DRUG GALLERY TRIALS SHOULD BE PURSUED

The Prime Minister is selective in his respect for international
obligations.

TO say that the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, was not pleased when a
committee of the United Nations seemed about to place Kakadu on an
international list of endangered environmentally significant areas, is
an understatement. In Kyoto two years ago, his Government went to
extraordinary lengths to exempt Australia from the obligation to limit
greenhouse gas emissions agreed to by other developed countries.

Under his Government, Australia's overseas aid is at its lowest level
in history.

It is fair to say that Mr Howard has generally been lukewarm in his
support for international labor or environmental standards.

Yet it seems a different matter when those standards happen to
coincide with his own convictions. When the UN International Narcotics
Control Board advised the New South Wales Government that its planned
supervised heroin-injecting rooms were contrary to international
drug-control conventions, Mr Howard swiftly ordered Australian states
to abandon their plans for the same. ``I cannot ignore assertions that
what is proposed could be in breach of Australia's international
obligations,'' the Prime Minister said piously.

Mr Howard is opposed to supervised injecting rooms, preferring to
pursue the problem of drug abuse as a criminal, rather than a health
issue.

He has, in this opinion, a powerful ally in the United States Office
of National Drug Policy, whose director, General Barry McCaffrey, was
strong in his praise for the Howard approach when he visited Australia
earlier this year. Indeed, it is legitimate to ask how much influence
the US view has on the international drug control board.

The board has told Australia that, as the host of next year's Olympic
Games, it should be promoting ``healthy lifestyles, free from
substance abuse''.

Is this not what any nation would wish to promote?

The problem is that the ``zero tolerance'' approach favored by Mr
Howard, by US drugs policy officials and apparently by the UN board,
has proved tragically ineffective - most notably in the US - in
slowing the epidemic of drugs abuse.

On the other hand, the ``harm-minimisation'' approach, which includes
the use of supervised injecting rooms, has been shown to reduce
drug-related crime, deaths from overdoses and the incidence of HIV.

Australian states should not breach international conventions. But
injecting rooms operate in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands -
not countries known for their propensity to flout international law.
Rather than using the UN to shore up his convictions when it suits
him, Mr Howard should be supporting the states' rights to pursue a
course that just might reduce the harm of drugs, and to do so within
the boundaries of international law. It is an experiment worth trying,
at least.