REAL HELP FOR ADDICTS FALLS BY THE WAYSIDE

AS State Parliament prepares to debate the legislation to establish a trial
heroin shooting gallery, David Noffs argues why the move is doomed to fail.

I GREW up at the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross. My childhood memories
include vivid images of the pain and anguish associated with drug addiction.

I became familiar with the glazed stare of heroin addicts: a window to a
tortured body and mind.

There is nothing compassionate about maintaining an addict’s downward spiral
to self-humiliation. Moreover, it is a cruel act indeed to participate in
another human being's physical and emotional destruction.

Ted Noffs was always straight with addicts. He was there to help, but they
had to live up to their part of the bargain by seeking recovery.

Like any responsible parent, Ted Noffs knew that being tough was sometimes
the only way to get someone to take responsibility for their lives.

While he never turned anyone away, he expected honesty and a commitment to
improving one’s life. The idea of having addicts injecting drugs in the
chapel itself is a complete betrayal of the very principles he established
during his 23 years in Kings Cross.

Many experts I have spoken to from around the world are wondering just how
Australia has plummeted to having some of the worst drug statistics in the
world in a little over a decade. My answer to them is summed up in the term
harm minimisation.

This harm minimisation approach to the drug problem became federal and state
policy about 15 years ago. It is based on the opinion that drug use is
inevitable and should somehow be managed.

Rather than aiming at a reduction in drug use itself, harm minimisers
promote what they call responsible and healthy drug-using habits. Is it any
wonder that drug use has escalated among young people in Australia to the
point where it is four times that of the United States?

A comparison of the two countries’ latest drug surveys show that prevention
and demand reduction strategies in the US continue to reduce levels of
adolescent drug use, whereas Australia’s harm minimisation approach is
driving usage to intolerably higher levels.

You can examine other countries to reach the same conclusion. In the United
Kingdom, a non-harm minimisation country, adolescent drug use is going down.
Similarly, in Sweden, which has aggressively pursued a preventive drug
policy, lifetime prevalence of drug use for 16 to 29-year-olds is nine per
cent compared to Australia’s 52 per cent.

In Holland, a noted harm minimisation country, the drug problem is out of
control. One does not need to be a scientist to conclude these two separate
approaches have two dramatically different outcomes. Why is it then that
Australia persists with a drug policy that is a public health disaster? And
who decided to experiment with such a strategy in the first place? There is
no body of research that shows that harm minimisation reduces drug use.
Neither the United Nations, nor the World Health Organisation endorses it.

Harm minimisation strategies include methadone programs, needle handouts,
shooting galleries and responsible drug use education, all of which have
become part of the Australian diet to fight the drug problem.

Other notable strategies to complete the picture will be heroin and other
drug handouts and finally drug law reform, which will decriminalise the use
of all drugs.

Like some doctor doggedly prescribing higher and higher does of a medication
to a patient who is not responding, harm minimisers refuse to admit their
programs have failed and bully the public into accepting even higher doses
of the same bad idea.

This is precisely what happened during the recent NSW drug summit, when the
majority of speakers, stacked with harm minimisers, advocated for further
steps to normalise drug use.

What should have happened instead is a call for an independent audit of harm
minimisation expenditures and outcomes, including reductions in drug use.

In fact, while the United States still searches for innovative strategies to
reduce its levels of drug abuse, Congress has banned the use of federal
dollars for needle handouts and some communities are asking that existing
privately-funded programs be shut down.

It has been under the watch of the self-declared compassionate harm
minimisers that drug-related deaths have continued to rise. Prohibition can
hardly be blamed as Australia’s drug-related health policies over the past
15 years have been designed to enable drug use, rather than prevent it.

What is clear, however, is that levels of drug use continue to climb and
that the Australian public has been force-fed a steady diet of failed
policies and programs leading nowhere.

It is time to question these policies in earnest and demand accountability
from public health officials.

It is time to replace failed policies with proven prevention and treatment
strategies aimed at reducing drug use rather than increasing It. It is time
to pull the plug on harm minimisation.