CARR WARILY GETS IT RIGHT ON DRUGS

Thinking Outside The Square

JOHN Enrlichman, the notorious Watergate conspirator, is credited with
originating the “war against drugs” in 1971 to ensure president Richard
Nixon's reelection. Ehrlichman was one of the first to realise that
“narcotics suppression is a very sexy political issue”. But he was also
aware that “the people in the federal government [are] just kidding
themselves and kidding the people... when they know darned well that the
massive war they have mounted against narcotics is only going to be
effective at the margins”.

Slowly but surely, the costly and ineffective response to illicit drugs
based on law enforcement is starting to crumble. What was once a "sexy
political issue" is rapidly becoming a political liability.

NSW Premier Bob Carr has acknowledged the widespread perception that current
approaches to illicit drugs have failed. This is an indispensable beginning
to any serious attempt to achieve better outcomes. But Carr failed to
acknowledge the magnitude of the policy failure. Failure on such a scale in
the corporate world would have resulted long ago in the dismissal of all
senior executives.

While Commonwealth and State governments have been spending hundreds of
millions of dollars a year on Customs, police, courts and prisons, there has
been a staggering increase in deaths, crime and corruption in recent
decades. National drug overdose deaths increased 55-fold between 1964 anf
1997, and NSW currently accounts for almost half those deaths.

There is much to admire in the decisions announced this week. The package
canvasses a broad range of areas. Some of the ideas, especially the novel
emphasis on early intervention for problem families, show evidence of
welcome thinking "outside the square". Funding for treatment has been
boosted substantially (although details are not yet available). It is
self-evident that the package is based on a prodigious amount of work by
officials since the Drug Summit.

With three years and eight months to the next State poll, government support
at all-time high and an all but invisible Opposition, the NSW Government has
taken some bold decisions - but with astonishing trepidation. The proposed
cannabis reforms, for example, are extraordinarily modest. Smoking cannabis
became popular among young people in the 1970s. The demographic equivalent
of bracket creep means that voters who have tried cannabis form a majority
of an ever-increasing number of age brackets.

CARR has emphasised repeatedly a fear that new and well-intended innovative
responses may make already dreadful matters worse. Yet no such fear is
evident when the Government reaches for the "tough on drugs" rhetoric and
policies. Well-meaning efforts to control drug supplies have all too often
not only squandered scarce resources but produced counterproductive
outcomes. Under the influence of "tough crackdowns", drug markets have been
displaced to new neighbourhoods and less harmful drugs have been replaced by
more harmful ones.

Increased spending on sniffer dogs and urine tests in prisons means heroin
injecting will increasingly replace more readily detectable smoking of
cannabis. The inadvertent encouragement of injecting in prison is a serious
public health conern.

The proposed trial of an injecting room in Kings Cross, to be conducted by
the Sisters of Charity, had attracted more publicity than any other
recommendation. It is important to remember that this recommendation came
from a royal commission into police corruption, was supported by compelling
arguments in a parliamentary inquiry (though not by a majority of the
committee) and was also supported by a majority of participants in the Drug
Summit. The argument that this "sends a wrong signal" to our young people
preposterously reduces an important policy debate to semaphore signals.

John Howard now clearly intends to remain irrevocably "part of the road".
Carr's cautious change in direction means that NSW joins Victoria and the
ACT as "part of the steamroller". Howard's only important allies from now
on will be Queensland, where the Government's options are limited by a
parliamentary majority of one, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Carr's greatest contribution to the debate has been to emphasise that our
future lies in better management of a difficult problem rather than chasing
after fantasies such as zero tolerance.