CARR'S DRUG CHALLENGE

Having boldly agreed to the wide-ranging Drug Summit, Mr Carr must live with
its results.

He does not have to accept everything that has come out of it, but he cannot
walk away from its main conclusions. Over the coming weeks, the Government
must respond positively, considering the best and most practical way to give
effect to the summit's recommendations, not attempting to avoid hard decisions.

Some of those who are disappointed at the outcome of the summit have
suggested that it was rigged or, in the word used by the Opposition legal
affairs spokesman, Mr Chris Hartcher, "pre-orchestrated", to ensure the
passage of recommendations such as the one for safe injecting rooms.

There have been complaints about who was and who was not invited, but it is
not realistic to suggest that the summit lacked balance in the range of
opinion presented or that the difficult issues raised were not properly
considered.

At the end of the summit, Mr Carr said he was determined not to accept
heroin as a normal part of society.

No-one would disagree.

Heroin and other dangerous substances are not a normal part of society and
nothing in the law or government policy should suggest they are. But that
does not mean society can avoid a responsibility to minimise the harm
illegal drugs do and to reduce the number of deaths they cause, while also
doing everything possible to reduce their availability and to arrest and
punish severely those who import them and deal in them.

It is too easy to fall back on a moral judgment, that people know drugs are
harmful and that if they take them and get into trouble, that's their
choice. Not only is it too easy to cling to that position; the position
itself is morally unsound.

As the former royal commissioner into police corruption, Justice James Wood
told the summit on Thursday: "The offender cannot be dismissed simply on the
basis of their personal choice to play with drugs.

There is an element of that involved but it is only part of an inadequate
system that costs us so dearly in terms of the loss of friends and family,
property loss and escalating insurance premiums, escalating health and law
enforcement budgets and, where I came in, the risk of police corruption, and
the enslavement of young people
through prostitution to feed a drug habit."

The recommendations of the drug summit are being called radical.

That is partly because in this difficult area of social policy, timidity has
ruled too long. One of the most "radical" recommendations is for the trial
of safe injecting rooms.

It is easy to paint this proposal in lurid terms.

But it must be kept in perspective. The evidence supporting the decision
long ago to supply clean needles to addicts is overwhelming. The provision
of clean surroundings for injecting is simply an extension of that decision.

It does not imply approval, but proper acceptance of a responsibility to
help save lives where they can be saved.

Sensibly applied in areas where the need is greatest such a policy will also
improve the chances that other, less contentious measures for drug education
and to prevent the "enslavement of young people" will succeed.

Other proposals, such as repeal of laws relating to the self-administration
of prohibited drugs, will seem to many people tantamount to legal
endorsement of such practices.

But that, too, is a mistaken idea. The law's emphasis has long since shifted
to the areas where it matters, interdicting imports of illegal drugs and
prosecuting those who deal in them. More effort is required there, but that
should not stand in the way of sensible measures to reduce the harm illegal
drugs, once in the community, can do.