HEROIN TRIAL INEVITABLE: PENINGTON

A heroin trial was an inevitable part of drug law reform, along with safe
injecting rooms and the decriminalisation of marijuana, Professor David
Penington told the Drug Summit yesterday.

The former professor of medicine and vice-chancellor at the University of
Melbourne called for "both civil and political courage to examine and
rethink established conventions". He told the summit that current drug
policies were having little effect on addiction and drug-related deaths.

Professor Penington was chair of the Victorian Premier's Drug Advisory
Council, established in December 1995, which commended the then proposed
ACT heroin trial and made recommendations including decriminalisation of
possession and use of moderate quantities of marijuana. This followed
recommendations for a more "liberal" approach to marijuana in Senate
inquiries in 1971 and 1977.

Decriminalisation was "long overdue", he argued yesterday, as messages
about the drug's use would "only be heeded by young people in the context
of health education, rather than in the context of criminality".

Professor Penington said marijuana use in jurisdictions where it had been
liberalised - South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory - was not
substantially different from those where it remained illegal. "To suggest
that the legal status of the drug acts as an effective barrier to use is
simply a nonsense," he said. Prohibition had failed just as it had against
alcohol in the US in the 14 years to 1933. "Prohibition is a simple,
populist answer to a complex problem and, for this reason, holds political
attraction. Clothing it in a moral dimension places it beyond rational
argument and analysis."

With a booming world opium trade, South-East Asian heroin would continue to
supply Australia, where street prices were falling and purity increasing.
Professor Penington cited statistics showing a 46-fold increase in deaths
from heroin and other opiates between 1964 and 1996, for Australians aged
15 to 44.

A heroin trial would "eventually prove essential, so that we can learn how
to handle provision of heroin to long-term dependent users who are not
ready to accept withdrawal and rehabilitation".

Safe injecting rooms would curb deaths and spread of hepatitis C, and
represented "a natural evolution from the needle exchange facilities that
have played such an important role in protecting the Australian community
from spread of AIDS since 1987".