DRUGS: A FALSE DICHOTOMY

The divisions at the NSW Drug Summit have been all too predictable. The
terms "zero tolerance" and "harm minimisation" roughly mark out the opposing
territories. Yet, the dichotomy they suggest is false.

In such an area as this, where the interaction of human behaviour, law and
morality is complicated, so, too, are the strategies required to change
behaviour.

Harm minimisation cannot become an excuse for condoning illegal conduct.

But zero tolerance allows little room to manoeuvre in the effort to treat
and rehabilitate.

The NSW Opposition leader, Mrs Chikarovski, is among those who have taken a
tough stand at the summit.

A "substantial minority view" at the summit wanted stronger enforcement
rather than liberalisation, she said, and unless that minority view was put,
the summit might fail through lack of balance in its debates.

This is all very well. But if the view of those advocating enhancement of
existing strategies is being put for the sake of argument rather than out of
sincere belief or on the basis of clear evidence that a tougher line is
right, what is the use of it?

An example of the limits of a school debating approach was provided a week
before the Drug Summit by the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, when he was asked
on radio why he was so implacably opposed to safe injecting rooms, or
"shooting galleries". On Melbourne radio 3AW Mr Howard said: "I am against
breaches of the law and I am against changing the law to accommodate them."
This ignores the third possibility - the light application of the law in
situations where its punitive or deterrent purposes would not be served.
Similarly, Mr Howard has seized on an
evaluation of the Swiss heroin trial which found that because controlled
heroin dosages were accompanied by education and treatment, it was difficult
to know which elements of the program had led to improvements in addicts'
social behaviour.

For Mr Howard, this confirmed "very strongly" that the heroin trials in
Switzerland were no argument for them to be conducted in Australia. Yet the
obvious point about the crucial qualification in the evaluation commissioned
by the World Health Organisation is that by supplying controlled heroin
dosages to addicts, the Swiss authorities were enabled also to give the
addicts education and treatment which helped at least some of them.

The head of the Prime Minister's drugs advisory council, Salvation Army
Major Brian Watters, has also come under fire at the drugs summit.

He was asked - by Mr Tony Trimingham, one of the organisers of the illegal
"shooting gallery" at the Wayside Chapel, Kings Cross - to explain why he
once said that "the wages of sin are death and addiction is a sin". Major
Watters's explanation - that he quoted the Bible to show addicts that
choosing treatment was choosing "God's gift of life" - will make sense to
some. Others will see it as suggesting limitations in a hard-line approach
to treatment and rehabilitation.

For all the discord at the drug summit, some practical measures are likely
to result, such as establishing a children's drug court and changes in the
law to allow warnings, cautions and conferencing for minor drug offences by
young people.

The NSW Attorney-General, Mr Shaw, appears ready to give effect to a call
for a heroin trial and a trial of sanitary injecting rooms. To those
inclined to zero tolerance, all this will seem a dangerous capitulation to
soft-headed liberalism. But it need not be. The more such measures are
embraced, the stronger the case for greater efforts to enforce the law where
it counts, indicting imports of illegal drugs and prosecuting dealers more
vigorously.