HOWARD TICKS OFF DPP OVER DRUGS SUPPLY

The Prime Minister has warned that the Federal Government will not
tolerate drug laws being liberalised to allow government supply of
heroin or marijuana.

He rebuked the South Australian Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr
Paul Rofe, who told a drugs conference that new means of regulating
the supply and distribution of drugs were needed because attempts at
combating their supply werenot working.

Mr Howard said of Mr Rofe's comments, made at the Australasian Conference on
Drugs Strategy in Adelaide: "I don't agree with them and I think they're
unhelpful. They're out of line with community opinion and they're also out
of line with the tragic experience of people who are addicted to marijuana.

"Obviously the laws related to those things are matters for State
governments but there will be no encouragement at all from the Federal
Government for further liberalisation of the law."

Two leading Sydney criminologists told the Adelaide conference that
crime crackdowns and other conventional policing initiatives could not
entirely suppress illegal drug markets and had detrimental effects on
public health.

The director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Dr
Don Weatherburn, said the balance between law enforcement and
treatment needed to be got right.

The price of heroin was likely to fall once it was legalised, but more
people would end up using the drug, and those who used it would
consume more. Conversely, tougher law enforcement was likely to
increase the risk heroin users posed to themselves and the community.

"If we're serious about harm reduction we should aim to make treatment
places easier to find than heroin dealers, and treatment environments
more attractive than drug markets."

An associate professor of law at the University of New South Wales, Dr
David Dixon, said zero tolerance was a fantasy and police had no hope
of suppressing illegal drug markets. The best they could hope for was
to prevent their rapid expansion by containing the street market.

Intensive police operations produced sharp falls in recorded types of
crime but had several negative consequences. To avoid arrest, street
dealers resorted to carrying heroin caps in mouths, exposing
themselves to blood-borne disease. Users were reluctant to carry clean
injecting needles and in haste injected clumsily.