THE DEBATE ON DRUGS GETS NOWHERE

IT IS not hard to become bemused and frustrated at the calibre of the
current drugs debate.

Much of the discussion appears to be long on rhetoric and short on rational
discussion and the most rare commodity of all, facts.

How is the community supposed to come to some sort of reasoned conclusion on
difficult legal and moral issues like the harm-minimisation approach,
needle-exchange programs, shooting galleries and heroin trials without a few
basic facts?

The news and letters columns of this and every other newspaper in the
country are full of contrary opinions, rational and irrational, and based on
ignorance, first-hand experience or simply the push for re-election.

It has been suggested, for example, that most drug users do it because they
enjoy the experience. That seems a very simplistic explanation, and for the
real junkie, is probably wrong.

The reasons are undoubtedly many and complex. People take drugs because they
think it's cool, because their friends do it, to rebel, because they are in
pain, or because life does not seem so awful when they are off their face.

Some undoubtedly enjoy it. Many - like the 13,000 on the methadone program
in NSW - apparently do not.

It has been argued that methadone is another form of addiction and not
rehabilitation. But addicts can be gradually weaned off methadone, as they
are weaned off nicotine by using patches. And methadone users rarely die
from overdoses.

The 13,000 methadone users in NSW, and the 6000 in Victoria, are presumably
not using heroin any more.

That's 19,000 fewer customers for the dealers, 19,000 fewer people shooting
up in the streets and toilet blocks, 19,000 fewer people likely to commit
crime to support their habits.

The vast majority of heroin users are not chronic addicts. It has been
estimated that there are about 3000 regular users in Canberra and 200
hard-core addicts. The number of casual, recreational users is unknown.

There is a vast difference between the drug use, lifestyle, motivation and
health of the casual user, the non-addicted regular user and the so-called
hopeless junkie.

Not all heroin users are doing break-ins and armed robberies to support
their habit. Not all are prostituting themselves or have a life-threatening
infectious disease. Not every user is also a pusher.

This ought to suggest that the society's response to heroin use has to be
extremely flexible. Not all heroin users can be labelled identically.

The NSW Opposition's latest contribution to the debate is to denigrate the
methadone program, advocate "cold turkey" for addicted prisoners, and
declare that the state's new drug court is doomed to failure, just a
fortnight after it has begun its work.

It is apparently unaware of reports from the United States, where drug
courts have been directing non-violent drug offenders into institutionalised
or outpatient rehabilitation for a couple of years, of an 80 per cent
success rate for the approach.

Writing off the drug court before it has got going is akin to rejecting a
heroin trial because you are not convinced it will work.

That is exactly why you conduct a trial: to find out if it could work.

The Salvation Army's Brian Watters, chairman of the Australian National
Council on Drugs, believes a heroin trial would send the "wrong message"
that society accepts heroin use.

What message do we send if we do not even considering the option? As The
Canberra Times said in an editorial last month, that message appears to be
that it is morally preferable to have addicts shoot up heroin of unknown
quality in the gutter than to give them access to medical supplies till they
are ready to address the root cause of their addiction.

Those who ought to know what they are talking about are adamant that
hard-drug use is a social, health and criminal-law issue, not just the last
of these.

They are equally adamant that the prohibition/law-enforcement approach has
been an abject failure. Every other option has to be considered, no matter
how unpalatable it might seem.

But without facts, the debate goes nowhere. Here are a few facts.

International drug trafficking is the world's second-biggest industry after
petroleum and is worth about $500 billion a year. During 1996-97, 237kg of
heroin was seized by Australian authorities. Police estimated that the
Australian demand was 10 tonnes.

On these figures, for every kilo seized, 40kg ends up on the Streets:
meaning that more than 97 per cent is not detected. More optimistic numbers
have been given to a Senate inquiry, that 85 per cent is never detected.

Police raided a ship off the NSW coast last year and netted 400kg of heroin,
by far the nation's largest seizure.

But there was no sudden shortage of the drug and prices did not rise. As one
media report put it, "The heroin industry barely flinched."

The street price for a hit of heroin has fallen frem $50 to $30 in a few
years.

The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates that the chance of police
making an arrest over any single heroin transaction is between one in 2600
and one in 10,900.

The US has allocated $51 billion to its anti-drugs fight over three years.
Despite this huge injection of money, the US strategy to block the supply of
drugs has failed.

According to official figures, drug barons pay $7 billion a year in bribes
to get shipments across the US border.

An expensive, "zero-tolerance", police operation aimed at street-level
dealers in Cabramatta had little effect on the number of heroin users.

According to police, Operation Puccini might have made Cabramatta's streets
safer, but only by pushing dealers further into suburbs and making them
harder to detect.

If zero tolerance was to work, the budgets of law-enforcement agencies would
have to be increased by a huge amount.

If $11 million buys 32 police officers, as recent Australian Federal Police
statements reveal, how much would it cost to implement zero tolerance in
every capital city, to effectively patrol every kilometre of Australia's
coast, to search every incoming passenger's luggage, and to inspect every
container shipped into our ports?

Here are some more facts.

More than 600 Australian heroin users died in 1996. More than 4000 have died
during the 1990s. Illicit drug use takes up 40,000 hospital bed-days a year,
at an annual cost of $7 billion.

By 5pm on one day, March 4 this year, one Canberra woman had died and 18
people had been revived by paramedics, after drug overdoses.

Already this year, four people have died in Canberra from overdoses. Last
year's toll was 10. There were 850 drug-overdose cases last year, 280
involving heroin.

The NSW methadone program saves about 70 lives a year. Victoria's 6000 on
the program are a 300 per cent increase since 1990.

The British have estimated that if cannabis and Ecstasy were sold through
licensed outlets, the prison population would drop by 10 per cent, law
enforcement would save ?500 million ($1.3 billion) a year, and ?1 billion
($2.6 billion) would be raised if the drugs were taxed at the same rate as
alcohol and tobacco.

Australian heroin users steal between $500 million and $1.6 billion a year
to support their habits.

Conclusion: prohibition is not working. The prohibition-oriented war against
drugs, which has been waged in Australia since the early 1970s, is being
lost. New defences are clearly needed if it is not to be lost completely.