WHY MORE POLICE WON'T STOP HEROIN DEALERS

A heroin dealer is likely to make thousands of transactions without being
arrested, according to a leading Sydney criminologist's analysis of drug
bust statistics.

The risk of a heroin dealer being arrested is only one in 2,600
transactions on the most conservative estimate and could be as low as one
in 10,900 "deals", according to Dr David Dixon, associate professor of law
at the University of NSW.

Dr Dixon has warned in a paper to be presented at a national crime
conference this month that such a low arrest rate shows that "conventional
policing" can make little impact on drug crime. "However much politicians
say we should have zero tolerance toward drugs, really you cannot have zero
tolerance because you can only suppress it. What police are involved in is
managing the market," he said yesterday.

The police crackdown on Kings Cross injecting rooms showed this, he said.

The extra 200 drug police pledged by the Premier, Mr Carr, would be
worthwhile only if they targeted high-level dealers, and there was a danger
they would simply lock up more users. A fellow UNSW academic who worked on
the paper, Dr Lisa Maher, said there were an estimated 18-78 million
"street-level" heroin transactions nationwide every year, but "throwing
more police" at the problem was not the answer.

"You cannot hire enough police to tackle a market of that size," she said.

"You increase the risk of arrest per transaction, but you can never get to
the point where it is a meaningful deterrent."

Dr Dixon's figures were likely to be an underestimate because they were
based on an assumption that there were between 49,000 and 150,000 heroin
users in Australia buying their drug on average once a day, she said.

"I tend to think that it is 200,000."

In his paper, Beyond Zero Tolerance, Dr Dixon says that the NSW Police
Service's intensive policing policy in Cabramatta, Operation Puccini, has
had only limited success, which has been "bought at considerable public
health costs".

Dr Dixon, one of four experts who have written an unreleased report on
policing in Cabramatta for NSW Police, said the operation had encouraged
dealers and users to store drugs in their mouths and noses, which increased
the risk of spreading Hepatitis C.

When the streets were heavily policed, users tended not to carry clean
needles, to shoot up quickly and clumsily, often "in disgusting
conditions", and to dispose of needles unsafely.

The operation had encouraged "drug market participants" to become more
organised, and they had been displaced from Cabramatta, making the problem
worse in surrounding areas and even in Marrickville, he said.

"The amount of heroin sold and bought in south-west Sydney does not appear
to have been reduced. The market is affected only to the extent that some
heroin is being sold in different ways, by different people, in different
places."