'TOUGH ON DRUGS' NO SUCCESS STORY: FBI

The world's most powerful law enforcement officer, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation director, Judge Louis Freeh, yesterday admitted that the
United States had failed to gain major success in reducing dependency on
drugs through its tough anti-drug measures.

But he said he did not believe it would be wise to ``roll over'' and give
up the fight against drugs, and he believed the best policy was a mixture
of law enforcement, education and rehabilitation - the same formula
proposed by the Prime Minister, Mr Mr John Howard.

After a one-hour meeting with Mr Howard in Canberra yesterday, Judge
Freeh's message contained good and bad news for the Prime Minister, who had
staked his ``tough on drugs policy'' on claims of recent breakthroughs in
the US.

In other heroin-related developments:

Drug users and minor offenders would be sent for treatment rather than
jailed under a uniform Australian system that the Federal Government is
likely to put to the 9April Premiers' Conference.

The Australian Federal Police commissioner, Mr Mick Palmer, said police
chiefs wanted a more sympathetic approach to drug users.

Melbourne's Lord Mayor, Cr Ivan Deveson, called on state and federal
governments to include local councils in talks on combating drugs.

Judge Freeh said his country's policies had not eliminated the drug
scourge, but had only ``reduced it in some degree''.

``But this is not a great success story, given the devastation and
dependency that we have on drugs,'' he said after meeting Mr Howard.

The FBI director also revealed that despite a reduction in overall
consumption of cocaine and heroin, the number of people addicted to cocaine
and heroin had increased. He said the major breakthrough in US law
enforcement policies such as ``zero tolerance'' had been in cutting
drug-related violence.

Mr Howard said his purpose in meeting Judge Freeh was to listen to the
experiences of other countries, but ``the American experience is not
automatically relevant to Australia - it never has been and it never should
be''.

The Prime Minister said Judge Freeh had told him that there was no
significant support in the US for different approaches to the drug problem
such as heroin trials or ``so-called safe injecting processes''.

``He gave a very powerful, I thought, explanation as to why things like
heroin trials were inadvisable when he said it would send completely the
wrong signal to younger children, to younger people,'' Mr Howard said.

The wrong signal was contained in the conflict in asking young people not
to take drugs, while also giving drugs a form of legitimacy in saying that
there was a government safety net if they became addicted.

Judge Freeh, interviewed on ABC-TV's 7.30 Report, said the US did not
presume to give other countries advice on what they should do.

Asked how spectacular had been the US in its success in combating the drug
problem, he said: ``I don't think they've been that spectacular. We're the
largest users of illegal drugs in the world and, because of that usage,
we're the cause of the drug problem, one that's affecting our country in a
most unfortunate way.''