HOWARD'S DRUG WAR STRATEGY MISFIRES

A CAP of heroin on the streets of Melbourne is now about the same
price as a slab of full-strength beer. For two or three teenagers
looking for a buzz or oblivion, heroin represents good value by
comparison to booze.

Heroin is readily available, it's cheap and its purity is high
compared to a few years ago. And yet our Prime Minister claimed in
Parliament on Tuesday that his Government's "tough on drugs" strategy
is working.

The evidence? Howard quoted figures to show that the authorities are
making record seizures of illicit drugs. According to Howard, in the
first seven months of 1998-99, federal agencies have seized five times
the amount of heroin and more than twice the amount of cocaine than
the yearly average over the previous seven years.

But this tells us nothing about total imports and the supply of hard
drugs on the streets. If the higher rate of interdiction led to less
heroin and cocaine on the streets, two things would happen: prices
would rise and purity would fall as dealers diluted supplies.

In some parts of Melbourne, it is easier for an underage teenager to
get a cap of heroin than a slab of beer or a packet of smokes.
According to the Penington Report (the Premier's Drug Advisory
Council, 1996), while there is no reliable estimate of the amount of
hard drugs imported into Australia, interdiction is estimated to
capture between 3 and 10per cent of total imports. Extrapolating from
Penington, this means that unless there has been a significant
improvement in the interdiction rate, all Howard has shown is that now
there is about 10 times the heroin and four times the cocaine being
sold compared to a few years ago.

It has been blindingly obvious for more than a decade that the war on
drugs has been lost. Zero tolerance and intensification of the
criminalisation of drug users is simply a means of filling up the
privatised prison system.

In 1997, after a series of teenage heroin overdose-related deaths in
Canberra, there was strong community support for a restricted heroin
trial for addicts, which gained the approval of most state health
ministers and the federal Health Minister, Michael Wooldridge. The
program was vetoed by Howard after campaigns by the Murdoch press and
the leading Sydney "shock jocks", Alan Jones and John Laws.

According to Penington, the global turnover in illicit drugs is in the
order of $600-$800billion a year, or the equivalent of 10per cent of
the value of world trade. The value of the illicit drug trade in
Australia was about $7billion a year in 1997, according to an estimate
by Access Economics. Best estimates (quoted in Local Government and
the Problem with Heroin, published by the Maribyrnong City Council)
are that 250,000 of the population used heroin in 1996 (75,000 in
Victoria), and about 60,000 (15,000 in Victoria) were dependent or
addicted users.

The numbers have continued to grow. Hard drugs are big business. The
business is sustained by occasional or recreational users rather than
addicts. The business is highly profitable because of its illegality.

According to Penington, despite being highly addictive, heroin in its
pure form is relatively non-toxic and causes little damage to body
tissue and other organs. Addicts who can afford a regular supply of
pure heroin are able to lead normal, productive lives. The damage to
addicts comes from the impurities used to adulterate the pure heroin,
the criminal lifestyle led by most addicts in order to pay for their
habit, dirty needles, and lack of quality control inherent in illegal
distribution.

Intravenous drug use is ugly and the prostitution, crime and death
associated with illicit hard drugs can easily be exploited by cynical
politicians and talkback radio hosts to create a frisson of fear in
the minds of the middle class. This can then be translated into votes
and ratings.

The truth is more prosaic. Death rates from alcohol, tobacco and road
trauma are all much higher than from illicit drug use. Youth will
experiment with drugs irrespective of the attitudes and laws of the
older generation.

The function of society is to ensure that the experimentation is as
safe as possible and, for those who become addicted, supply and
distribution is organised so that the addicts can lead a productive
life outside crime.