BUSH DRUGS

State election campaigns have a tendency to generate phoney law and
order issues and the forthcoming NSW election is no exception.

At the same time, there is a genuine law and order issue in NSW and it
centres on the widespread use of hard drugs in the bush. According to
research conducted by Dr Shane Darke of the National Drug and Alcohol
Research Centre, one in five NSW heroin deaths now occurs in rural
areas.

The view that "heroin is a Sydney problem" is no longer tenable, says
Dr Darke. The director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, Dr Don
Weatherburn, concurs.

He says the major crime problem in the bush has shifted from incidents
of violence and assault associated with alcohol abuse to
break-and-enters fuelled by heroin addiction. Burglary rates in Dubbo,
for instance, increased by 50 per cent between 1995 and 1997.

The police say they can do little about the problem.

They say it is often hard to catch drug dealers in the act or to get
enough evidence to persuade a magistrate to issue a search warrant.

But the residents of country towns say they are not only aware of the
problem but aware also of where and when drug deals occur.

The curate of St Joseph's Catholic Church in Orange, Father Paul
Devitt, for instance, says dealing occurs openly in the town's central
park. If this is common knowledge, how hard can it be for police
officers to find ways to catch the dealers?

The Police Minister, Mr Paul Whelan, says the answer is to stop drugs
being imported in the first place and that this is a Federal
Government matter. There is an element of truth in this but also an
element of buck-passing. There is also an element of truth in the
argument that by concentrating police in major drug supply centres,
including Cabramatta, the availability of hard drugs in the bush will
be reduced.

But such an approach can also push the dealers into other areas and
they will take most of their contacts with them.

Mr Whelan says that "having 300 police living and working out of
Dubbo" is "not going to solve the problem". But something like this is
surely part of the solution.

So, too, are more drug rehabilitation centres in the country and more
anti-drug campaigns targeted particularly at rural youth.

But the bigger question is what are NSW politicians going to do about
drugs in the bush? It is time that they stopped pandering to city
fears about crime and put concrete proposals on the table for dealing
with this serious problem in rural NSW.