PROHIBITION ALWAYS BREED CRIMINALITY

IT WAS interesting to read Roderick Campbell's account of the committee of
government lawyers' report on uniform penalties for illicit drug use (CT,
December 4, p.11) and see how easily the obvious seems to escape the
collective legal mind.

When asked by the Commonwealth not to list steroid users with other users
of illicit drugs, the rest of the committee rejected the idea saying, "The
mechanisms of illicit supply are depressingly familiar and no different in
their essentials from illicit trafficking in other manufactured
pharmaceutical drugs".

They seem amazed that this should be the case. Why wouldn't it be? Since
when did prohibition not breed criminality? They might have done better to
reflect that those much more problematic drugs, tobacco and alcohol, have
long been regulated rather than prohibited.

Unfortunately, a certain percentage of humanity is always going to use
drugs for short-term pleasure even when they're told of their long-term
dangers.

Surely it is better that they be educated as to exactly what these dangers
are and be able to buy their drugs in a legal and regulated context rather
than risk death from day to day with substances of unknown purity,
substances for which they have often had to steal to pay unnecessarily
inflated prices.

The lawyers talk very sensibly of how care will be needed in the area of
penalties for young people using, and trading in, illicit drugs, saying,
"There is no area of prohibition in which inappropriate resort to the
criminal law is more likely to aggravate, rather than minimise the harms
associated with illicit drugs'.

How do they not see that all resorting to the criminal law in these matters
(other than the low level needed for regulation) is similarly inappropriate?

GEOFF PAGE, Narrabundah

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski