BIN DISPUTE CAN'T COVER REAL ISSUE

THERE are some simple totems that have become synonymous with the
world we have created for ourselves: the heart-friendly tick, the
international radiation hazard symbol, the skull and crossbones
minefield caution and, in Australia, the ubiquitous yellow needle
disposal bins that routinely adorn public toilets.

The bins are a graphic and distasteful reminder of how we have allowed
drugs to dominate the lives of so many people and to intrude on our
own comfort zones.

Not everyone who uses syringes is a junkie but proliferation of
disposal bins seems to me a flag of surrender, an acknowledgment that
the best we can do for people who are destroying themselves is to hand
out the instruments of destruction and to pick up the debris of
shattered lives.

The proposal to install bins in the toilets of Ansett aircraft has set
a new high in visual offensiveness and reignited the simmering debate.
At the very least, it doesn't say a lot for airport security at a time
when blood-filled syringes are the weapon of choice for any number of
service station bandits.

And it indicates that drug abuse is not exclusively the domain of the
bus station set or the penniless day-to-day addicts of fond
imagination.

Or are airborne bins designed to serve the mindlessly hip and
cashed-up drug users who have given the words "designer" and
"recreational" a whole new meaning?

However high and mighty they might think themselves to be, is it too
much to expect them to wait a couple of hours before shooting up and
throwing their syringes about?

The fact is that if they've still got the wherewithal to find a plane
fare, they're probably not so far gone down the road to ruin that they
can't wait an hour or three before the next hit.

After all, smokers are now expected to go cold turkey - even all the
way to Europe and back - and there have been claims nicotine is more
additive even than heroin.

I would suspect that diabetics and others have long been forced to
learn how sensibly to dispose of their needles but junkies, locked up
in their own self-centred world, are different.

So just in case you think syringe bins in the loo will make it safe to
go fossicking XXXXXXXXXX that two exchange centres in its municipality
handed out 1.2 million
syringes in one year. Just 25,000 were returned in its exchange bins.

The truth is that most junkies don't give a damn about themselves and
they're in no position to give a damn about anyone else.

Our collective acceptance of that sorry fact is part of the puny
response we have made to the drug scourge: it's a mixture of craven
tolerance and futile prohibition. We seem willing to infringe on the
comfort of the majority to make it easier for the weak-minded and
self-destructive few, and we seem dead set on pouring billions of
dollars in a futile but corrosively corruptive war on drugs, yet we do
just about nothing to cure the addicts.

IF WE accept that drug addiction is a health problem (and a social and
crime problem of massive proportions), has there ever been a more
feeble response to a major epidemic?

If this were smallpox or black plague or tuberculosis sweeping through
hundreds of thousands of homes, the resources of the nation would be
mobilised.

Think back to how vigorously we stemmed the invasion of polio, how we
almost eradicated TB from our society. Some will remember the graphic
films on the causes and symptoms of TB that we were regularly shown in
movie theatres.

Many an adult left the theatre swearing to turn a new lifestyle leaf
and many a youngster suffered his first bout of film-induced
hypochondria after those showings. But they sure as hell went home

with a more positive view of the compulsory chest X-ray vans that
lurked on suburban corners, (The fact that cavalier bombardment with
X-rays caused its own problems is an altogether different story.)

Is there any real compulsion for drug addicts to seek
treatment?

They might make a few mealy-mouthed. or even well-meaning promises
before the beak but there is little in the way of machinery to enforce
rehabilitation.

Even if they willingly seek treatment, access is limited and resources
stretched, making a mockery of the claims that we are dealing with a
health issue.

More bizarre is the horrible truth that despite up to 75 percent of
crime being blamed on drugs in one way or another, opportunities for
treatment or rehabilitation in prison are practically
non-existent.

Methadone therapy is but slowly being introduced into prisons but,
with such a piecemeal approach, there would have to be a fear that it
will become just another denomination of jailhouse currency in a
closed-shop economy built on drugs.

We agonise over such issues as heroin trials and despoil the landscape
with syringe bins but we won't even flirt with the one obvious
solution: offering addicts the choice of compulsory, supervised,
closed-door treatment or prison.

Increasingly we offer neither; rehabilitation is not available and
prisons are too full to clutter them up with even more junkies. Yet we
affront the majority with the telltale yellow evidence of a gross
failure of public policy.

You'd have to wonder whether it's all XXXXXX.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady