LEST WE FORGET LOST GENERATION

The weekend heroin overdose death of a 16-year-old student in Inala
again has highlighted Australia's drugs crisis

THIS Sunday, national remembrance services will be held for people who
have lost their lives through illegal drug use.

The ceremony, organised by the families and friends of the victims of
the drug trade, is an attempt by a dedicated group of adults to break
the silence of prejudice and ignorance that surrounds one of the
greatest killers of young Australians.

Like many social problems - youth suicide or road traffic deaths for
example - the human tragedy involved in drug deaths generally remains
emotionally distant from most of us. When it strikes an individual
family, however, what was distant and academic becomes a gut-wrenching
personal reality.

Just last weekend, drugs became a real issue in our household when my
daughter arrived from Sydney to try to rescue a heavily addicted
former friend. Although their friendship had broken up two years
before, she felt an obligation to try to help him.

The young man used to be a healthy, fit and successful music
entrepreneur. Now, as a result of years of injecting and ingesting
almost every illegal substance he could get his hands on, he was a
living skeleton, slowly dying on his feet.

When we contacted drug rehabilitation centres, however, we found it
was impossible to get him admitted to any treatment programme. To
begin with, there were few centres and most of them were full. Those
that had vacancies required the addict to be "clean" or drug-free, so
he did not qualify. As he had not yet overdosed, it was pointless
taking him to a hospital emergency service.

In a last desperate measure, he decided to take himself off and camp
on the beaches of Stradbroke Island in order to, in the words of my
daughter, "cleanse himself of drugs or to die in the process".

The young man's plight reminded me of the cheap shot Senator Nick
Bolkus made about John Howard's drug policies almost a month ago.
Bolkus tried to imply that Howard's "zero tolerance" approach to
eliminating drugs was responsible for the huge rise in drug deaths in
Australia. Of course it wasn't, because the death rate had begun to
climb sharply well before Howard became Prime Minister.

But the Bolkus comment underlined some facts about drugs that
politicians of all persuasions conveniently ignore - death rates are
rising at a time when the black market price for heroin is spiralling
downwards while the purity level is increasing.

Yet though this formula almost guarantees more young addicts and more
deaths, drug treatment centres are struggling to survive. The money,
it appears, is still pouring into police, customs and other
enforcement activities with only very limited success. Despite the
record 400kg seizure of heroin recently, the Federal Police and
customs admit that they intercept at best no more than 15 per-cent of
all heroin imported into Australia.

As a community, we have every reason to be worried about drugs.
Soon-to-be-released Queensland Police figures on juvenile crime will
show that though, over the past 12 months, youth crime is static or
even down in some categories (such as homicide and other violent
crime), drug arrests have increased by nearly 20 percent.

These, and other drug use indices, suggest that juvenile offending
will not stay static for long. Instead, we can expect an explosion of
youthful crimes - against people and property.

Sunday's "remembrance day" is more than just a ceremony to mourn those
who have died in the drug wars. It is also a plea for a revolutionary
approach towards drugs that would emphasise education and not

enforcement and rehabilitation rather than revenge. It would also put
back on the policy agenda the legal dispensation of drugs to
registered addicts.

If we don't change our mind-set about how we deal with drugs, then we
can expect more and more of our young to die in this continuing and
pointless tragedy.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady