NOT SO USER FRIENDLY

HE HAD a skateboard in one hand and a cap of heroin in the other.
Contact had been made quickly with the other skateboarder, the one who
had been loitering for 10, maybe 20 minutes. A short word, a nod,
hands connected briefly - then they walked away in different
directions. Neither of them looked as if they knew which end of a
shaver was up.

So young. The street was my local shopping strip and I had never
realised that in my neighborhood kids could so easily buy hard drugs,
drugs that could, and do, kill them in increasing numbers. These are
easy, careless observations, I know, ones made from the security of my
car, me aghast at the reality that hundreds of youth workers, health
officials, police and legal officers grapple with daily. It says more
about middle-class complacency than it does about horrific drug use.

Or does it? Why do we still witness deals and stumble over strung-out,
begging kids in Swanston Street and Bourke Street, there under the
impressive shadow of Parliament House? Why is it that drug-abuse
agencies predict that heroin deaths will increase this year compared
with last, this when awareness of drug abuse in the community has
never been so high?

While the successful seizure this week of 400 kilograms of heroin off
the coast of Australia is a triumph, it has an unavoidable corollary:
there must be dozens of shipments of 400 kilograms that we get nowhere
near finding. Now police and drug agencies are nervously watching the
street trade in heroin to test the awful truth of that deduction: if
there is no increase in street prices, if availability does not
shrink, the supply lines into this country must be more than we can
imagine.

Youth, health, law and order and Government agencies say they have
never worked together better than they do now over hard drug abuse
among young people: harm minimisation is their strategy rather than
the failed dogmas of prohibition. And the greatest efforts are on
controlling trafficking and dealing, which is how it should be. But if
the young of this city, this country, still feel the need to get it,
use it and consequently ruin their lives because of it, then despite
our good efforts, it is the dealers who are running drug education in
this country, not us.

It was horrifying to read earlier this year in the 1997 Victorian Drug
Trends report that while intravenous drug users noted increased police
presence this had not made it any more difficult to score drugs. This
doesn't, however, mean that new police strategies have failed: police
now have the option of cautioning first-time offenders caught with
small amounts of cannabis rather than charging them, keeping them out
of a court system of trial and punishment that invariably sends them
into a spiral of re-offence. The system seems to have been so
successful that police are testing a similar program for harder drugs.

But that seems to be as far as we will go. The police are not ready to
back the establishment of safe injecting rooms, and neither is the
State Government. And the proposed ACT heroin trial still languishes
under John Howard's veto. The justifications are reasonable -
Melbourne the city in which to shoot up? Heroin use a
Government-sanctioned option? - but the stubborn refusal, to face
reality is foolish. While the young can continue to score, the
meanness of our streets no longer allows us to avoid the tough option:
we either take over the care and responsibility of users, particularly
young users, and aim to re-educate them at the same time, or we
abandon them to the tender care of dealers.

And these people are frightening. Last week I saw a shaky and
desperate kid on the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets, no more

than 15, approach a car of steel-eyed operators. He bought something
leaning in through the window and stumbled off to shoot up. I can only
guess where, but the experts tell me to assume he would have had used
equipment, putting him at risk of blood-borne infection, and would:
have been all alone if the stuff he bought turned out to be bad.

If we cannot yet get the stuff off the streets, the streets that are
our responsibility, then isn't the other consequence of that street
trade also our responsibility? This should become our highest
priority. It isn't an excuse anymore that the police are just not
philosophically predisposed to safe shooting galleries: they should
know better as their day-to-day reality is so much harsher than ours.
And even if the Premier has the reputation of a state to defend - and
a back bench to keep happy - and the risks associated with making
Victoria more user-friendly, so to speak, are indeed great, the
alternative for all users, and particularly the young, is just too
dangerous.

At a time when a young person's first drug is increasingly heroin,
when a cap will cost you less than a bottle of scotch, when social
pressures of unemployment, homelessness and family breakup are
crushing so many, the dangers of unsupervised drug use are even worse.
That task must be ours, as an act not only of clear-eyed practicality,
but of true compassion. The alternative is to leave the young in the
grip of slick, heartless sharps in fast cars who will deal them their
first cap of heroin for 10 bucks as their own version of kindness.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady