A HARD LINE ON DRUGS

Yvonne Preston talks to Athol Moffitt about Australia's high rate of drug
abuse. She outlines his concerns and his suggested strategies in the
never-ending war.

CHILDREN venture on their first experiment with illegal drugs at an average
age of 13, and first-time users are getting younger every year. Eighty per
cent of all people who finish up with a drug habit started off with some
combination of under-age alcohol and marijuana.

Australia is one of the world's highest users of marijuana, and Australian
cannabis is the strongest in the world, five or six times stronger than
even 10 years ago. Marijuana is the first step to abuse of harder drugs
and, for some, that step will lead to the tragic and pathetic half-life of
the addict.

To Athol Moffitt the facts are highly disturbing and the downward spiral
inexorable. The retired judge of the NSW Supreme Court, a former president
of the Court of Appeal who presided over Australia's first Royal Commission
into organised crime in the early '70s, is scathingly dismissive of the
currently fashionable view, taught to children in schools he says, that
there is such a thing as "responsible use".

He dismisses the commonly held distinction between "hard" drugs and "soft"
drugs, saying there's no such thing as a soft drug; marijuana is a "Jekyll
and Hyde". And he rejects the view that supplying registered addicts and
decriminalisation are appropriate ways to deal with drug abuse, which has
reached epidemic proportions in this country.

At the age of 84, recovering from a bout of heart trouble which put him
into hospital, Moffitt is devoting his still-considerable energies and
intelligence to a cause he feels passionately about. Earlier this year he
collaborated with a pharmacologist and a magistrate on Drug Precipice, a
scholarly book on the worsening problem of illicit drugs in Australia.

Now he has published Drug Alert, a handbook guide for parents, teachers and
kids themselves, with a glossary of street names, details of the
side-effects of drugs, some very nasty indeed, ways to detect signs of drug
use and advice on action parents can take to protect their children and
help them stand up to the peer pressure which tends to start it all. The
book is simple, short and cheap, full of good advice about what to do to
protect children of the rising generation who are, as yet, "drug innocents".

By now you might have thought there was abundant information available to
concerned parents, and anyone else, worried about the corrosive influence
of drugs on our society. Moffitt disagrees. "Parents in Australia lack
information and are subject to a great deal of misinformation, both as to
the effect of drug usage and what to do.

"An academic theory of "responsible use' has become the fashionable view.
It holds that we have lost the war, prohibition has failed to prevent the
gradual increase in drug use, so we should tell kids how to use drugs
responsibly. The argument goes that it is natural for children to
experiment, that warning of dangers will only incite their curiosity and
that since we cannot stop them it is best to allow them to learn through
experience.

"This is a view backed by the libertarian notion that it is my body, and I
can do as I like with it. The truth is, anywhere there are no restraints
drug use is greater."

Lobbies like NORML, the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws, which began in the United States and exists here, campaign on an
individualist and libertarian platform, protesting against prohibition.

At his home on Sydney's North Shore, Moffitt puts the case for the
prohibitionists. Prohibition has not done better because it hasn't been
allowed to work. No law works unless it gets proper support and if people
dismiss it as a wrong law. The law needs to be supported by the public.
Just passing a law against driving under the influence of liquor was not
enough.

It needed to be enforced and it was not being enforced until roadside tests
were introduced. This was still not enough without a public-education
program, hence the now familiar advertisements at holiday times with their
explicit warnings of the fearful dangers of drink-driving and the heavy
penalties it attracts. The law was enforced and earned public acceptance
and respect. You do not hear people saying "Teach me how to drive under the
influence".

Driving under the influence of alcohol became socially unacceptable, just
as the public and persistent campaign against smoking reduced cigarette
consumption by making it, too, socially unacceptable. Still Moffitt
believes all the evidence points to the anti-prohibitionist line on drugs
having the upper hand in the debate about how to deal with exploding drug
use in Australia.

When Moffitt wrote Quarter to Midnight, the book which followed his 1973
Royal Commission into Organised Crime, drugs came up, but much less than
they do today. "My view is it's now too late."

"Drug use has exploded. The drug trade has become international. We're
never going to stop it. We are only intercepting 10 per cent of drugs
coming into this country, and if we did wonderfully well, we are still not
going to stop the trade. The answer lies not in supply, the supply is
there, but in acting on the demand.

"Catch the crooks, people say, and more and more money is put into trying
to catch them. I say, of course, catch them. But that's not the answer. The
answer lies in people." There is one abiding fact which is true everywhere.
The stronger the perception of the danger in any use of drugs the lower the
usage. The less danger is perceived the more use goes up. The classic
example of this is tobacco. When its dangers were said to be not proven,
everybody smoked. It was socially acceptable. Old films are wreathed in
cigarette smoke. The tide turned when the danger was shown and emphasised.

The United States and Sweden both provide evidence of the truth of his
claims, Moffitt says. In the US cannabis was decriminalised in 10 states
from 1974-78. They said it was a soft drug. The result was a 50 per cent
increase in cannabis use in schools. The US became one of the world's
highest users of cannabis. Then a movement of parents against this liberal
law got under way. There was a Senate inquiry, the decriminalisation was
reversed and usage fell back by the same percentage it had risen.

Decriminalisation is the case now being put in Australia, Moffitt says, and
Australia now exceeds the US, Britain and Canada in cannabis use. A United
Nations report published in February this year says public discussion of
decriminalisation encourages the young to cannabis use, five times higher
among Australian children than American.

Sweden too went down the road of decriminalisation by simply not enforcing
the law against illicit drug use. It has since reversed its stand, using
the threat of jail to compel people to seek rehabilitation. Addicts are
granted parole only if they persist with their treatment. Sweden is now one
of Europe's most successful countries in dealing with the drug problem.

Asked about his views on needle exchange and approved "shooting galleries",
Moffitt says it is important to consider all the arguments about what can
be done for addicts, but in any epidemic, while there needs to be treatment
and palliative care, there also needs to be a search for the cause of
infection to stop it spreading. "I say, yes, argue about the treatment of
addicts, but what are we doing about the 'drug innocents'? If we don't do
better than we have done in the past we are simply going to have innocent
people of today the addicts and criminals of tomorrow, and on a larger scale."

Children should know of the absolute dangers. In Drug Alert he cites some
horrific cases. There was the 19-year-old youth who hanged himself because
of a psychiatric illness caused by smoking cannabis twice a week for two
years. His mother had believed cannabis to be a soft drug.

There were 30 youngsters admitted to a psychiatric ward in Sydney in a
psychotic state after using skunk, extra-strong marijuana.

A young man who overdosed on marijuana killed his younger brother,
believing he was in a Vietcong village. He had watched a video of Platoon.

Stoned youths who sat on a railway line and the girl who jumped over a cliff.

Cannabis can act as a trigger, Moffitt says. Drugs can have serious effects
on the 10 per cent of the population said to be psychiatrically or
psychologically vulnerable. Amphetamines are a real problem. The UN report
referred to above warned that amphetamine use in Australia was increasing
at an alarming rate. The designer drug ecstasy, an amphetamine manipulated
to produce hallucinogenic effects, was promoted among the young as a new,
natural and safe product.

Drug Alert includes a foreword by Angela Wood, mother of 15-year-old Anna,
who died within 12 hours of taking ecstasy at a dance party.

Wood writes that she has learned a lot about drugs since her family's life
was changed by the tragedy. Her sentiments were those of many other
parents: "It could never happen to my family". She no longer believes that.

"It can and does happen constantly to families from all walks of life,
including the most loving and close-knit, as was ours."

Moffitt puts some telling arguments about the practical problems of the
decriminalisation course advocated by the anti-prohibitionists. He found in
his inquiry into organised crime that casinos run by reputable people
became controlled by organised crime in Las Vegas, the Bahamas and elsewhere.

Legalise marijuana, and you will soon find the drug barons of the world
running it. And nobody ever refers to what will be legalised. Would legal
marijuana include skunk, bad weed, cannabis at 30 per cent strength which
could send many kids to psychiatric wards?

What other drugs will be legalised? If the legalised drug develops a
tolerance in the user he or she will then turn to the still-illicit market
for stronger stuff.

"We need strong law enforcement and good education. The big crooks depend
on people on the street as distributors, and that is their weakness. We can
never catch the big guys, but for the crooks to succeed they need the
distributors. The only way to properly attack the crooks is by the back
door, by depleting the black market."

Also needed are strong parent organisations to protest against the
anti-prohibitionists. "Parent power", if well briefed, can act as a
formidable force in the war against drugs. In the US the parent lobbies,
inspired by enraged parents who have themselves suffered the tragedy of an
addicted child, organise to provide advice and assistance and education for
other parents. They fight the libertarian drug movements and in time become
a political force. Kids opposed to drugs can be enlisted to affect a kind
of "reverse peer pressure", Moffitt says.

He finds it a distinct anomaly that Australia is second to none for the
stand it has taken against the use of drugs in sport. While at the other
end of the spectrum Australia suffers some of the highest levels of drug
abuse in the English-speaking world, and the pervasive argument for
decriminalisation is allowed to encourage even greater use.

"Why can't we in Australia attack our drug problem, the way sport has
attacked it, by saying drug use is totally unacceptable and by implementing
tough laws against it?" Moffitt asks.

Drug Alert: A Guide to Illicit Drugs for Parents, Teachers, Everyone, by
Athol Moffitt (Pan Macmillan). 141pp. $9.95.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski