THE TRAIL OF DRUGS THAT AFFECTS US ALL

When Neil Comrie took an interstate telephone call a few weeks ago he was
expecting a friendly chat with a long-time friend.

Instead, the chief commissioner of the Victoria Police was devastated.

The friend's 22-year-old son had come to Melbourne with his girlfriend for
the weekend. The young man wasn't a regular drug user and according to Mr
Comrie was brought up in a decent family.

But during that weekend the man was offered some of the high-purity and
cheap heroin that is easily available on the streets of Melbourne. He
injected and died.

"We were given the job of conveying the message to his father that he
wouldn't be coming home," Mr Comrie says.

The chief commissioner says that during two decades working as a police
officer he has been locked into a hard-line approach to drug users.

But he now admits the approach has not worked and "I have in recent years
changed my mind quite considerably".

I ask Mr Comrie about people's anger towards drug addicts who steal to feed
their habits and how hard it would be to convince the public that offenders
should get warnings.

"The real problem with that attitude is that it is families like them which
are losing their children to drug abuse," he says.

"I know, for example, a number of very decent families who have done
everything they can to provide a balanced and good upbringing for their
children only to find that because of idiosyncrasies in that individual's
make-up they get involved in the drug scene and the next thing they are
found dead somewhere," Mr Comrie says.

"I don't really think that society can abandon anyone who tries drugs," he
says. "There is an obligation on society to try to minimise the damage that
they do but also the need to minimise the damage they do to themselves."

Mr Comrie says that with the benefit of hindsight "we would probably do
everything differently" from the time the drugs problem started to escalate
in Australia in the early 1970s.

"Previously we all looked in amazement at what was happening in the United
States and the United Kingdom," Mr Comrie says. "Well it is now upon us and
we really haven't used our time wisely in dealing with this problem."

Mr Comrie says he personally regards drug traffickers as the "lowest of the
criminal element because they really are peddling a very dangerous product
which we know takes many lives".