WHAT'S YOUR POISON?

If we really wanted to wage a "war on drugs", this week wouldn't be a
bad time to start. Between Christmas and New Year, Australians drink
three times more than usual, which is a lot already. About 90 per cent
of Australians over 14 drink alcohol, almost half of us cheerfully
overestimate our ability to hold our liquor, and about 16 per cent of
young Australian men imbibe more than 29 standard drinks in an
average, non-festive week. Yet here's the paradox: Australians
increasingly say they disapprove of drug use.

All drugs are not equal, nor should they be treated as such. There are
plenty of legal addictions to be had: coffee, alcohol, tobacco,
gambling, sleeping pills. But the stark dividing line between
health-based approaches to the use and control of legal substances and
the criminalisation of illicit drugs is neither logical nor effective.

As explained in the Herald yesterday by a former president of Brazil,
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a respected Latin American inquiry into
drugs on which he was co-chairman has concluded that prohibition in
that region which supplies most of the world's cocaine and marijuana
has merely shifted cultivation and drug cartels from one place to
another, fanned gang wars and empowered criminal drug lords.
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In nations which mainly import illicit drugs, raids and arrests have
barely dented consumption - almost 40 per cent of Australians have
used illicit drugs. In Asia, harsh penalties have filled prisons with
injecting drug users with soaring HIV infection rates. Cardoso and his
colleagues have called for a shift in thinking, to emphasise harm
minimisation and reduction of consumption, while cutting the profit
incentive for criminals and the glamour of illegality for users.

Australia has considerable expertise in harm reduction. Pioneering
needle exchanges and injecting rooms in NSW skirt legal restrictions
because they are medically supervised. In less than a decade, the
state has saved $1.3 billion in health costs and much human suffering
by preventing tens of thousands of HIV and hepatitis C infections and
by referring many users to drug rehabilitation services.

Cardoso's message is important here in NSW. If, as expected, the
Coalition wins power in the March election, it will arrive with
pressure from its conservative factions for a harder line on illicit
drugs. Before turning back down that road, Barry O'Farrell should take
a look at experience, here and in places like Portugal, with
approaches based on harm reduction, controlled supply, and treatment
for chronic users. As it has been with tobacco, informed choice might
well be a better weapon than prohibition.