TOUGHER DRUG LAWS ONLY SCRATCH THE SURFACE OF THE PROBLEM

A police-led war on drugs might be easy politics but it is lazy and
ineffective policy, writes Andrew Macintosh.

A CAMPAIGN is being waged by the federal and NSW governments to strengthen
drug laws, particularly those concerning cannabis, in what is being
portrayed as an attempt to deal with burgeoning mental health problems. But
as a report by the Australia Institute shows, strict drug laws are no
solution to the dilemma posed by mental illness and illicit drugs.

The report found that drug strategies should be treatment-orientated so
that to ease the punitive burden on users we need to discourage people from
using drugs and provide those who do with effective treatment. It also
found that drug law enforcement is incapable of putting a significant dent
in illicit drug markets, particularly when compared to the likely patterns
of drug use and harm under the treatment-focused alternatives.

The Australian National Council on Drugs, the main advisory body to the
Federal Government on drug policy, has responded by pointing out that there
has been a decline in illicit drug use in recent years, and that heroin use
and heroin overdoses have dropped dramatically since the late 1990s.

Have the National Drug Strategy and the efforts of the police made
significant inroads into the patterns of drug use and drug harm? Only the
most radical anti-prohibitionist would deny that there are many positive
aspects of the strategy. Its harm reduction components, like the needle
exchange and methadone maintenance programs, have saved lives, reduced
crime and decreased the social costs of illicit drugs.

The negative side of the strategy lies in the continuing over-reliance on
law enforcement and the refusal of governments to trial more innovative
harm reduction initiatives, such as heroin prescription and an expansion of
safe injecting rooms.

Studies have been unable to find a statistical link between police drug
seizures and street-level availability and prices. The only exception is
the Australian heroin drought that began in 2001, which the Federal
Government and others claim was a product of drug law enforcement, which
the evidence shows is incorrect. It appears the primary cause of the heroin
drought was a commercial decision by South-East Asian drug syndicates to
switch from supplying heroin to methamphetamines. Three crucial facts
support this conclusion.

First, while seizures of methamphetamines have increased significantly in
recent years, their availability has also increased dramatically, along
with the associated social costs, so much so that the scale of the
methamphetamine problem now appears to be commensurate with the heroin
crisis of the late 1990s.

Recent data indicate that amphetamine psychosis has increased by more than
60 per cent in the past four years, hardly a statistic that supports upbeat
assessments of the illicit drug situation.

Second, heroin production in Burma, the source of almost all of Australia's
heroin, has dropped by about 80 per cent since the late 1990s, and nobody
seriously suggests that Australia's law enforcement efforts are a major
cause of this decline.

Finally, police intelligence indicates that the organisations supplying
methamphetamines from Asia are the same groups involved in the heroin
trade. This raises the question: if drug law enforcement was the main cause
of the drop in heroin, why has it failed to stop the flood of
methamphetamines coming through the same channels?

The solution is not to abandon drug law enforcement. Yet, there needs to be
a dramatic shift in emphasis so that treatment and prevention are seen as
the core elements of our response to illicit drug problems.

While the evidence clearly shows that treatment is the most cost-effective
method of dealing with drug problems - returning savings of up to $12 on
every dollar invested - around 80 per cent of government funding for
illicit drugs is directed towards law enforcement. This division of
resources is illogical and inefficient.

And it is not just a case of expanding or reallocating funding. Governments
need to accept that, irrespective of how hard we try, people will always
take drugs. Once we accept this reality, the best we can do is make using
safer. To do this, controversial strategies like heroin prescription and
pill testing will have to be trialled.

Being "tough on drugs" is a case of easy politics, but lazy policy. Drug
abuse will never be eliminated, however, we can do better than we are now.

Andrew Macintosh is deputy director of the Australia Institute.