A FACTORY OVERDOSE FEEDING OUR STREETS

South-East Asian Superlabs Churn Out Tonnes Of Illegal Drugs Each
Week - Made For Australian Buyers, Writes Ruth Pollard.

It is the new heavy industry with a ready-made Australian market -
large-scale factories, employing a workforce of hundreds and capable
of producing up to two tonnes of methamphetamine each week. From
Indonesia to Malaysia, the Philippines to Cambodia, the industrial
scale of drug production is surprising, and it is alarming the most
seasoned experts.

The biggest concern is the lack of a local market for
amphetamine-type stimulants in these countries, so the bulk of what
is produced is made solely for export - to Australia, New Zealand,
Japan and, in some cases, the US.

Run by transnational crime groups that have established factories in
states with ineffective law enforcement, these huge drug operations
are set up for long-term production, says Jeremy Douglas, the
regional projects co-ordinator at the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime in Bangkok.

Douglas and his colleagues were in Canberra yesterday, presenting the
latest evidence of the potential tide of amphetamines coming our way
to the Australian Federal Police and other government agencies.

"Drug production in South-East Asia has escalated in the last three
to four years to what we would call industrial-style productions -
these factories can produce between one and two tonnes of
amphetamine-type stimulants every week," he warns.

And it is not just the production and export of drugs on such a large
scale that is worrying the UN - it is the money laundering and
corruption that go with it, activities that will have a disastrous
effect on the stability of governments in the region.

Housed in huge warehouses, with millions invested in processing
equipment and other infrastructure, these superlabs are the way of
the future, Douglas says. There is also a trend towards mobile
facilities, he says, pointing to a recent seizure of shipping
containers containing methamphetamine labs.

When a crime gang suspects its operation has been detected, it simply
loads the container onto a ship and changes location, without losing
a day of valuable drug production. "This is worrying for Australia as
there is not a market for these drugs in places like Malaysia and
Indonesia, so they need to export the drug to other, nearby, markets."

Australia's first heroin overdose was officially recorded in the late
1960s. At that time, there were few drugs of any kind used on any
scale. In just 40 years, we have gone from a nation of simple beer
swillers to one that is awash with illicit drugs. There is now
widespread use of substances that can alter our minds, make us feel
up, down, or just plain out of it.

"You have a period of 40 years where it has gone from little use of
any of these drugs to just an explosion of use," says Richard
Mattick, the director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research
Centre at the University of NSW. "There was relatively little use of
amphetamines, no ecstasy, now it is commonplace."

Mattick warns of a looming public health burden. As more people use
drugs, the number of those who tip from harmless, occasional use into
harmful, chronic, dependent use will increase. "Heroin still kills
several hundred people in Australia every year, and more young people
die from drug use than die from cancer. If you think about the impact
of that on society, it is extraordinary."

The growing epidemic of drug use has spilled over into stimulant
drugs - ecstasy, cocaine, speed and the more potent crystal
methamphetamine - and while the immediate impact of an overdose is
less common, the cumulative effects can be devastating.

"There is increasing evidence of quite severe heart disease caused by
high blood pressure from chronic cocaine or methamphetamine use, and
people are dying prematurely," Mattick says. Then there is the cost
to families and the community as the relentless equation of addiction
plays out: time + money + consumption + recovery = physical,
financial and emotional hardship.

And with an ageing population will come a population dependent on
drugs, he predicts. "By 2050 I believe we will have a lot of people
who are in retirement who are regular users of a range of drugs how
the government deals with that will be a difficult question."

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre turned 20 this month,
and now has a monitoring system of 1000 regular users, enabling it to
track the extent of drug use as well as the price and availability of
each drug on the market. If there is a new drug on the scene, the
centre will identify it, with its complicated network of dealer
contacts and users, as well as police, health workers, treatment
centres and drug counsellors.

Yet the potential impact of a further influx of methamphetamine on
the streets of Sydney via huge drug labs in Asia remains a big
unknown. "We have, to some extent, had some success in curtailing the
production of crop-based drugs such as cocaine and heroin, yet there
is a very large incentive for the industry to turn to manufacturing
other drugs in less obvious ways, in factories, " Mattick says.

"The size of manufacturing plants in parts of Asia means they are
capable of churning out huge amounts of methamphetamine the
capacity is huge and amount of money invested in these places is very
substantial."

Wayne Hall is a professor of public health policy at the University
of Queensland.

He lead the research centre through the mostly cannabis-based work of
1993-94 and into the devastating heroin epidemic that ran from
mid-1996 until the so-called drought hit in 2001.

"Things got torrid when it became clear we were in the midst of a
heroin epidemic - there was a steep rise in overdoses until they
numbered over 1000 per year, public injecting in inner-city Sydney
and Melbourne, and lots of media coverage. We were putting out an
annual bulletin on overdose deaths, and year after year it was just
getting worse."

Suddenly, as quickly as the epidemic hit, it was over and there was a
precipitous fall in heroin overdose deaths due to a sharp reduction
in availability. "You can date it almost to a month - between
December 2000 and January 2001 - when heroin disappeared from our
cities and a drug that had been cheap and freely available just
disappeared simultaneously around the country."

It resulted in a sustained 40 per cent reduction in overdose deaths, he says.

Most heroin users are polydrug users - they consume whatever is
available - so the switch to cocaine and then later, amphetamines,
was inevitable.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, the typical heroin user was in their late
20s or early 30s and was likely to be male. They were using heroin
daily and drinking heavily, one-third to one-half were using
benzodiazepines and smoking cannabis and almost all were tobacco
smokers, as well as occasionally dabbling in amphetamines and cocaine.

"There was simply a change in the proportion of intake devoted to
heroin as opposed to other drugs," Hall says. It remains the same today.

Data presented at this week's National Drug Trends Conference
indicates the price of heroin has remained stable while use has
increased slightly, the price and purity of methamphetamine are
stable and use has fallen slightly, while those nominating ecstasy as
their drug of choice has decreased marginally over the past four years.

The director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don
Weatherburn, describes the development of large-scale drug production
in Asia as the most worrying trend on the horizon. "We have had a
steady rise now for more than 10 years in the number of people being
arrested for amphetamine use and I don't think that is just a
refection of tougher law enforcement, that is an indication of a
growing problem."

And a growth in use means an expanding potential market. There are
surges in cocaine use as well, but it is methamphetamine that appears
to be burgeoning, Weatherburn says. "The big concern everyone has is
that prolonged and chronic use of these drugs tends to send the user
paranoid, edgy, anxious and aggressive. But the assault levels in NSW
have been fairly flat since 2001 while amphetamine use has been
rising, so it takes time for these epidemics of drug use to play out."

Another recent trend picked up by staff at the medically supervised
injecting centre in Kings Cross is the emergence of brown and beige
heroin from Afghanistan, as opposed to the usual white powder
trafficked from the area known as the Golden Triangle in South-East
Asia. "There has been no impact on the number of overdoses or
overdose deaths, however brown heroin is not as clean to inject, it
has to be heated and even then it is still a bit sludgy so it causes
harm at the site of injection," Ingrid van Beek, the medical director
of the injecting centre, says.

A key informant in the illicit drug reporting system, the injecting
centre monitors closely any changes in use of different drugs, as
well as the folklore and myths that drive much of the information and
practice shared by injecting drug users.

"It is the most sensitive and timely indicator of drug supply that
the country has. We are able to report on more than 200 visits per
day at the injecting centre with the brown heroin, we were right
there, we were able to see what arrangements people had made to heat
and acidify the drug."

NSW Police Force has established a special unit to deal with the
clandestine drug laboratories cropping up in private houses that now
produce much of the powdered methamphetamine used in Australia.

"The main drug that is manufactured is methylamphetamine
[methamphetamine], but in recent times we have seen the production of
MDMA in these laboratories," says Detective Superintendent Greg
Newbery, the commander of the drug squad.

Along with cutting access to precursor drugs such as pseudoephedrine,
police are also working with the pharmaceutical industry to reduce
access to the other chemicals needed to manufacture amphetamines, Newbery says.

And while the bulk of the powdered methamphetamine in Australia is
manufactured locally, Newbery acknowledges that the crystallised
version, known as ice or crystal, is being imported from overseas.

As the United Nations notes, only co-ordinated, multinational efforts
to anticipate trafficking from the drug factories of Asia will
prevent that balance being tipped, and ensure that the very real
potential for large-scale harm is avoided.