DON'T NEGLECT WAR WORTH FIGHTING

A Skirmish Over Marijuana As Medicine Could Distract From The Main Front,
Writes Miranda Devine.

It's hard to argue with the proposed marijuana trial of the Premier, Bob
Carr, especially when he has wheeled out so many sick people who say a toke
on a joint has eased their pain and restored their appetite, hallelujah. If
a doctor prescribes marijuana to people with cancer, HIV, chronic pain and
so on, and it relieves their suffering, good luck to them.

It becomes the same as any other prescription drug, and no more significant
than the routine and blessed availability of pethidine on tap for women who
have had caesareans.

But if there is a danger in the legislation, it is in people from the two
sides of the drug debate - zero tolerance versus harm minimisation -
attaching to it greater importance than it deserves, and turning it into
just another skirmish in the war about the war against drugs, one which the
good guys will lose.

Pat Daley, Salvation Army spokesman and anti-drugs campaigner, said
yesterday that was why he had not entered the debate. "It's been very
cleverly announced and to oppose it after the way it has been put forward
would be like opposing motherhood. Our concern is that it may be the thin
end of the wedge."

Well-meaning social conservatives - such as Bill Muehlenberg,
vice-president of the Australian Family Association, concerned about the
"wrong message" a medical marijuana trial will send, should relax. Equally,
the harm minimisation crowd - such as Greens MP Lee Rhiannon, who wants a
widening of the trial - should refrain from punching the air and realise
that Carr's marijuana plan is irrelevant to their cause.

This is no "social revolution" as The Daily Telegraph proclaimed on its
front page yesterday. Carr himself, in his endless round of press
interviews on Monday, insisted it was "not a step to decriminalisation. I
am opposed to decriminalisation".

In fact, if memories of my misspent youth are reliable, overreach by
anti-drug campaigners always backfires, making illicit drugs more alluring
to new users.

The old warning that marijuana was a stepping stone to "harder" drugs such
as heroin, never rang true to a generation of potheads, nor their children.
The more likely stepping stone was between cigarettes and marijuana. With
an estimated 2.5 million people using marijuana this year in Australia,
according to Alex Wodak, of St Vincent's Hospital, not to mention all the
former Cheeches and Chongs, there is a lot of what you could call
grassroots knowledge in the community against which propaganda will not work.

Evidence of a link to schizophrenia, particularly with newer, more potent
strains of marijuana, is more convincing. In the 1980s, there was an urban
myth in Sydney about a red-haired boy in the Blue Mountains said to have
become a schizophrenic after smoking too much pot.

The story added a trace of fear to carefree bong-pulling gatherings, which
may have had the effect of limiting consumption.

Despite suspicions that the strategy to promote Carr's marijuana trial has
been so cleverly organised that it must be part of the larger harm
minimisation campaign, serious anti-drug campaigners would do better not to
be lured into a diversionary war.

They are, after all, winning the real war on drugs in Australia, despite
little publicity, and need to maintain the momentum.

For the past five years, Australia has embarked on a spectacularly
successful, though unfashionable experiment - an official tough-on-drugs
strategy, overseen by the Australian National Council on Drugs and
Salvation Army zero tolerance advocate Major Brian Watters, hand-picked by
the Prime Minister, John Howard.

Watters was overseas and uncontactable yesterday, but told me in March: "We
are building a fence at the top of the cliff rather than having ambulances
waiting at the bottom."

So far that fence has proved remarkably effective, despite the vicious
campaign of personal abuse and denigration Watters has suffered at the
hands of the harm minimisation industry. It has been accompanied by what
Watters describes as a compassionate approach to victims and an increase in
programs to combat their addictions.

No one can say for sure whether the tough-on-drugs strategy directly led to
Australia's heroin drought, which began in Christmas 2000 in Cabramatta.
But the evidence points that way and no one has any better theories, since
such a drought was not occurring elsewhere in the world.

The drought occurred after two years of concerted law enforcement, in which
borders were better policed, drug kingpins were arrested, heroin seizures
went through the roof, and in NSW the rate of drug-related crimes fell for
the first time in a decade.

With less heroin on the streets, the number of people dying from overdoses
fell from 968 in 1999 to 306 in 2000. At the same time, illicit drug use
overall dropped from 22 per cent of the population to 16.9 per cent (except
for ecstasy), according to the 2001 National Drug Strategy Household Survey.

And fewer young people were exposed to heroin, with the proportion of
Australians aged over 13 who had been offered heroin declining from 2.4 per
cent in 1998 to 1.5 per cent in 2001. Fewer needles and syringes were
handed out by health authorities and more addicts were in treatment.

Meanwhile, drug crime in NSW - home burglary, armed robbery, car theft -
actually fell, with police and the director of the Bureau of Crime
Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn, pointing to the heroin drought as
the most likely reason.

This was a victory worth having in a war worth fighting.