HARD FACTS ABOUT A 'SOFT' DRUG

When the third in line to the Crown, Prince Harry, recently took a deep
breath and confessed to smoking marijuana - and, unlike former US president
Bill Clinton, admitted to inhaling - Prince Charles didn't spare his son
from confronting some hard facts.

Prince Harry was sent to a rehabilitation clinic to talk with addicts about
their experiences, then faced up to his father for a long talk about drug
use. It is a conversation almost every parent dreads having, perhaps even
more so since Melbourne researchers issued a wake-up call to the community
this week. A Royal Children's Hospital study found, for the first time,
strong evidence that frequent use of marijuana was not only associated with
depression in young people, but could cause it. The seven-year study of
2000 youths suggests that heavy marijuana use, long identified as a
potential trigger for schizophrenia and psychosis, can be bad for the
mental health of young people who had not been depressed.

In a society in which almost two-thirds of young adults have experimented
with the drug and youth suicide has reached disturbing levels, it is
reassuring to note, however, that occasional use appeared to have little
effect. Indeed, experiences such as Prince Harry's, say the researchers,
can be taken as evidence of normal socialisation (which is not the same as
saying they should be encouraged). It is important to note, too, the
warnings of mental health experts that the fact that more young people
smoke marijuana, from considerably more potent cannabis cultivars than in
the past, does not justify demonising the drug or its users. "That's a
waste of time," said Ian Hickie, chairman of the national depression
initiative, beyondblue.

People on all sides of the debate on illegal drugs need to face up to the
facts when they become available.

The "war on drugs" approach has failed to stop the supply of marijuana,
which is easily grown at home and, on the numbers involved, self-evidently
not confined to a criminal class.

The facts have exposed both the shallow politicking of "zero tolerance" and
the old, complacent distinctions between "soft" and "hard" drugs (and that
applies across a continuum of drug taking, illegal and legal). The
limitations of law have also been exposed.

As seen in South Australia, where the decriminalisation of personal
marijuana use in 1987 has not reduced the problem, the state of the law is
neither solely the answer nor the problem. A more holistic approach, one
that allows us to see the dimensions of the problem in human rather than
political or criminal terms, is long overdue. It is an approach that
appears to have helped Prince Harry give up marijuana. Parents and
politicians alike should note that the emphasis was on correction, rather
than punishment, on education and information, rather than hysteria, and
most importantly, on care. A human problem requires a human approach.