TIDE TURNS IN WAR ON HEROIN, BUT NEW FEARS OVER COCAINE

The good tidings would be big news at any other time, but the election and
the war on terrorism have all but buried it, writes Sally Loane.

A great war story got lost last week, buried under the sound and fury of
the international war on terrorism, the war on corrupt cops in our northern
beaches backyard and the phoney war of the election.

The war on drugs. We've had a significant win. In the past year there's
been a dramatic fall in heroin use across NSW.

Supplies have dried up. Fewer needles have been handed out in public
hospitals, both in former heroin hell holes like Cabramatta and across the
entire state. More people are going into methadone programs, and in
Cabramatta the numbers have doubled.

The rate of heroin overdoses, which like needle hand-outs are a key
indicator of heroin use, has fallen in Cabramatta by a whopping 74 per cent.

Drug-related deaths in NSW have fallen from a high of 65 in April 1999 to a
low of 11 last month. Even those people still using heroin have reduced the
amount they use and the amount of money they spend on the drug.

More importantly for the vast majority of us who have nothing to do with
drugs but who find ourselves, our homes and businesses targeted by thieving
addicts, the heroin drought does not appear to have pushed up the crime
rate. Vehicle theft and robberies have remained stable across NSW.
Shop-stealing in Cabramatta declined sharply at the onset of the heroin
drought and remains at a lower level than before the supplies began to dry up.

These are extraordinary statistics, revealed 11 days ago by the Premier,
Bob Carr, at the inaugural NSW Press Forum at Parliament House, and in more
detail last Wednesday by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
In normal times they would have commanded a deal of analysis and debate,
but the juggernaut of news from Afghanistan and the election campaign blew
them off the news pages before they became fish and chip wrappings.

There's not been much cause for excitement over drug and crime figures in
the past few years but I swear I heard a flicker of elation in the voice of
the sanguine criminologist, Dr Don Weatherburn, when we spoke last week.

There were two reasons why heroin use had declined, he said: increased and
more effective law enforcement from both state and federal authorities,
combined with a happy quirk of nature, a drought in Burma, Australia's main
heroin supplier. The bureau's study, he said, provided the first direct
evidence in Australia that drug law enforcement had the capacity to limit
heroin use.

Look at the list: bigger seizures of drugs by Customs; the jailing, for
life, of a drug lord responsible for a great deal of Sydney's supply;
increasingly effective dismantling of drug syndicates by federal and state
agencies like the Joint Asian Crime Group; and more police and arrests on
the ground in places like Cabramatta.

In my view there must also be a small but growing deterrent effect from the
huge penalties, including life imprisonment, for drug importation,
increased drug education for children and better treatment programs.

Would all this have been enough to reduce heroin use here if the opium
crops had not failed in Asia? Will it be enough if, or when, the Taliban
release their $60 billion heroin stockpile onto the world market? Or will
we revert to the bad old days when heroin killed more than two people every
day in NSW?

No-one knows. But make no mistake, some significant territory has been won
in the drug war, thanks to a bigger and better armoury of federal and state
police and other hardline drug enforcement practices.

The downside to the good news is that some people are using cocaine to make
up for the reduction in heroin, which is worrying health authorities.
Cocaine poses a far bigger threat to public safety, they say, because it
makes people aggressive and paranoid. As well, new scientific data revealed
last week proves cocaine can be just as addictive as heroin because it
causes immediate brain changes, just like heroin. When I last wrote about
the so-called recreational drug of the Sydney party crowd and pointed out
that cocaine users were supporting the evil, illegal drug syndicates just
as surely as street junkies, a number of people emailed me with the view
that cocaine wasn't like heroin because users didn't have to steal, that
coke use was a harmless, victimless crime.

What rubbish! Cocaine deserves the same tough law enforcement treatment as
heroin. Take no prisoners.