Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Drug policy sacrificed on the altar of narrow-mindedness

By John Ryan - posted Friday, 21 September 2007


A man in his early 20s was recently seen lying face down in the middle of a shopping strip, repeatedly banging his head on the pavement. People mostly walked by, seemingly oblivious.

He ended up at a nearby Needle and Syringe Program. Staff recognised signs of drug use. But they suspected there was more to his story than drugs. Perhaps it was mental illness that was driving him to self-harm. But the staff were not qualified, trained or resourced to help. They did their best to calm him down but soon he was banging his head against a wall.

He was soon at the emergency department of a major hospital. He was admitted and placed in an isolation room for people with drug psychosis. Staff called the notoriously overstretched crisis assessment and treatment team but they didn’t turn up. They kept him in the isolation room until his drugs wore off, and once he had detoxed, he was released.

Advertisement

Drugs are a hard issue. Ask anyone with a drug using son or daughter. No one in the world has yet discovered the formula to stop societal drug use. But plenty are making a profit from it, and not just drug dealers.

Drugs and mental illness is a complex area and we are still learning, whether police, scientist, parent or policy maker. We can get caught up in reaching for miracle cures and simple “magic bullet” solutions, outlandish claims and hallucinations. The latest misfire is Bronwyn Bishop’s parliamentary committee report, The Winnable War on Drugs, an artefact of shallow thinking.

Mrs Bishop has sadly followed the wrong leads and targeted the wrong enemy. Her inspiration comes from Drug Free Australia (DFA), the dads’ army of illegal drugs policy in Australia. Not only has she taken up their policy agenda and elevated moralism over the suffering of fellow Australians grappling with drug problems, but she has been suckered into celebrating their pet hates.

Their approach is to attack outspoken harm reductionist Dr Wodak and others who are determined to reduce the burden of drugs. Harm reduction has the audacious premise that drug use has a very long history. That we must apply ourselves to the reality that hundreds of thousands of Australians have broken the law and to be responsible we must have policies that respond to this, rather than the pyrrhic “Just Say No”.

At the DFA conference earlier this year, there was a failure to be enriched by diverse perspectives and to rise above petty personal attacks to address these difficult issues. There was applause when individuals (who weren’t there) were maligned. They were referred to as “the other side”. Delegates joined in revivalist style applause at the drop of a cliché. Conspiracy theories were raised to the level of truths.

Like Bishop, some speakers even held dedicated professionals responsible for our drug problems. Dr Alex Wodak, a drug treatment physician, supporter of harm minimisation and highly regarded all over the world, is their bête noir.

Advertisement

Science, evidence and compassion are sacrificed on the altar of Bishop’s and DFA’s twisted logic that people wanting to reduce the harm from drugs are actually responsible for creating the problem. Just like the argument at the DFA conference that condoms are fuelling the HIV epidemic!

The conference even went to the extent of flying in one of DFA’s purists, Dr Kerstin Kall from Norway. How does the obscure, hardly published, Kerstin Kall gain Bishop’s attention to supposedly unravel the evidence of harm minimisation programs in Australia including the internationally successful Needle and Syringe Programs?

There is an escape clause for Kall though: according to the strong praise and amens (literally) of the delegates, the scientific standards are an enormous conspiracy too. Peer reviewed academic journals are not worth the paper they are written on. These are not truth seeking research journals aimed at improving our knowledge and hence building our civilisation, they are just pedlars of pap and in the drugs area, dominated by the legalisers and other enemies of the people, “the other side”.

I like clear moral values and laws to protect the community. I support harm reduction as a viable public health approach to drug issues. Harm reduction co-exists with interdiction, but for Bishop they are mutually exclusive and harm minimisation is somehow soft on drugs.

How can the criminalisation of drugs in Australia be seen as soft on drugs? Our prisons are full of drug users.

Bishop mischievously forgets that it is the drug pedlars, with no regard for our community but enormous financial clout, who should be a key focus of our attention and interdiction rather than ordinary Australians struggling with their drug problems.

It is men like Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel, who hold hard-working, community-minded and compassionate Australians in contempt, who should make us all worry. They are misery profiteers, willing to corrupt our police and judiciary and to pay no tax. But at the DFA gig and last week in Bishop’s report, Wodak got more negative attention than Tony Mokbel and other misery pimps. I worry about the impact of gangsters like Carl Williams on the fabric of society. Bishop seems more worried about harm minimisation.

In the worst tradition of political correctness, Bishop wants to change our language from harm minimisation to harm prevention. This is not a great leap forward but it is code for dismantling Australia’s global leadership in drugs policy. This ideological posturing is reprehensible.

For the past 20 years we have taken a comprehensive approach to drug use and it is called harm minimisation. It includes police and drug treatment as well as interventions for current users. The War On Drugs is a re-badge but part of the Australian tradition, aiming to balance supply control with interventions for people who are currently using, including drug treatments and needle and syringe programs.

Bishop wants to move the goal posts so that anyone who delivers and supports current harm minimisation programs in Australia should be de-funded. The result would be worse drug problems and lives lost. I wish we could eradicate drugs too but let us stay real and seriously engage with a global phenomenon.

Seeing drugs are already banned, Bishop wants to ban words. Words like “recreational drugs” because it sends the “wrong message”. That this is a priority when people are losing their sons and daughters to drugs is reprehensible. Bishop is yet to figure that “ice” sounds really cool but sooner or later we won’t be able to describe this pernicious form of amphetamines in shorthand.

These are not socialists whining about correct language but drug zealots carping about conspiracy theories of endless mendacity. They tut-tut together about evil language being used as a beach-head in efforts to spread drug use.

We would be led by the sad and the confused if Bishop’s report is given any credence.

Bishop is contradicting most of the expert submissions to her enquiry as well as the World Health Organisation, the Red Cross, UNAIDS, the AMA and the published scientific evidence. It is well-known that the enquiry chose to ignore the evidence and submissions in favour of the DFA’s agenda.

Here is something Bishop neglected to mention in her report: Needle and Syringe Programs (NSPs) are targeted interventions for people who are injecting drugs that have saved $7.7 billion in treatment costs for HIV and hepatitis. Australia has one of the lowest rates of HIV in the world, largely because of the early embrace of NSP. Bishop wants to move back to the “good old days” but the world has moved on.

A sobering lesson from convening the first panoptic Australasian Amphetamines Conference in 2006 is the clarity of vision that the police have on their side in relation to drugs. They want to stop more drugs entering Australia and seeming they would need to search every piece of cargo and humanity that crosses our border they have a big job. But some dealers move on and they are now using submarines! Australia’s police teams are engaged in harm minimisation programs as they appreciate the long-term benefits of the strategy.

The problem for the health sector is that there is an endless complexity to humanity that requires attention. We need politicians willing to concentrate on the real issues, and seriously engage with this complexity instead of serving up narrow-minded reports.

At our recent Mental Health and Illegal Drugs Conference, attended by more than 400 harm reduction workers from across Australia, there was a thematic thread to the sessions: stick with the evidence and lead with compassion. I wish Ms Bishop could have been at this conference; maybe her opinion and the resulting recommendations would have been more balanced and founded.

With an eye for the future, we know that cooler heads will prevail and the evidence based results of current policy will stand the test of this latest diatribe and we can all get on with doing the jobs that we are internationally recognised at being the best at doing.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All

This article is the personal opinion of the author.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

18 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

John Ryan is the CEO of Anex - the Association for Prevention and Harm Reduction Programs Australia.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Article Tools
Comment 18 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy