Two more milestones in the failed war on drugs

For those interested in drug laws based on health rather than criminality, June 2008 saw the passing of two anniversaries of note, one at the South Australian level, and the other internationally.

In June 2002, the South Australian Drug Summit was held, and the final communiqué recommended a heroin prescription trial and further consideration of the use of cannabis for medical and therapeutic purposes, recommendations which were strongly supported.

Six years on, neither of these has happened and, as memories of the Summit recede, the likelihood of their implementation decreases. Yet recommendations that received divided support in the Summit, such as criminalising the supply of precursor chemicals, are what the Rann Government is acting on.

The South Australian Parliament now has before it an intellectually challenging bill - the Controlled Substances (Controlled Drugs, Precursors and Cannabis) Amendment Bill. Despite the Drugs Summit stressing the need for a scientific and evidence-based approach to drugs, clause 14, in relation to penalties other than for cannabis, cannabis resin or cannabis oil, instructs as follows:

… the degree of physical or other harm generally associated with the consumption of that particular type of controlled drug, as compared with other types of controlled drugs, is not a relevant consideration and the court must determine the penalty on the basis that controlled drugs are all categorised equally as very harmful!

So much for a scientific and evidence-based approach.

Given that so much of the Rann Government’s actions on drugs run counter to so many of the outcomes of the Drug Summit, it is not surprising that the Summit’s sixth anniversary went unremarked.

But the other unremarked anniversary was ten years ago.

Between June 8 and 10, 1998, a special session of the UN adopted the slogan “A drug-free world, we can do it” with that target to be reached after a ten-year war on drugs.

So here we are ten years on and that war has failed - abjectly. It has failed because the mindset that led to that conference is one that treats drug use as a moral and a criminal issue and not the health issue that it is.

At the time, a letter from hundreds of MPs, doctors, artists, mayors, lawyers, judges, journalists and academics from 40 countries signed a letter to the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, expressing concerns about where the “war on drugs” was leading us.

Fifty Australians signed the statement, including former Premiers John Cain, Neville Wran and Rupert Hamer, observing that “… true surrender is when fear and inertia combine to shut off debate, suppress critical analysis, and dismiss all alternatives to current policies”.

We see the result of such policies in South Australia with no real let-up in the use of drugs, despite the “rack ‘em, pack ‘em and stack ‘em” policies of the Rann Government. The only winners in such a policy are the designers and builders of the new prisons that will have to be constructed.

The war-on-drugs philosophy has seen the supply of drugs in South Australia pushed more and more into the hands of organised crime, and increasing budgets for the policing of that crime. Unsurprisingly, there has a been a switch to the legal drug, alcohol.

Even the prospect of the death penalty has failed to stop the production and trafficking of drugs. On the UN’s annual “International Day Against Drug Abuse” China has taken to staging mass rallies with 50 or 60 drug users being publicly executed, yet it has failed to stop drug use in that country.

Australians became acutely aware of the death penalty for drug traffickers when Melbourne resident, Van Nguyen, was executed in Singapore in 2005. South Australia’s Premier Rann distinguished himself with his hard-line quote “Van Nguyen is not Florence Nightingale. Van Nguyen is one of a number of people who want to peddle death to our young people and make money out of it and it doesn't come much lower than that.” Yet trafficking of drugs into Australia continues unabated.

Governments around Australia have increasingly adopted a “tough on drugs” or “say no to drugs” approach, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Police seem to be dictating the response - a response that is not evidence-based, as our new Prime Minister would apparently require. Why should we be allowing our police force to dictate public policy? And yet that is what is happening in South Australia.

The harm reduction approach is ignored by them. Yet, thankfully, South Australia continues to support a needle-exchange program, a symbol of harm reduction. But even that is under attack from the Family First Party.

The needle-exchange program is probably one of the last vestiges of a harm reduction approach in which South Australia once led the nation. In the last three months, legislation has been passed to ban the sale of bongs and other drug implements, and legislation to allow the use of sniffer dogs based on the highly unsuccessful New South Wales model, the very existence of which the NSW Ombudsman has questioned, has also passed.

On all occasions the Liberal Opposition has bent over backwards to support these new laws, often decrying what they see as slowness on the part of Government, or complaining that the laws are not tough enough.

My recent suggestion of a medically supervised trial of MDMA for war veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder was instantly dismissed by our Attorney-General as “a left wing social experiment” - no research required on his part, just a knee-jerk reaction. He is, after all, responsible for much of the draconian anti-drugs legislation being introduced in South Australia. It would have been asking too much of him to check out the science.

The ten-year anniversary of that UN session demonstrates the failure of the war-on-drugs approach. But why would governments and oppositions supporting that approach acknowledge an anniversary that shows they have got it wrong?