Drug policy sacrificed on the altar of narrow-mindedness

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.