Pubdate: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 Source: Herald Sun (Australia) Copyright: News Limited 2000 Contact: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ Author: Andrew Bolt OUR COURAGE TO KEEP UP THE DRUGS BATTLE IS BEING SAPPED Our war against drugs is not lost. But our courage to fight it is being sabotaged. Look at the bottom left of this page, where we report the number of heroin deaths. When we first published that figure, on February 23 last year, we told you 62 people had died already in 1999. That shocking news electrified the debate over what to do about rising drug use. There was, rightly, an air of crisis, and when Labor won office it appointed a panel of drug advisers led by Professor David Penington. The panel recently predicted the death toll would race from. 359 last year to nearly 500 by 2005. It pooh-poohed tougher law enforcement, and called for "some real changes in the way we handle this issue". Like introduce five injecting rooms. But let’s not panic just yet. As I said, on February 23 last year. the death toll stood at 62. Yesterday, exactly one year later, the death toll for this year reached just 37. Still tragic, but around half that of a year ago. Yes, this may be a statistical blip, and the figures — while last updated by the Coroner on Tuesday — are a day old. But there has been a fall, even though the Bracks and Kennett governments have done little extra to save addicts. It is almost as if they wanted the old-fashioned ways to fail. Victoria still has such a huge shortage of treatmeat centres that a judge this month had to send a 20-year-old woman to South Australia for help. Addicts often wait weeks for treatment. If the Bracks Government gets its way on shooting galleries, by July it will be easier for an addict to get help to shoot up than to give up. Or take street policing. Switzerland cut deaths among its addicts largely by closing down parks where drug dealing had been tolerated. But here our dealers still parade along the streets of Footscray and Springvale. A war on drugs? Forget it. Another example: Customs searches just one in 1000 shipping containers, says the Penington panel. But US Customs searches up to 30 per 1000. Shouldn’t we try the obvious things first - more drug treatment places, more street policing, more Customs searches, more diversion programs for drug offenders and tougher penalties--before we give in to injecting rooms? Forget it, even though that works in Sweden. We’re being softened up for a pro-addict policy, and facts don’t seem to count. So we’re promised "safe injecting rooms", which are in fact not safe — for anyone. So we pay for needle "exchanges", which don’t insist on exchanging needles at all. So were told we must keep handing out 4.1 million needles a year to stop addicts getting hepatitis C - yet learn at least half of them get the disease from shared needles anyway. Needles we pay for. Then we’re told by the Melbourne Inner City Needle and Syringe Program that "99 per cent of drug users" get rid of their needles "responsibly" - only to hear that Melbourne City Council alone finds 35,000 of them in its gutters, and Port Phillip Council has so many on its beaches that it warns us to get hepatitis B shots. On it goes. We’re told by the Penlngton panel that injecting rooms are so good that Frankfurt’s death toll plummeted from 1991. But we find in fact that Frankfurt’s first injecting room didn't open until years later, in December 1994. Never mind. What is proof when we’re on a mission to change society? And, boy, aren’t the urgers keen for us to see things from the addicts’ point of view? So when Police Minister Andre Haermeyer hears drug use is rife in prison, he doesn’t demand better security and drug-free jails. Hell, not he decides to let prisoners get stoned on methadone instead. Then the director of the Adolescent Forensic Health Service says she already gives methadone to teenage "clients" of the justice system. She just wishes prisoners could get free heroin. too, because it's a "rights issue". For 15 years we’ve seen this cave-in to what is known as "harm minimisation" policies. And we’ve drowned in drugs. Of course, there are many reasons for our crisis, starting with the abandoning of many young Australians by parents. But how doubly despicable authority must seem to these youths, when it is so timid against law-breakers, so eager to please addicts, so exhausted with standing on principle. so loose with the facts. - --- MAP posted-by: manemez j lovitto