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Deaths down, so is drug war lost?

August 10 2001

In the first seven months of last year, 214 Victorians took so much heroin, or such a bad batch of it, that it killed them. Up until yesterday, the body count for this year was 29.

Why, then, does Australia's peak crime-fighting body profess to have lost the war on drugs? Why does NSW police commissioner Peter Ryan feel the same way? And why does VicHealth chief executive Rob Moodie believe the Australian Federal Police are "delusional" if they think the battle to halt the illicit drug trade is being won?

The answers are complex and, as Shaun Reynolds of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence said yesterday, the figures can mean different things to different people, depending on their philosophy.

Most experts say the bald figures on heroin-related deaths are not enough and reject the whole concept of a "war" on narcotics, begun in 1973 by Richard Nixon's administration in the United States. They emphasise the importance of policing complemented by drug treatment and prevention.

The issue has been clouded further by the well-publicised heroin drought. However, the number of syringes distributed by St Kilda Crisis Centre - more than a million over the past year - suggests the heroin drought has not led to a corresponding injecting drought.

"It doesn't take away the needy and desperate drug users who are continuing to try and find a substitute for heroin or who are going through a lean time with heroin," said Margaret Hamilton, director of Melbourne's Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre.

John Dalziel, spokesman for the Salvation Army, which runs the St Kilda centre, said there had been a 10 to 15 per cent increase in the number of syringes handed out to addicts. Experts pointed to an increase in the use of methamphetamines and benzodiazepines and more cases of alcohol abuse, but these were less likely to cause overdose deaths.

To strengthen the argument for a heroin trial the NCA used estimates that seizure s accounted for only 12 per cent of all heroin consumed in Australia. And while law enforcement, such as the AFP's log-runner operation in Fiji, had some effect on heroin supply, Dr Moodie said the Australian market was at the whim of global economic forces beyond its control.

For example, the Taliban's ban on growing poppies as a sin against the teachings of Islam halted supply in Afghanistan, which produced 70 per cent of the world's opium last year. The United Nations suggests Burma will eventually regain its 1980s status as the main producer, but that will take time.

Other factors are the weak Australian dollar, which could persuade suppliers to sell their drugs more profitably elsewhere, and climatic change destroying South-East Asian crops.

In Victoria, meanwhile, the number of overdoses attended by the Metropolitan Ambulance Service has fallen, but not by as much as heroin deaths. Dr Hamilton said this suggested the increased public awareness might have led addicts to inject more cautiously, in the presence of other people who were prepared to call an ambulance quickly. The most recent figures show there were 139 overdoses in January compared with 379 in the same month last year, and 365 in January, 1999.

According to the UN's 2001 report on global illicit drug trends, heroin abuse remained generally stable in western Europe last year, but increased in eastern Europe and some parts of Asia. "We have never won," Dr Moodie said. But he hoped the recent strengthening of local drug strategies and primary care for drug users would guard against spiralling harm when heroin returned in force to the Australian market.

"It's wonderful that the deaths have come down, but I don't think it's necessarily law enforcement that has done it ... Policing is important but it can't be the only weapon," said Dr Moodie, who was part of the last Drug Policy Expert Committee under Professor David Penington.

The NCA report, released on Wednesday, said heroin use had doubled in the past 15 years and that the proceeds of trafficking had made organised crime a national security threat.

Caroline Fitzwarrynne, executive officer of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, said the criminality of illicit drug use made it difficult to tell whether, regardless of the heroin drought, the war was being won.


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