... PERHAPS SHE'LL DIE.

So, for the second time in a year or so a group of our leading citizens has released a report recommending a radical re-think of drugs policy. Not just any old citizens, but those who’ve spent years at the business end of the current system, dealing with both enforcement and social fallout. Oh, and let’s not forget the Foreign Minister who, as Premier of New South Wales, presided over the most draconian drug enforcement push the country had yet seen, but was forced to change his ideas after considering the real facts – and the real cost.

            Will they be listened to? Of course not. They’ll receive the kind of grudgingly polite audience usually reserved for a senile aunty at Christmas; they’ll do the rounds of morning shows desperate for something – anything – to fill three hour’s airtime; then they’ll be quietly and completely forgotten. Much more important things for the community to focus on; like, say, the Prime Minister’s latest hairstyle.

            These kinds of reforms always founder on the prejudice and irrational preconceptions of the majority; people who know there’s a problem but don’t have any real idea exactly what it is, much less what to do about it. The chorus begins on cue: “oh no, we can’t just throw up our hands and admit defeat”; or the more succinct, equally vapid, “legalise drugs? Never!”  A large part of the problem, by the way, rests with the common ignorance of any distinction between legalisation and de-criminalisation; no sensible person is actually suggesting we legalise anything.

            Let me tell you about the effectiveness of drug enforcement. In the late 90s, when Premier Carr was dramatically increasing the Police force by drastically lowering the entrance requirements; while the Howard Federal Government was trumpeting the success of its Customs and Federal Police forces at intercepting heroin shipments; the availability and quality of street heroin reduced not one iota; if anything, it got cheaper, better and more plentiful. Dealers, you see – the big ones, the importers – are businessmen, smart ones; they know, and can afford, to plan for a certain amount of lost product as part of the business model ...

            The change came early in 2001. Overnight, the smack disappeared. Quite literally, one day you could score a quarter-gram of very good gear in Kings Cross for seventy dollars – less if you knew your way around the Western Suburbs; the very next, four desperate junkies and I scoured the city for seven solid hours, only to end up sharing a fifty dollar cap of weak, heavily cut dope. No major busts in the news; no big recent push by the Police; it was just gone.

Three days later, the guys who used to sell heroin could get you all the cocaine you wanted. Within six months they were selling crystal-methamphetamine – ice. Those smart dealers, the big guys, had made a business decision; they realised that if you sell someone heroin, they’ll go away and stare at their feet for six or eight hours; sell them coke or ice, and they’ll likely be back within the hour.

Now, I realise I’ve just lost half my audience with the admission of having been a drug user; and that half again of those still reading now regard me with suspicion; but let’s just pretend, for the moment, that I’m an intelligent, articulate, adult human being with basic grasp on the facts of the matter, and no reason to lie about them. Agreed? Then let us continue ...

I’m not going to waste time addressing the effects of the worldwide War on Drugs; nor will I drag out the old alcohol/tobacco comparison; but what are the immediate, local consequences? If you don’t feel inclined to ask an inner-city emergency ward nurse what life’s been like since the ice wave hit; if you don’t know anybody who’s ever had to confront someone in the grip of meth-induced psychosis; then just sit and have a good, long think next time you’re writing out a big cheque to your insurance company. Have a think about what all those extra police and resources cost when you’re doing your next tax return, or paying for a heavily taxed drink somewhere. Or maybe just drive past an inner-city Centrelink office, and ponder what it might be like if addicts were better able to lead functioning, productive lives instead of having to spend their time lining up the next fix; dealing with criminals; being reduced to criminality themselves.

“But,” I hear you say, “That’s just surrendering”. Surrendering what, exactly? And who declared war anyway? After forty years of carnage, of sending wave after wave of soldiers in a doomed frontal assault on a fortified position, perhaps it’s time to bust the commander to the ranks, and see if maybe there’s a way in around the back? How about, instead of inflicting the cost of this quixotic campaign on addicts, police and emergency services - and the community at large – we instead put the squeeze on the Big Boys; those bastards who never go within a mile of the ‘cross or Cabramatta? How? By neutralizing their client base.

William S. Burroughs summed it up half a century ago, and it’s never been put better: the one irreplaceable tier in the drug pyramid is the user in the street: You can intercept all the drug shipments you like; there’ll always be more. You can lock up all the dealers you like; most of the visible ones are trying to support their own habits anyway – there’ll always be more. You can even track down and punish the Mr Bigs; while there are astronomical profits to be made supplying the illicit market, there’ll always be more.

However, if you excise the user from this structure; if you ensure a dependable, safe supply - along, of course, with resources to aid in quitting when and if they’re ready – then the dual effect is dealers with no market, and many more addicts able to contribute to a society now spared the cost of marginalising them. The John Howard response to this was to say that it would put the government in the business of importing heroin; nobody thought to ask him where public hospitals get their morphine.

(Incidentally, we’re not talking about just handing over drugs to anybody who wanders in. Currently, to qualify for methadone – a much more addictive drug than heroin – you have to be urine tested to ascertain that you’re already an addict. Which is kind of the point; with this approach, you not only rob the illicit market of customers, but also effectively quarantine the existing addicts).

It’s at this point that those irrational preconceptions surface again: why bother helping grubby, useless junkies? If you’d ever hung around a methadone clinic, and seen the cross-section of society that walks through the doors – corporate types, old-age pensioners, even professionals supplement the stereotypical bogan cases – you might just reconsider. For that matter, talk to the people who clean the bathrooms at State Parliament sometime.

If all this is a little oblique, let me put it terms a child could understand: the war on drugs, and everything connected with it, is like swallowing a spider to catch a fly. Its social, economic and human costs far outstrip any return on the investment. Not only is it not working, it can’t work. We missed a fateful opportunity, after the Drug Summit in Sydney a few years ago, to stop swallowing flies while heroin was still the worst drug we had to deal with. Heroin is back, but ice is a far more dangerous drug, and it’s everywhere. What do we swallow to catch it? And what will be next?

I used to think community attitudes to drug policy would change when the majority realised that addicts are people too; flawed and damaged, but human, and worth saving from the unnecessary burden placed on their narrow shoulders by the current system.

I know now that the only way to change things is to point out that it’s you, the wider community, who are also being subjected to these needless assaults. This is an enormous problem, being made inexorably more massive by the hare-brained remedies applied. Drug use is a symptom, not the disease, and we’re trying to treat a runny nose by inducing cancer. You, dear reader, whether you’re a junky or not, are paying for all this. And it will get worse.