ceedee's posterous

One of the interesting side-effects of the Federal Parliament's obsession with immigration and taxation issues this year has been that serious discussion of social policy has been sadly neglected. Especially around drugs.

It's been about 40 years since marijuana, LSD and heroin made their way into Australian society and about 30 years for cocaine and ecstasy. Methamphetamine has been with us for a little more than 15 years and in the past couple of years we've started to see the advent of synthetic analogue drugs such as Kronic.

Three inescapable facts arise from the most cursory review of Australian drug policy since the late 1960s. The first is that governments continue to rely almost exclusively on the ''tough on drugs'' strategy. Secondly, drug use continues to escalate despite the ''tough on drugs'' strategy - or rather, because of it. Thirdly, while tobacco and alcohol are demonstrably the most dangerous drugs, governments still treat them far more leniently than others.

None of this makes any sense at all. If the road toll continued to rise over 40 years despite new speed limits, more traffic cops and speed cameras, would legislators continue with the strategy? Not likely. But when it comes to drugs, Australian governments cannot look any further than the United States for inspiration. They send people to jail for possessing a box of marijuana or as many ecstasy tablets as would fit in a packet of aspirin. But in effect, ''tough on drugs'' means ''devoid of any new ideas''.

In Victoria, new legislation is in the parliament to ban bongs.

''We'll show those young kids that we're serious about stopping marihuana smoking,'' Premier Ted Baillieu said.

Yet Baillieu then exempts the traditional Middle-Eastern ''hookah'' from the ban seemingly because he doesn't want to lose votes in Muslim communities. Apart from being a form of racial discrimination this legislation is going to force tens of thousands of young Caucasian and Chinese dope smokers to make their bong out of half an orange juice container and a piece of stolen garden hose. Inhaling hot plastic vapours will make more young adults sick than the dope will.

All states, and the ACT, have simply bought the AMA's untested and unproven line that synthetic cannabis causes serious health problems and have banned its sale completely. They've even wrapped jail sentences around the synthetic drugs that are higher than for real marihuana. Yet many people were using these drugs to alleviate the symptoms of serious illnesses such as Parkinson's and fibromyalgia, which may explain why this medical lobby group attacked these new compounds with such ferocity.

In Queensland, Anna Bligh's Labor Government has gone so far as to introduce laws that say if a substance is ''similar'' to synthetic cannabis or ''is intended to have a similar effect'' then it is taken to be that. This is probably the most misguided piece of drug legislation in Australian history, and will potentially criminalise all sorts of chemical compounds and stymie medical research on anything that vaguely looks like it could alter mood. Because tobacco and alcohol are already legal and have unfortunately been with us since white settlement in Australia, a different approach is needed to help people give up these drugs. Every time I hear federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, talking tough on cigarettes, I cringe. It's taken her (and her previous health ministers) 40 years to go from the first health warnings on cigarette packets to legislation aimed at getting rid of brand names on packets. If that's the best they can do to stop the current 15 per cent of Australians who smoke, they should give the game away.

Any first year university student knows that, after price, the quickest and most reliable way to stop people from buying a product is to legally narrow the point of sale to the bare minimum, without actually enacting an outright ban. Total bans never work and almost always cause a product to thrive on the black market.

So instead of fiddling around with yet more packaging schemes, which will make no discernible difference to the number of smokers, why doesn't Roxon simply get cigarettes out of supermarkets, out of newsagents, out of service stations and anywhere where children can witness the transaction of tobacco for money? Don't worry about the kids seeing colourful brand names on the packet. Take the packets out of mainstream circulation and allow them to be sold only from age-restricted premises such as clubs, adult shops and tobacconists.

If people have to make a separate and dedicated trip to a location they are not very familiar with instead of just picking up some cigarettes when doing the grocery shopping, then they will have more time to think about the decision. Their children will not see the transaction happening, in the process normalising the sale of cigarettes.

While we're on about it, why do we still have alcohol for sale in supermarkets? It's not as though there is a shortage of outlets selling alcohol that we have to have booze for sale alongside breakfast cereal. Again, if governments were serious about bringing down drinking levels, they should be focusing on point of sale rather than labelling. Domestic violence and under-age binge drinking are fuelled by the easy availability of alcohol. Inevitably, the supermarket chains will fight to keep both cigarettes and alcohol as part of their mix and argue that without them they cannot be profitable. But look how many different lines the average supermarket carries. If they can't make it with thousands of different products and have to rely on two of them for their profitability, they should give the game away.

Here again, politicians are duplicitous and will argue about why they can't do this. They'll carry the big stick and puff their chest out about being tough on drugs but when the retail and alcohol lobbyists are in the room, their posturing changes. Then they're just tough on drugs which don't have lobbyists.

Police crackdowns to cut the supply of illegal drugs by removing dealers and criminal overlords actually lead to rises in drug-related violence, gun crime and murder, according to an international study. A review of 20 years of research into drug enforcement has found that attempts to snuff out the trade in illegal substances have the opposite effect to that intended, by creating a power vacuum when drugs barons are imprisoned which is rapidly filled by competitors eager to fight each other for the newly-vacated territory.

Campaigners for the reform of drugs policy said the findings, which follow numerous studies showing that prohibition has failed to stop narcotics from becoming more plentiful, added to the pressure on governments to declare the "war" on the £200bn global illicit drugs industry over, and adopt a policy of controlled legalisation.

The study by the Canada-based International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP) found that heavy-handed tactics, ranging from attempts by the American-sponsored Colombian armed forces to eradicate drug cartels to the arrest of dealers in Sydney, had led to increases in violence. Often, this violence is fuelled by criminals arming themselves to profit from price rises caused by seizures of drugs or the dismantling by police of dealing networks.

The assessment of 15 reports on the relationship between violence and drug enforcement, presented yesterday at an international conference in Liverpool, found that 87 per cent of studies reported that police seizures and arrests led directly to increased violence.

Dan Werb, co-author of the ICSDP document, said: "The convention has been that law-enforcement action to reduce the availability of drugs, thereby increasing drugs prices and decreasing supplies, also has the effect of reducing violence. Not only has prohibition been found to be ineffective with regard to price and supply; this study has also shown that it is accompanied by an increase in drug-related violence.

"Prohibition drives up the value of banned substances astronomically, creating lucrative markets and worldwide networks of organised crime. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that any disruption of these markets through drug-law enforcement seems to have the perverse effect of creating more financial opportunities for organised crime groups, and gun violence often ensues."

The study, which highlights the drug-related violence gripping Mexico as an example of the vicious circle fuelled by crackdowns, said researchers in Florida had recorded a five-fold increase in violence and property crime linked to drug arrests. Another study of six US cities found that attempts to shut down crack markets led to increased homicide rates in four of them.

A six-year Australian investigation into drug dealing in Sydney found that the arrest of dealers and subsequent disputes between rivals had contributed to murders and a substantial rise in non-fatal shootings with handguns.

Campaigners for a regulated market in drugs said the study bolstered the argument for legalising drugs and introducing a sliding scale of controls, ranging from membership of coffee-shop style premises for the sale of cannabis to licensed pharmacies selling cocaine.

A spokesman for the Transform Drug Policy Foundation said: "We have a government in pathological denial of the negative impact of a prohibition-based drugs culture. Which other global industry worth £200bn is left in the hands of organised criminals rather than being taxed and properly regulated?"

52% of Americans polled said yes!

A Zogby poll found that over half of American's favor the legalization of pot:

Voters were asked: "Scarce law enforcement and prison resources, a desire to neutralize drug cartels and the need for new sources of revenue have resurrected the topic of legalizing marijuana. Proponents say it makes sense to tax and regulate the drug while opponents say that legalization would lead marijuana users to use other illegal drugs. Would you favor or oppose the government's effort to legalize marijuana?"

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.