Time for the decriminalisation of drugs
The second phase of Prime Minister John Howard's Tough on Drugs campaign is a $27 million education campaign involving a series of TV advertisements and a glossy booklet to be distributed to every Australian household. The focus of the campaign is for parents to discourage their children from using illegal drugs.The campaign was meant to be launched last July but it was suddenly withdrawn after Howard's office criticised the content of the parents' booklet for not being tough enough. A Howard staffer rewrote key sections of the booklet resulting in criticism from health professionals that the booklet contained unscientific statistics and misinformation. For example, the booklet said that Studies overseas reveal that young people from families who eat together at least five times a week are less likely to be involved in drugs.
This campaign is a monumental waste of money. As Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation president Alex Wodak pointed out in the March 26 Australian, the $27 million could buy places for 15,000 people in methadone and other treatment programs.
Currently, drug users find it extremely difficult to get into detoxification centres and treatment programs, especially pharmacological ones, because of the great shortage of places.
Howard has taken personal responsibility for anti-drug programs, insisting on a policy of zero tolerance instead of harm minimisation. To ensure that his approach prevails, Howard is purging his main drug advisory body, the Australian National Council on Drugs, of people who advocate drug law reform rather than Howard's law enforcement just say no to drugs approach.
Under this strategy, programs which discuss safe drug use will be axed and heroin prescription trials and safe injecting rooms will be ruled out. In 1997 the federal government intervened to prevent the ACT government from conducting a trial which would have issued free heroin to a specific number of drug users.
The $27 million which the government is spending on its anti-drugs education campaign is just a small part of its $500 million anti-drugs campaign. The lion's share of this money will be allocated to law enforcement and only a small amount to rehabilitation.
In 1997 the UN World Drug Report showed that Australian government spending on policing drug use was 14 times that for drug treatment. The figures would be little different today.
Howard's tough on drugs stance does not extend to legal addictive drugs such as alcohol and tobacco, a further demonstration of government hypocrisy.
After decades of federal and state government drug policies concentrating on prohibition, the strategy has been thoroughly discredited. Even conservative establishment figures, such as police commissioners have begun calling for alternative approaches to be considered.
Why do governments refuse to consider decriminalising illegal drugs and treating drug addiction as a health matter rather than as a crime issue?
Decriminalisation would result in a dramatic reduction in drug-related crime and the number of prisoners. Decriminalisation would subject currently illegal drugs to regulation regarding their ingredients. This alone would decrease the number of drug related deaths.
Decriminalisation would, however, result in a decline in profits for the capitalists who derive their profits from illegal drugs. A 1999 Australian Financial Review article estimated that the heroin industry is worth $7 billion more than the tobacco industry.
Given the utter failure of the drug prohibition policy, are federal and state governments just being irrational for pursuing this policy?
Despite their tough on drugs approach, Australian governments would prefer the status quo than decriminalising drugs. For a start, drug addiction is a means of social control. Wealthy drug addicts aren't subject to the vicious drug laws that exist in states such as NSW, because their drug use is behind closed doors. It's only poor drug addicts who face arrest by doing drug deals and injecting on the street.
There are different penalties for different drugs. The possession of cocaine, the drug of choice for the wealthy, attracts a much lighter penalty than heroin. As heroin is cheaper than cocaine, it is generally used by poorer people, thus criminalising large numbers of poor people.
It suits capitalist governments to treat drug use as a criminal issue rather than a health issue because it criminalises the poor, and, it suits governments to use the war on drugs as an excuse to attack our civil liberties. In the days of former premier Joh Bjelke Peterson, the Queensland police used the extra powers given to them by the drug laws to put political activists in jail before important demonstrations.
Images of people whose lives have been destroyed through drug use are hypocritically exploited by capitalist governments in order to win public acceptance for more repressive police powers and laws on the premise of getting tough on drugs. Meanwhile, these same governments refuse to fund adequate treatment facilities for drug users.