Page 2919 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 August 1991
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were charged with, and our resources, we determined to try to take one small step in dealing with a major problem of our society, and that is a major drug problem to do with heroin.
The Sackville Royal Commission in South Australia put as one of its main recommendations that heroin should be demystified. Evidence before our committee has suggested that if we studied alcohol just by looking at alcoholics we would have an horrific view of alcohol. Of course, that is exactly what has happened with heroin. Heroin has almost always been studied by looking at it from the perspective of dependent users.
Our current approach of recommending that a study on the controlled availability of opioids be continued is not a new approach at all. In fact, what it does really is put into a quite defined form what committees since 1971 have been recommending. The most recent of those committees was the Cleeland Joint Statutory Committee on the National Crime Authority. On pages 75 to 80 of that committee's report, Mr Cleeland pointed out that there had been a quite clear failure on the part of the prohibition policy in Australia; that there had been a clear failure of Australian law enforcement to manage to contain heroin. That is not surprising. The same experience has been found all over the world. In the United States there is a parallel increase between dollars spent on the war on drugs and usage. So, clearly, for every extra dollar they spend, they actually increase usage.
There is a series of other reports and inquiries that have looked into the problem of illegal drugs in Australia. The modern reports really started with that of Senator Marriott in 1971, and that was the Senate Select Committee on Drug Trafficking and Drug Abuse; then, in 1977, there was Senator Baume's committee; the Sackville Royal Commission in 1979; the Australian royal commission under Williams in 1979; and then one in New South Wales in 1981 under Rankin; the Stewart inquiry in 1983; the Costigan inquiry in 1984; the Kerr inquiry of 1985; and, of course, the Cleeland committee in 1989 that I mentioned earlier.
The critical aspect of these committees is that they all deplored the fact that there was not enough information available; there was not enough hard evidence. What our committee has said is: Let us find the hard evidence. With that in mind, we approached the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health and asked, "Would we be able to answer some questions if we proceeded to a heroin trial; would we be able to get any more information?". The response of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, together with the Australian Institute of Criminology, was to produce this very extensive two-volume report. That report is well worth reading, for anybody who is at all interested in this particular subject.
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