Page 2920 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 August 1991
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I believe that our recommendation to proceed to stage two of the recommendations of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health is a very small step. Our recommendations are not about legalisation, as one might think from reading some of the mail we get and some letters to the editor. That is not what we are on about. The hypothesis that legalisation of heroin, in the very narrow sense of controlled availability, could in some way improve the lot of Australians, particularly Australians involved in some way with drugs, is a question that needs to be answered. I draw particular attention to a letter that was sent to members by a New South Wales magistrate, Mr Craig Thompson. In that letter, Mr Craig Thompson raised a series of questions. He said:
... we could try to administer the heroin to them but this might present some very real legal-medical problems. Doctors, I believe, will not inject morphine intravenously because of fear of overdosing the victim. Could nursing staff be expected to inject intravenously without knowing (a) the tolerance ... and (b) whether the subject may have taken an illegal dose before attending?
He raised a whole series of questions, and I think that is a very positive thing. What we have attempted to do is say: Yes, those questions do exist; a controlled trial under rigorous academic conditions just might answer some of these questions. That magistrate referred to a trial in the United Kingdom and to other trials that had been held previously. They were very different from the trial that is proposed here. They were held under very different circumstances, in very different years, and they have very little relevance to Australia at this time.
I urge members to look very carefully at what we are proposing and not to be taken in by the emotive arguments of those who say that we are in some way proposing legalisation of heroin. That is not it at all. What we are doing is proposing an academic trial that may provide answers to some questions. When people understood that, when as part of this inquiry they were surveyed, about 70 per cent of people in Canberra said, yes, that it was an appropriate thing to go ahead with the trial. I think the reason that people are prepared to say those sorts of things is that they realise that we are in a position of other systems having failed - a terribly frustrating position. When I first came to this committee, I thought there would be a very simple solution; that, basically, all we needed to do was increase our law enforcement and increase the money allocated to it, and before we knew it the problem would go away.
Debate interrupted.
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