Page 1028 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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amendments that were prepared some little while ago will achieve that. I would like members to have the opportunity to cast their eye over those before we take the debate out, so I will be suggesting that one of my colleagues adjourn the debate when members have had the opportunity to make remarks at the in-principle stage.
MR MOORE (11.03): Mr Deputy Speaker, in dealing with this legislation, I think it is very important for us to ensure that we cover the full range of perspectives in dealing with harm minimisation. There is no doubt that the intention of Mrs Carnell in tabling this Bill was to attempt to reduce the harm associated with the use of anabolic steroids. She has not attempted to ban anabolic steroids as such but to move them into the medical sphere.
Mr Deputy Speaker, the difficulty here is that in Canberra - unlike in New South Wales, for example - we do not have a medical practitioner of whom I am aware who is prepared to prescribe anabolic steroids for people who are determined to use them for body building. In Sydney there is a medical practitioner by the name of Dr Millar who in fact spends a great deal of his time doing just that. His philosophy is that you know that people are going to use anabolic steroids for body building. If that is going to be the case, then to avoid harm associated with such use, the risk of HIV, the danger of overdose and all the other dangers associated with using such complicated drugs, he believes that it is far better that users be under the care of a medical practitioner rather than under the care of a friend of a friend who thinks he knows something about the drugs and who is getting them not pharmaceutical preparations but veterinary preparations. It is quite clear that these are the sorts of issues that Mrs Carnell was wrestling with when she tabled this Bill.
It seems to me that before we are ready to support this Bill we ought to ensure that those services are in place. It seems to me that, once we have a medical practitioner - it may well be a government medical practitioner - who will prescribe these drugs, then it is the appropriate time to implement this legislation. I am not speaking against the legislation in principle. I am concerned that we adjourn the debate so that serious consideration can be given to assessing whether or not we can find a medical practitioner who is prepared to take a broad population health view of the issue, to look at the HIV risks and the other risks and to say, "That is how we will deal with it". In that way, when somebody says, "I am going to use steroids for body building", people can say, "If you go to Dr X, he or she will be able to deal with it". That doctor, in turn, can say, "Do you realise what this is going to do to the rest of your body? Do you realise the side effects of these?" and so on and so forth. That doctor can look at the dose rate and monitor people, as Dr Millar does in Sydney. Training could be provided, I presume, by working closely with that medical practitioner.
I also draw the attention of members of the Assembly to a published report on harm minimisation and anabolic steroids. It sets out the results and recommendations of the Drug Referral Information Centre injecting steroid user survey. The author was Stephen Plowright. The steering committee included Dr Gabriele Bammer, from NCEPH; Mick Batinally, a gym owner; Dr Tony Millar of the Lewisham Sports Medicine Clinic, the person I mentioned; Marion Watson, the service director of ADD Inc; and Richard Refshauge, a prominent lawyer and a person who has been involved in illicit drug use for quite some years. Their sixth recommendation reads:
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