Page 2038 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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have a very bad habit. We can understand that that would translate through to the way children might be affected.
Sometimes there is violence. Ice is characterised as a drug that increases violence in the user. Another thing this report shows is that it does not affect everybody in the same way. And there is the stigma. There is a public perception of the ice user that has been created. When I think of the word “ice”, I can see some of the faces that were presented in the Four Corners report last year. It becomes a sensationalist issue. When issues become sensationalist—we have seen it with child abuse issues—it takes people’s eyes off the main game, the systemic changes that must be made at the same time.
One thing that the committee canvassed is that family-inclusive treatment options need to be increased in the ACT. Not everybody who uses drugs is a single young person—there is another stereotype. There are families involved. The whole family needs treatment in some way or other. Certainly people should not be separated from their families. We do not have enough of those options in the ACT.
We also need to recognise the needs of kin carers. One thing that has been discovered in Australian cities—certainly in relation to the AIDS campaign, not just in Australia but in Thailand where the AIDS campaign was able to be stemmed—is the importance of peer education. That is where I think the loss of CAHMA, the needle and syringe program, might have had a deleterious effect, because people who know the problems of users are the ones that users can talk to best. Directions ACT has now got the needle and syringe program. It is an incredibly good program, but I would like to see some evaluation of the loss of CAHMA. It could not be a problem; I do not know. But I am not sure if there is anything out there which indicates that one way or the other.
The committee was supportive of needle and syringe programs, but it did not go so far as to suggest that they should be in prisons. If people get caught selling or even using these drugs, they will end up in prisons. It is ridiculous to think that the problem ends there and that they are put away safe from drugs. We all know that that is not the case. I would have liked to see the committee go that far.
It was really good to see—I was really pleased about it—the attention given to dual diagnosis. That is a growing problem. We have to understand that ice users are probably poly-drug users and that there is an increased presentation of people who have drug issues and mental health issues as well. When I last checked on this, there was one dedicated worker in ACT Health on this issue, I think. It is really important that we do not just have one dedicated worker. The committee does understand this and recommends that the ACT government should make available and resource mental health first-aid training for all workers in the alcohol and drug sector. And that needs to go both ways: people who work in mental health services also need to have a good understanding of all the issues related to drug use.
One of the more concerning things about methamphetamine use is that, unlike heroin use, there is a total lack of pharmacological treatment. We do not have any treatment programs at all in the ACT. Perhaps that indicates the level of use. For instance, ambulance officers told the committee that, while alcohol was 30 per cent of
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