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Cracking Down On Cannabis
Abstinence or harm-minimisation? A clash of values is emerging, writes Bill Bush.
Bill Bush | The Age | 02/13/06

Police coming down hard to solve a health problem? This is just what the Commonwealth Government is calling for to improve mental health.

Even though the use of cannabis has declined by 37 per cent, the Prime Minister asked heads of Government at Friday's COAG meeting to toughen their laws on the drug.

The signs are that this is the vanguard of steps to reverse Australia's harm-minimisation drug policy in favour of one that puts a premium on abstinence and stronger law enforcement.

Other indicators of this shift are:

· Financial support for naltrexone implants that focus on abstinence combined with criticism of methadone maintenance therapy that focuses on stabilisation.

· A $600,000 grant over three years to Drug Free Australia to "advocate abstinence-based approaches to drug issues" while cutting the grant of the peak harm reduction focused Alcohol and Other Drugs Council to just one year.

· The enactment of harsh comprehensive Commonwealth criminal drug law overshadowing that of the states. It includes even minor possession offences under the label of serious drug crimes.

Since the Prime Minister vetoed the heroin trial in 1997, the rhetoric of his Government has been unfriendly to harm minimisation. He has said that he does not believe in it and his Government has played language games with the term.

Only last year the Commonwealth reaffirmed its commitment to "the principle of harm minimisation" in a further extension of the National Drug Strategy. This is defined so broadly that its three poorly integrated components of "supply reduction", "demand reduction" and "harm reduction" allow governments much room to manoeuvre. Only the last component embodies the essence of harm-minimisation as it was originally conceived: "Strategies to reduce drug-related harm to individuals and communities."

Nevertheless, the Commonwealth continued to support key aspects of harm-minimisation such as the provision of sterile syringes and methadone maintenance. This now seems to be changing.

For example, the Government is echoing alarmist media reports about a cannabis and mental health crisis.

Health Minister Tony Abbott and parliamentary secretary Chris Pyne have expressed alarm. Employment Minister Kevin Andrews wants to "explore its links with welfare dependence". The PM has warned that "mental illness and homelessness was the price the nation was paying for 'lax attitude' towards cannabis". "The time," he says, "has arrived for us - legislators and parents - to get tougher."

A lax attitude or not, household survey figures show that the proportion of the population that had used cannabis recently declined from 17.9 per cent in 1998 to 11.3 per cent in 2004. That's the 37 per cent decline.

Recent research is showing some links between heavy use of cannabis and mental illness. Though worrying, these are nothing to those demonstrated for methamphetamines - "ice", "yah bah" and the like - use of which is booming.

The Government's own Australian National Council on Drugs has said of cannabis that "there is emerging but limited evidence that cannabis may cause psychotic symptoms in people who are not at risk of this condition". In the hands of crisis mongers that becomes: "There is overwhelming evidence cannabis causes psychotic illnesses, such as schizophrenia, as well as depression and anxiety disorders, particularly among young people."

The Commonwealth wants jurisdictions such as South Australia to ditch its expiation notice systems and for all jurisdiction to toughen cannabis policing. It matters not that studies show that coming down hard on cannabis can cause more harm to young people than the drug. The processes of the criminal law heighten known risk factors for mental illness such as unemployment, poverty, homelessness, insecurity, divorce and family break-up. The same studies have shown no appreciable difference in cannabis use between jurisdictions with different systems.

The cannabis and other Commonwealth initiatives are in line with the 2003 abstinence focused report on drugs of a House of Representative committee.

A battle of values is emerging. Those supporting libertarian views would oppose the reversal of harm-minimisation. (The Institute of Public Affairs Review has supported heroin prescription.)

It is also consistent with a Christian view that condemns us if we persevere with actions that marginalise people and lead to their suffering and death.

An opposing strand, espoused by the Health Minister and the Australian Christian Lobby, gives primacy to measures that make users drug free. On this view people who are on drugs are virtually dead anyway. If this prevails, public health and safety are bound to suffer.

Bill Bush is a member of Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform.

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ZenXi6

I've been following this whole issue closely and knew that this government was going to get stuck into Marijuana legislation early this year - I have been emailing various Pro-Marijuana organizations as well as emailing various federal ministers to try and figure out what's going on.

Any links to Australian sources (especially in Victoria) would be brilliant and any help would be much appreciated.

Good news is that the Western Australia Premier is all for decriminalisation and believes people should be able to have small amounts on them or a few plants in the garden + he has tried Marijuana before. But that's only one state!

Buzzby

The tactic of dehumanizing your opponents ("virtually dead anyway") is the first step in developing policies that deny them basic human rights and considerations. This is how they justified the treatment of Jews under the Nazi regime. At a lesser level, this is how the US justified interning American citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps during WWII.

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