Sheradyn Holderhead: Ice epidemic worst in Adelaide, so where’s the help?

ADELAIDE is standing on the frontline of Australia’s ice epidemic but the cavalry isn’t coming — and nor do we even know how much money is going to fight it, writes Sheradyn Holderhead.

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• Wastewater tests reveal Adelaide still Australia’s ice capital

ADELAIDE is standing on the frontline of Australia’s ice epidemic but the cavalry isn’t coming.

It has been a year since the first national waste water drug analysis was released and in every report since then it has been clear Adelaide is an ice hotspot.

The level of use recorded in the metropolitan area has been among the worst in the country in each of the four Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission reports, and has been growing.

The release of the latest report showed SA and WA are the only two states where ice consumption in both the capital city and regional areas outstrips the national average.

Given the weight of evidence, it is hard to comprehend why SA receives less cash under the Federal Government’s National Ice Action Strategy than the state’s population demands. That means without even taking into account the scale of the problem here, SA is already getting less than our fair share of funding.

While the country’s law enforcement agencies appear to be learning lessons from the waste water reports, in 2016-17 the Australian Federal Police seized about 40 per cent of the methylamphetamine needed to meet national demand, the Health Department appears ignorant.

New details on the model it uses to carve up the money for treatment reveals six of the 31 country’s primary health networks receive bigger cash injections than Adelaide.

Surprisingly, none of those are in WA either, which is also being underfunded for the size of the problem that state is facing. The funding for PHNs, the bodies through which the Federal Government funds health services, is weighted according to socio-economic disadvantage, remoteness and indigenity.

Health Department assistant secretary David Laffan said the wastewater report “doesn’t necessarily provide the depth or breadth of information that would make it suitable to use within a funding model”.

So instead it appears the Health Department is basing which areas get extra funding on assumptions rather than data that covered more than half of Australia’s population.

Putting that issue aside for the moment, it may be even more baffling to learn that the $240 million devoted to treatment services over four years under the ice strategy is actually for all drugs, not just ice.

And the federal Health Department reckons it’s “quite difficult” to say how much of that bucket of cash is actually going to ice treatment. It could be $1, it could be $200 million — who knows? The Government sure doesn’t.

While it’s hard to argue against extra funding being pumped into any alcohol or drug treatment service, it seems pretty disingenuous for the Federal Government to claim it has a national ice strategy.

A record ice haul - 313kg - made by Australian Federal Police. Picture: Tait Schmaal

The ice taskforce on which the Government’s strategy was based found Australia’s drug treatment and support system was “not particularly well designed to respond to ice use”.

“Many services are designed to treat use of other drug types, such as alcohol and heroin, and do not provide the extended support necessary to accommodate the withdrawal and recovery period associated with ice,” the report stated.

That was why extra funding was supposed to boost services specifically designed to support ice addicts.

When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the funding — $300 million all up including treatment and other initiatives — in December 2015, he labelled it a “comprehensive package to reduce the demand for ice and reduce the harm it causes”.

“We cannot arrest our way out of the ice problem,” he said.

Mr Turnbull’s comments are as true today as they were two and half years ago.

The waste water data showed the average consumption of ice nationally had been growing since August 2017 — the first national testing round — despite the success of law enforcement agencies cracking down on the increasingly sophisticated ice market.

The ice epidemic is destroying families and communities throughout Adelaide — and the state — with broad economic and social consequences.

SA’s leaders need to rattle the cage to ensure we get the help we need before it’s too late.