Forget the war. We need policies that work to reduce harm.
LET'S get the big furphy out of the way first. The latest calls to rethink the ''war on drugs'' are not the same as surrender, as the tough-on-crime brigade crassly claims. The ''war'', first declared by US president Richard Nixon in 1971, has failed worldwide. Only countries that focus on harm minimisation, not criminalisation, can report progress. Those are the facts.
The Age has long been a critic of simplistic prohibition policies. Premiers Jeff Kennett and Steve Bracks were once open to reform. In 1996, Mr Kennett set up the Drug Advisory Council headed by David Penington. To save lives, Mr Kennett was willing to decriminalise marijuana use and considered a heroin trial, but was overruled. His colleagues were blind to evidence such as a Broadmeadows police trial in which marijuana users were cautioned and referred for treatment. Only 8 per cent reoffended. Then police chief Neil Comrie identified the nexus between drug profits and police corruption. His estimate that 70 per cent of crimes might be drug-related represented a huge cost to taxpayers. Labor promised reform in line with the Penington recommendations, but never delivered. Today, the flow of drugs defies all policing. The lack of treatment options is deplorable.
Under prime minister John Howard, the reform push was halted, until now. The leading Australians pushing for change include two of his former health ministers. This is not a right or left cause. As early as 1989, conservative economist Milton Friedman warned that prohibition made trade more lucrative and made drugs more concentrated (being easier to hide and transport) and likely to be dangerously adulterated. He cited the US Prohibition, when crime groups grew on the profits of illegal trade and drinkers switched from beer to spirits of unreliable quality.
A year ago, the Global Commission on Drug Policy found that the war on drugs had been an abject failure. Its report recommended that education, health and rehabilitation replace the ''criminalisation, marginalisation and stigmatisation'' of drug users. Three federal Liberal MPs then called for this change in Australia, which recorded more drug arrests in 2010 than in any year of the preceding decade.
Now other leading figures in politics and policing, including Foreign Minister Bob Carr, have endorsed a damning report by think tank Australia21, The prohibition of illicit drugs is killing and criminalising our children. They do not seek open-slather supply to anyone who wants drugs. Instead, they want a policy focus on education and treatment. Users would not be driven underground or resort to crime to fund their habit.
It does not follow that drug use will rise. Sharp falls in Australians' use of a legal drug, tobacco, are evidence of a winning alternative. Portugal and Switzerland are tackling other drugs in similar ways. As global commission member Richard Branson told a UK parliamentary inquiry in January, after decades of war on drugs, ''all we have to show for it is increased drug use, overflowing jails, billions of pounds and dollars of taxpayers' money wasted and thriving crime syndicates''. Instead of measuring ''success'' by arrests and drug seizures, while clogging the courts, harm minimisation monitors broad progress, ''like the number of victims of drug-related violence and intimidation, levels of corruption connected to the drug market, the amount of crime connected to drug use and the prevalence of dependence, drug-related mortality and HIV infection''. In 2001, Portugal decriminalised illicit drugs. Use has not gone up and Portugal has made clear progress on almost all measures cited by Sir Richard.
On its own, the evidence of success and failure already exceeds the ''high threshold'' that Attorney-General Nicola Roxon requires to change drug legislation and policies. Governments are terrified of being seen as ''soft'' on drugs, but the status quo is incalculable human misery, preventable deaths, huge policing costs, a thriving criminal trade and corruption. That must change.