Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Children first. But every individual child has to be thought of not as a prop to help the addicted parent get over the addiction or have a better life but as deserving to have some hope of having a good life and not becoming part of the future generation of addicts.

We found that there is out there what we have called the drug industry elites, who have captured those terms ‘harm minimisation’ and ‘harm reduction’ and think it is okay: ‘Drugs are here. Get used to it—and if we reduce drug usage that is an end in itself.’ They say that by doing this you remove the moral judgement about whether drugs are good or bad. They promote an amoral system where they can have counsellors or other folk who advise people that they can have drugs; just manage them better. It is in their evidence to the committee. It is in the Hansard. What we are saying is no; there needs to be a harm prevention policy, and the prevention policy needs to prevent young people becoming addicted in the first place. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has shown that 77 per cent of people who first start on drugs do so out of curiosity. But, up until the recent spate of commercials that the government has put to air, where has been the counteradvice to kids to say it is not okay?

One person who is part of the drug industry, Mr Dillon, is an advocate who goes around talking to schools, even in my electorate, giving the soft option message. It has got to stop. Kids have to be informed that what they are risking is their mental health, their appearance, their teeth, their skin, their very fibre and indeed their DNA. They have to know the truth of it.

The Lancet, which wrote in 1995 that cannabis, no matter how much you smoked, would not affect you, have now finally said that they were wrong. On 28 July this year they wrote:

In 1995, we began a Lancet editorial with the since much-quoted words, ‘The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health.’

They say:

Research published since 1995 … leads us now to conclude that cannabis use could increase the risk of psychotic illness.

They say now:

… governments would do well to invest in sustained and effective education campaigns on the risks to health of taking cannabis.

People who advocate the legalisation, taxation and regulation of cannabis are stuck, like Dr Wodak, back in 1991, when he wrote an essay talking about available heroin and that you can best deal with things by regulation and taxation. Stuck in that old thinking, he was still giving it to us in his testimony before the committee. It is wrong. It is the people who are prepared to admit they were wrong in the Lancet who are the people who are prepared to give kids a break.

We know that kids who are lost from overdose, kids who are lost because of drug use, are loved by their parents. On Friday, when I went back to the office, I did not leave until quarter to seven in the evening because I was returning calls to heartbroken parents who were saying, ‘Thank God the message will go out.’ We have a moral obligation. These policies that we have put forward are based on higher principles. They are morally based. We have a moral obligation to let people know what will happen to them. For those who do slip, we need to have access to detox and to rehabilitation in a timely manner. So often, they will ring up and be told, ‘Ring us back in a fortnight or three months,’ and it is too late. So we have advocated that we set up a one-stop number, an 1800 number. It is modelled shamelessly on the system I put in place in aged care called Carelink, where you break the country into regions and task an NGO with keeping alive all the services that are available in that region. When you ring up, you say where you live and you will be transferred to the person who is responsible for that information, and you get immediate contact.

We have recommended that naltrexone go on the PBS. We visited Dr George O’Neil’s clinic. It is a way of detoxing quickly with an implant, not tablets, which allows people to then go into rehabilitation, because you cannot have rehabilitation unless you are detoxed, and the two have to be put together simultaneously. We know that parents continue to love their children but we know what impact a child who is a drug addict has, not only on the parents but on their siblings, and the appalling effect on babies just has to stop.

This report is a plea from the heart. This report is very specific about what needs to be done to prevent harm—not just to reduce it or minimise it but to prevent it, with the ultimate aim of always making the individual drug free and not sentenced to a lifetime of methadone, which will probably take 46 years off your life expectancy, and not turned into a hag with their teeth falling out. If you think the mouth of a tobacco-smoking person is hideous, look at the mouth of a methadone user. We need an anti-drug campaign—which we recommend—which is of the same reach, intensity and spend as the anti-tobacco campaign. We must get that message across. This is a report which has a life and must live, whoever wins this election.

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