Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the report of the Australian Crime Commission Committee inquiry into amphetamines and other serious drugs. This is a growing issue that carries with it the most serious implications. Recently, we have heard many reports about the increasing social cost of the use of methamphetamines. I am sure that I will not be alone in saying that, while I was aware of the ecstasy problem prior to taking part in this inquiry, the sheer number of other illicit drugs that come under the umbrella of amphetamines amazed me. Frankly, their growing popularity is of huge concern.

Users of these evil substances can easily become addicted to them. Victims can display symptoms of violent paranoia and seemingly superhuman strength and they can experience delusional attacks which manifest in horrible situations. People suffering in the grip of these drugs can present a serious hazard to those around them. In the most tragic cases, addicts can become locked in, suffering a permanently deluded state.

Too often, meth addicts become homeless. The effect of such outcomes on families is devastating and beyond description, but not impossible to imagine. Our police are not trained or equipped to deal with these unfortunate people. Our hospital emergency staff are certainly not equipped to deal with violent people in the grip of a full-blown psychosis. Padded isolation rooms and restraints are perhaps thought to be of another time. These drugs, if not dealt with properly, may require their reinstatement.

Throughout the course of the committee’s inquiry, I was appalled to hear of the statistics on the use of amphetamines. Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland said in one of the hearings:

Our estimation, our intelligence, is that there are somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 tablets of ecstasy being consumed per weekend across Australia ...

That is 100,000 pills popped each weekend. If that is not a wake-up call, then I do not know what is. This is a huge problem and we must all work together to find ways of combating this ever-increasing destructive behaviour.

The Department of Health and Ageing added these alarming statistics. One in eight people aged 20 to 29 had used ecstasy in the last 12 months. The 20 to 29 age group also had the highest proportion and number of persons ever using ecstasy compared with other age groups. In 2004 there were approximately 100,000 more recent ecstasy users than in 2001, just three years earlier. These statistics confirm that the surge in the use of amphetamines and other synthetic drugs has spiked in recent years and continues to increase.

I am aware that saying ‘AOSD drugs’ is akin to saying ‘ATM machines’ and ask for members’ indulgence in this. Of major concern to the committee and, as a result, the focus of this inquiry is the trend towards the consumption and production of AOSD-class drugs. Also, the role of organised criminal involvement in the availability and supply of these drugs is a serious consideration.

An issue that the committee found to be counterproductive in tackling the problem was the different terminologies used in describing this particular class of drugs. In light of this, let me take a moment to clarify some terminology. The term ‘amphetamines and other synthetic drugs’, AOSD, was derived from the Australian Crime Commission’s special intelligence report in 2003. While a number of submissions to the inquiry also included the descriptor ATS, or amphetamine type stimulants, AOSD appears to be the descriptor most commonly used internationally for these synthetic drugs.

To improve efficiency, the committee recommended that government departments and agencies standardise the terms used to describe amphetamines and other synthetic drugs, particularly for research and statistical purposes. Of course, it is very difficult for an inquiry such as ours to have direct contact with those most directly affected by these drugs—the users. The committee is particularly grateful to radio station Triple J for allowing the chair, Senator Ian Macdonald, to appear on its current affairs program Hack to discuss the inquiry.

The range of contributors to the radio program appeared to confirm the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia submission to the inquiry, which said:

AOSD users cut across all sectors of society and come from a variety of backgrounds. Users may range from well-educated professionals who, for example, use ecstasy and methamphetamine at dance parties, through to marginalised injecting drug users who inject methamphetamine and/or cocaine.

This evidence was primary for the committee’s findings that, contrary to the myth that users of AOSD type drugs are people at the edge of society, these drugs are becoming very much a mainstream issue and users come from all walks of life. However, it is the wide availability of AOSD that points to their high usage. While the majority of AOSD are imported, there have been many highly publicised seizures in recent times of precursor chemicals or clandestine laboratories—strong evidence that domestic production is on the increase. It appears that major technological breakthroughs, such as portable microlabs, are being exploited by organised crime groups in the manufacture of these drugs.

The committee has thus recommended that the ACC develop a nationally coordinated response to new and emerging communication technologies as used by organised crime networks to undertake serious criminal activities. Particularly worrying is that the evidence received by the inquiry pointed to AOSD becoming the drugs of choice for many young people. This is due in part to their increasing availability. International organised crime groups are moving away from the heroin market to AOSD, partly because AOSD are easier to produce and market than heroin.

To ensure that the committee is kept informed of the current trends, the committee recommended that provisions of the Law and Justice Legislation Amendment (Serious Drug Offences and Other Measures) Act 2005 be reviewed not later than December 2007 and, further, that the act be amended to provide for regular reviews of the effectiveness of the provisions in two-year intervals after the initial review.

Recent attempts at supply reduction of AOSD have been focused on restricting drug makers’ access to precursor chemicals. These precursors include such substances as pseudoephedrine, most commonly found in cold and flu medication. Other strategies to combat the rise of AOSD in Australia include demand reduction and harm minimisation. Many of the users who contributed to the Triple J submission commented that the use of so-called ‘scare campaigns’ was somewhat effective but more work was needed to educate young people about the industry and the people behind the production of these insidious drugs.

The committee recommended that public education and demand reduction campaigns for illicit drugs be factual and informative. The committee also recommended that such campaigns seek input from young people and take account of genuine user experiences of AOSD. While the committee found that the efforts of law enforcement agencies in reducing supply of AOSD need to be maintained and continued, more needs to be done to work towards balancing the current national approach to the broader problem of illicit drugs.

Supply reduction, harm minimisation and demand reduction need to be balanced and considered. These approaches are perhaps just as important as law enforcement and criminal prosecution when it comes to the growing problem of these drugs in our communities. Education is a primary part of this, especially in relation to harm minimisation. Our responsibility first and foremost as legislators is to ensure that young people are equipped with the tools and adequate knowledge with which to make responsible choices regarding the use of illicit substances.

I would like to place on record my appreciation to the witnesses who came before us. I cannot emphasise strongly enough the grave concerns not only of those who participated in the hearings. It is widely acknowledged within the community that this is an area that all members of the community, including our government and those in this chamber, have a responsibility to redress.

Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate that senators want to speak to other things, so I will try to be brief. I often talk in this chamber with concern about the slowness of government responses to committee reports. I was a member of the Joint Standing Committee on the Australian Crime Commission for only the very last period of this inquiry but I was able to review some submissions and certainly considered the draft report, and so I am happy to be part of what is the unanimous report of a cross-party committee.

As I said, I am often concerned about how slow the government is in responding to reports. I suppose in one sense I should therefore be pleased that the Assistant Minister for Health and Ageing, Mr Pyne, who has already dismissed this report, responded so quickly. It was almost in record time. I think that within about an hour of the report coming down he had already dismissed key recommendations. Whilst I would like things to be a bit quicker, maybe we could get it to be somewhere between one hour and one year. Maybe if the government took a couple of months after reading a report before they dismissed it that would be a little bit more acceptable, particularly on an issue as important as this and after the committee had done a lot of work. As I said, I joined the committee only relatively recently, so I do not put myself in that category, but I know that the committee members as a whole did a lot of work.

Obviously a lot of people from the community contributed to this. They came from across the community—from the law enforcement agencies, from the health sector, from the people are developing our policies, from drug users and those who are touched by the harm that drugs can cause. All of those people participated, and the committee thought long and hard about how to put this report together and worked together to get a unanimous, balanced and certainly not radical report. If it was left to individual members across the spectrum to put their views, I am sure they would have had much stronger emphases on particular areas. But for the assistant minister, Mr Pyne, to totally dismiss key recommendations from the report straightaway is an absolute tragedy and a real contempt not just for the Senate but for the people in the community who are trying to get a better solution on this.

The report had a range of balanced and reasonable recommendations about ways that we can be more effective. This is an area that costs a lot of money. As the minister himself said, we spend $1.3 billion. If we are spending $1.3 billion, don’t we want to look at how we can be a bit more effective at spending that money rather than just using it as a way of dressing up the minister as though he is some sort of little assistant general in a tin-pot war? This sort of reproach is just so irresponsible when you get a considered report and people are prepared to put all their prejudices and preconceptions to one side and look at the evidence. The evidence was quite clear. It found that some people are missing out on getting the treatment they need. The assistant health minister should be listening to this. He should be looking for ways to improve the health outcomes for people who need treatment. Some of them are missing out on treatment because of the fear they have of the criminal sanctions that might apply.

The committee gave the unanimous recommendation that the National Drug Strategy would be more effective if more resources and focus were put on harm reduction. That does not mean ‘Legalise everything and tell the police to lay off.’ It means ‘Change your priorities and emphasis because if you put some more in this area we reckon it could have a better effect; we reckon it could help people.’ What is so terrible about that? We had Assistant Minister Pyne straight away saying:

... now is not the time to be showing weakness in the face of the war on drugs ... Now is not the time to be wavering in the war on drugs by embracing harm minimisation over a tough-on-drugs approach.

Please! How pathetic can you get? That might have been a nice two-second radio grab, but we are talking about people’s lives here. We are talking about how to make taxpayers’ money more effective. Why give such jingoistic responses to what was quite a moderate recommendation about changing the emphasis a little bit, and why immediately wave the flag of being tough in the war on drugs?

It is bad enough that the Prime Minister is completely ignoring reality with the war in Iraq and continuing down the same path, completely blind to whether or not things are getting worse, deciding to tough it out and stay the course. When you are a policy maker or politician, you have to continue to assess the evidence. If the evidence shows that what you are doing is not working then, even though you might think you are being tough and determined to stay the course in your so-called war, frankly, you are just being an idiot if you are ignoring the evidence purely for the sake of maintaining a rhetorical purity or whatever you think might score you the best political points in the short term.

Frankly, I do not think the public across the spectrum are on the whole particularly interested in that rhetoric. They are not interested in the ‘legalise it’ versus the ‘tough on drugs, zero tolerance, heavy-handed law enforcement’ debate. For most people, this is not about using the drugs issue as a way to reinforce their own morality, political ideology or vote-winning strategies; they just want to see policies that will work. This was an inquiry that listened to the people who are involved. I imagine most of us here are not partakers of amphetamines or other synthetic drugs and most of us have probably never been, I suspect.

Government Senator:

A government senator interjecting—

Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Quite possibly. So how about we listen to some of the people who are involved, who want to look at what strategies might work to encourage them and to convince them they would be a lot better off—and the community would be a lot better off—if they did not consume so many of those drugs and, when they do, to do so in a safer way. How about we just look at the evidence? I am very disappointed. I hope that, once the minister has got past his chance to have the quick radio response, he sits down and reads the evidence. I hope he talks to some of his own colleagues on that committee—Senator Macdonald or some of his House of Representatives colleagues, some of whom have experience in the police service in this area. He should talk to them away from the TV cameras and the headlines, and perhaps he could look at what might work and take a more reasonable response.

Question agreed to.