OVERVIEW

Victorians are justifiably concerned about widespread misuse of drugs in our community. Experimentation among young people is widespread. Use of drugs such as cannabis and amphetamines is high by international standards, despite prohibitionist laws and a strong commitment to law enforcement.
Concerns have become apparent about increasing adolescent initiation into heroin, and the proliferation of intravenous administration of amphetamines and the use of derivatives of this group such as Ecstasy. Use of multiple drugs is common as the same criminal source may offer a variety of drugs. There has been an increase in the number of deaths directly attributable to
illicit drug overdose in the past three years. These are all reasons for re-evaluation of policies and programs.
The Council was charged by the Premier with undertaking an intensive public investigation into illicit drugs and advising on how Victoria should tackle the problem. Some of the eight Council members had wide familiarity with the field, while others brought different experience and skills. Together we have examined the considerable body of evidence currently available in Australia and overseas, have consulted widely in the Victorian community, reviewed over three hundred written submissions, and have taken initiatives to explore issues with special groups and authorities.
The Council is conscious of many firmly held and divergent views on particular issues about illicit drugs in our society. We are also fully aware that no simple solution will solve what are, by their nature, long-standing and intractable problems. The issues must be tackled as a whole, as the many facets are interrelated. There are no easy answers.
The Council has come to a common view that changes are necessary to policies, legislation and services if we are to effectively contain the problems, and have the capacity, in time, to reduce the harm being caused to our community by drugs. If society is unwilling to consider change, many more individuals and families will be adversely affected in the future.
We appeal to the community to consider all our recommendations, covering a wide range of interrelated issues. We hope that agreement will be gained to the adoption of a significantly fresh approach. The recommendations put forward are the unanimous view of the Council, and were dictated by consideration of the large body of information and carefully considered views that we had before us.
MARCH 1 9 9 6    iii

HARM CAUSED BY ILLICIT DRUGS
The damage done by illicit drugs is widespread. It includes:
•    Lives that are controlled by drug dependency.
•    Many deaths due to drug overdose.
-    Disruption of families by bereavement or grief due to a family member's dependence on illicit drugs.
-    Family tensions created for loving parents by demands for money or the consequences, in many cases, of commitment of drug dependent people to lives of crime or prostitution.
•    Effects on the wider community of crimes of theft, burglary, and instances of violence.
•    Ever-present danger of corruption in our society because of the huge sums of money involved in the drug trade.
•    Spreading of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and hepatitis B and C in the community by intravenous drug administration under unsafe conditions. Rates of hepatitis C among injecting drug users are very high. This is in spite of the implementation of needle exchange programs in Australia which have contained the spread of HIV/AIDS more successfully than almost any other country.
•    The economic costs to society of law enforcement and imprisonment.
While the number of deaths attributable to alcohol or tobacco in any year is far greater than those due to illicit drugs, the problems of illicit drugs are feared and clouded, in many people's minds, by moral
considerations. Many Victorians find it difficult to consider pragmatic approaches to measures designed to reduce the harm being caused. However, the Government's and Council's over-riding
concern must be to reduce the harm drugs cause to people, to families and to our community.
Victoria and Australia have led most of the world in enlightened responses to the problems of abuse of alcohol and tobacco, but our approach to the illicit drugs has lagged in terms of innovation. Until the 1970s, public drunkenness was seen as a major community problem, but with the introduction of widespread school and public education, and changes in policing, major advances have been made. Public advertising and roadside testing for alcohol has achieved major improvement in the number of road deaths related to alcohol.
In contrast, the widespread use of marijuana, because it is illicit, has not been subject to any education programs to help people to distinguish use from misuse. Twelve per cent of all Victorians
have used marijuana in the past year and the proportion is much higher among young people. Community concerns about the risks associated with driving under the influence of marijuana (and other drugs) supports development of education and law enforcement programs similar to drink driving campaigns and programs.
Deaths attributable to drug overdose now approach, in number, the deaths due to traffic accidents.

WILL PROHIBITION ON ITS OWN SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS?
The use of agents that alter mood has a long history in human society. Records or evidence of use of the opium poppy, of marijuana and of alcohol go back over thousands of years. Concern over international trafficking in narcotics, (particularly those derived from opium, cocaine and cannabis) has resulted in the adoption of successive international treaties, the first of which was in the early years of this century. These were subsumed by the United Nations in 1949. Subsequent treaties have bound signatories to ensure that trafficking, possession, and use of stipulated drugs is treated as a criminal offence.
Australia has ratified acceptance of these treaties in 1953, 1967 and again in 1993. State by State, legislation has been enacted at various stages, although some differences have emerged over the past eight years, particularly in respect of marijuana. Italy and Spain have moved away from criminal
sanctions for the use of all drugs in recent years. The Netherlands has not changed its laws, but it imposes no penalty for use or sale of marijuana.
The international community has attempted to curb production and trafficking in cocaine and opium (from which heroin is derived). However, evidence provided by United Nations agencies indicates that production of these drugs continues to increase and that it represents a major portion of the
economies of a number of South East Asian and South American countries. Producers continue to search for new outlets through thriving international criminal networks that control a black market.
Contemporary Australian assessments indicate that law enforcement agencies, despite rigorous efforts, are having only a relatively small impact on the availability of drugs.

THE ECONOMICS OF TRADE IN ILLICIT DRUGS
Estimates of global annual turnover in the illicit drug industry are of the order of $US400 to 500 billion and approach 10 per cent of the total value of international trade! A report of the Parliamentary Joint
Committee on the National Crime Authority in 1988 estimated the annual turnover in Australia for heroin, cocaine and cannabis alone to be $2.6 billion. Despite their illicit status and vigorous efforts at law enforcement, drug seizures are simply responded to by the black market with replacement supplies and/or rising prices.
The cost to our economy of illicit drugs in Australia is estimated to be of the order of 0.5 per cent of GDP. In the USA, it has been estimated that the average economic cost to the community of a dependent heroin user was $US43,000 per year. Incarceration costs $45,000 per year; by comparison,
residential care in a treatment facility costs $16,500 per year, and methadone maintenance in the community $3,500 per year. The costs in Victoria are similar in Australian dollars.

LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVES
With goods and money moving more readily around the world every year as trade increases, there is no possibility that interdiction of supply will solve drug problems in our community. The Parliamentary joint committee cited above concluded:
Over the past two decades in Australia we have devoted increased resources to drug law enforcement, we have increased the penalties for drug trafficking and we have accepted increasing inroads on our civil liberties as part of the battle to curb the drug trade. All the evidence shows, however, not only that our law enforcement agencies have not succeeded in preventing the supply of illicit drugs to Australian markets, but that it is unrealistic to expect them to do so. If the present policy of prohibition is not working then it is time to give serious consideration to the alternatives, however radical they may seem.'
Mr George Schultz, former Secretary of State in the USA, said in 1990, that the 'war against drugs', as then conceived, was doomed to fail and that '... we need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalisation of drugs' ( The Wall Street Journal, October 27).
In an address to the recent international drug-related harm reduction conference, the Secretary General of Interpol, Mr Ray Kendall, said he was 'entirely supportive of the notion of removing the abuse of drugs from the penal realm in favour of other forms of regulation such as psycho - medical - social treatment'. He went on to state that 'the dollar you spend on demand reduction is seven times more cost effective than the dollar you spend on law enforcement'.
The General Accounting Office of the United States Government, in 1993, released a review entitled Confronting the Drug Problem: Debate Persists on Enforcement and Alternative Approaches. The study canvassed a wide range of possible approaches, including the establishment of a regulated market for marijuana, while continuing prohibition for other, more addictive, illicit drugs.
In 1994, a Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health publication set out five legislative options for cannabis in Australia that ranged through the system of fines currently applicable in South Australia and the ACT, and decriminalisation of varying degrees, to regulated supply and free markets. Many are searching for solutions, few have been willing to adopt them.
Cannabis products are readily available in the community to those who choose to use them. The estimated turnover of this trade in Australia was $1.9 billion in 1988. Victoria probably contributes between twenty to twenty five per cent of this figure.
Decriminalisation of cannabis cultivation for personal use, within the context of the home environment where a family chooses such a course, would diminish the link with other more damaging and addictive illicit drugs. However, any such change must be made in conjunction with the provision of appropriate education and public advice on the dangers of abuse of the drug, and appropriate penalties for dangerous use.

THE WAY AHEAD
The Council is not of the view that we should lessen efforts to control trafficking, but rather that we should look afresh at strategies that might curb demand and reduce the harm caused in society by the use of illicit drugs. These entail:
•    Mobilisation of virtually every sector of our community to gain a better understanding of the nature of the problems, and to improve collaboration at the local level between all involved in tackling the problem.
•    Development of school based education programs about the misuse of licit and illicit drugs so that young people are encouraged to keep control of their own destinies and to protect their minds and bodies.
•    Better understanding of the issues by parents so they can discuss them constructively with their children, while recognising that many young people may be subject to peer pressure to experiment with 'exciting' or 'dangerous' practices.
-    New approaches in the country as a whole, and at the level of each local community to help young people who have never found employment, who see no long-term future for themselves as constructive contributors to society, and who are particularly vulnerable to the seductive 'excitement' associated with drugs.
•    Further development of the services that are available to support people with drug dependency, particularly those that offer the possibility of removal from a life of frequent crime and unsafe intravenous drug administration and treatment that offers the possibility of escaping completely from dependency on drugs.
•    Improvement in services for young people who have begun on the path to drug dependency, but for whom there is a real possibility of rehabilitation with appropriate support. To this end, Council proposes the establishment of a Youth Substance Abuse Service to support the important contribution of youth workers already in the community.
•    Development of research and evaluation capabilities so that services for the care and rehabilitation of drug-dependent people are based on dispassionate assessment of their effectiveness. This should be achieved through establishing an Agency for Drug Dependency based on development of existing services and offering support to the many valuable voluntary sector agencies which provide support in this field.
-    Improvement in the quality of advice to the courts and enhanced capacity to ensure treatment required by the courts is delivered by a competent organisation and with appropriate supervision. This would not diminish the obligations on the courts to deal with criminal offences on their merits.
•    Acknowledging the achievements of the Victorian methadone program, which is recognised nationally and internationally to be effective. The program should be researched more fully and the means explored by which it can be improved.
-    Development of proposals to trial new drugs that may offer other options in treatment, additional to methadone, in support of those with dependency and in the course of rehabilitation from dependency. This should not diminish the importance of the role of programs using non pharmacological means of rehabilitation.
•    Elimination, as an offence, of personal possession and use of marijuana. This would enable police and court resources to be redirected to more effective community policing and law enforcement against drug trafficking across the range of illicit drugs, including other more potent cannabis products.
•    Growing of up to five plants per household for personal use would also no longer be an offence. This should apply to a normal residence, but should not apply to schools, colleges or public institutions.
-    Trafficking in marijuana and trafficking, possession and use of the more potent cannabis products and other currently illicit drugs should remain as offences.
•    Regulation, by local authorities, of marijuana smoking in public places. Offensive behaviour, should it occur, would be dealt with by police under the current law.
•    Ensuring police are able to deal with dangerous driving under the influence of drugs, including marijuana. Both P- and L-plate drivers, if convicted of driving dangerously, recklessly or carelessly while impaired by marijuana, should be automatically disqualified for an extended period and required to participate in education programs. Protocols should be drawn up to assist in the policing of these provisions.
-    Research and development being funded to establish a test for short-lived metabolites of cannabis products in breath or in saliva. This would allow the introduction of roadside testing for cannabis in a manner comparable to alcohol breath testing.
•    Reviewing sentencing patterns and levels of penalties to ensure trafficking penalties are appropriate to the crime.
-    Recognising the achievements of practitioners, researchers and communities in the field of harm minimisation and related community development by the creation of an annual award.

CONCLUSIONS
The emphasis in this report is on reducing demand, encouraging treatment, support and rehabilitation where possible, and concentrating law enforcement resources to curb the supply of all illicit drugs in local communities and statewide. An appropriate balance between these aspects is essential if the harm being done to society is to be minimised, and the important achievements of the Victorian and National Drug Strategies of the past 10 years are to be built upon.
The recommendations for an escalating sequence of responses to possession and use of the remaining illicit drugs, commencing with a formal warning by police, are designed to foster education and the potential for rehabilitation rather than punishment. Our recommendations are closer to practice in Singapore and Sweden (where obligations to education, treatment and rehabilitation are handled outside the court system) than those in the USA. While there would be less rigorous supervision in our community in the first instance than in Singapore, for example, there would be sanctions for the courts to fall back on and more severe penalties if necessary.
Few people are currently committed to prison in Victoria for possession and use of illicit drugs alone, although many arrests and charges are brought before the courts on this basis. For the courts to be comfortable with the use of formal warnings by police and educational programs in the first instance, it will be necessary to expand facilities for treatment, supervision, counselling and rehabilitation in the community. Specialist assistance, monitoring, research and leadership will be provided through the new Agency for Drug Dependency.
The proposed changes to penalties largely reflect what is current practice with respect to sentencing in Victoria for possession and use of illicit drugs. However, they have the potential to make the processes for dealing with drug users far more effective, and reduce the court time devoted to these offences. The proposed review of sentencing by the courts for offences of trafficking in illicit drugs should assist all the courts to focus more directly on this critical aspect of the State's response to illicit drugs.
In view of the intersectoral and interdisciplinary nature of the problems associated with drugs of dependence (which involve activities associated with Health and Community Services, Education, Police, Corrections, the courts, many voluntary agencies and a number of the professions), it is recommended that an expert reference group, akin to the current Council, play a role in advising the Premier, through a unit within his Department, during a period in which the Council's recommendations are being implemented.
A number of further recommendations are contained in the body of the report. The fact that they are not included in this overview in no way diminishes their importance. Those selected above give the sense of direction of the recommendations to guide debate and assist the reader in understanding the considerable volume of information contained in the report.

David Penington A.C.
MARCH 1996