Drug Abuse

 

 

 

David

 

 

 

I write as the honorary Secretary for Drug Free Australia to give you some understanding of Dr Wodak’s stances and positions on drug policy here in Australia so that you might better understand his stated approaches in your e-mail traffic to and fro.

 

 

 

Australia’s Foremost Proponent of Drug Legalisation

 

Dr Wodak is in Drug Free Australia’s view the foremost proponent of drug legalisation here in Australia.  He has for many years been the President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation (for verification see http://www.adlrf.org.au/documents/3BillionDamage.pdf) which is the sister-linked organisation for the Australian Parliamentary Group for Drug Law Reform (see https://abuse-drug.com/lib/library/articles/rowe2.html).

 

The above-mentioned Parliamentary Group wishes to:

 

“seek to establish policies and laws that will control production, manufacture and distribution of drugs of dependence and psychotropic substances.” (http://druglawreform.org.au/DrugLore/epilogue.htm)

 

Government Control of Availability of Illicit Drugs

 

Dr Wodak has long advocated the Government control of availability of all illicit drugs.  The latest of Dr Wodak’s national media releases is as below:

 

(http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/cut-cannabis-use-by-selling-it-at-post-office-expert/2008/05/05/1209839608171.html ):

 

Cut cannabis use by selling it at the post office: expert

 

Erik Jensen | May 6, 2008 - 10:00AM

 

CANNABIS would be sold legally in post offices in packets that warn against its effects under a proposal outlined by the head of a Sydney drug and alcohol clinic.

 

The director of the alcohol and drug service at St Vincent's Hospital, Alex Wodak, said Australia needed to learn from the tobacco industry and the US Prohibition era in coming to terms with his belief that cannabis use would replace cigarette consumption over the next decade. "The general principal is that it's not sustainable that we continue to give criminals and corrupt police a monopoly to sell a drug that is soon going to be consumed by more people than tobacco," he said.

 

Harm Reduction a Phase Before Legalisation

 

As the person responsible for introducing Harm Reduction to Australia in 1985, Dr Wodak has worked tirelessly towards drug legalisation goals.  In his own words harm reduction is the first achievement that must be followed by legalisation, as per his presentation to the 15th International Conference on Drug Related Harm (see ppt attached).  He said:

 

 

 

“In many countries it is time to move from the first phase of harm reduction – focusing on reducing adverse consequences – to a second phase which concentrates on reforming an ineffective and harm-generating system of global drug prohibition.”

 

Agreement With Soros’ View on Drug Legalisation

 

Dr Wodak has some level of agreement with billionaire financier, George Soros (The Soros Open Society contributed substantially to the costs of the Beyond 2008 NGO Forum in Vienna, July 7-9, 2008) whose view is that:

 

“. . . what I would do if it were up to me.  I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available.  Initially I would keep prices low enough to destroy the drug trade.  Once that objective was attained, I would keep raising the prices, very much like the duty excise on cigarettes, but I would make an exception for registered addicts in order to discourage crime.  I would use a portion of the income for prevention and treatment.  And I would foster social opprobrium of drug use.” (Soros on Soros, p 200; Wiley NY 1995)

 

Soros has publicly documented a strategy to overwhelm the United Nations’ Drug Conventions in 2009 (see http://www.soros.org/initiatives/health/focus/ihrd/articles_publications/publications/cnd_20040316 ).

 

Out of Step with Australian Attitudes to Legalisation

 

Dr Wodak is almost entirely at odds with the vast majority of the Australian public who do NOT want drugs legalised in this country.  In Australia’s 2007 Illicit Drug Strategy Household Survey (http://www.aihw.gov.au/publications/index.cfm/title/10579 ) the percentages of Australians AGAINST drug legalisation were as follows:

 

Cocaine                                    95% Against Legalisation

 

Ecstasy                                    94% Against Legalisation

 

Heroin                                       95% Against Legalisation

 

Marijuana/Cannabis                   79% Against Legalisation

 

Meth/amphetamine                    95% Against Legalisation

 

Latest Australian Parliamentary Drug Inquiries Advocate Abstinent Outcomes

 

The last two Australian Parliamentary inquiries (Road to Recovery (2003), The Winnable War on Drugs (2007)) advocated against an acceptance of illicit drug use in Australia, rather advocating for abstinent outcomes.  Dr Wodak, David, has a far greater tolerance of illicit drug use in Australian society than what these inquiries advocate.  Both inquiries were critical of Australian harm reduction programs that failed to seek abstinent outcomes.  (see www.aph.gov.au/HOUSE/committee/fca/subabuse/report/fullreport.pdf and http://www.aph.gov.au/House/committee/fhs/illicitdrugs/report.htm ).

 

Drug Free Australia accepts harm reduction programs only insofar as they are made a pathway to an eventual abstinent outcome and insofar as they are not used as a pathway to illicit drug legalisation.

 

 

 

Regards

 

 

 

Gary Christian

Secretary

Drug Free Australia

PO Box 497

Elizabeth  SA  5112

Phone:  (08) 8287 6815

 

Caution: This message may contain both confidential and privileged information intended only for the addressee named above.  If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or reproduction of this message is prohibited.  If you have received this message in error please notify the sender immediately, then destroy the original message.  Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states they are the views of Drug Free Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

From: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it [mailto: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]

Sent: Wednesday, 25 March 2009 4:05 AM

Cc: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Subject: Re: The war on drugs: a devastating public-policy disaster

 

 

 

Here is my paper.

 

 

 

 

 

In a message dated 3/24/2009 3:20:47 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it writes:

 

 

 

Dear David,

 

 

 

The Lancet is one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.

 

 

 

I have attached an editorial from a recent issue.

 

 

 

Evan Wood, Daniel Werb, Brandon D L Marshall, Julio S G Montaner, Thomas Kerr.

 

 

 

The war on drugs: a devastating public-policy disaster. Lancet: 2009; 373; 989-990.

 

 

 

The authors are outstanding and highly respected researchers from Vancouver, Canada.

 

 

 

The conclusion of this excellent piece is:

 

 

 

'Clearly, the preponderance of evidence shows

that the UN drug-control framework has not only

been ineffective but has resulted in a range of

severe unintended harms. If the UN system fails to

acknowledge this reality and open up to more evidence

 

based approaches during its upcoming review process,

it will tarnish the reputation of the entire UN system. It

will also help perpetuate the needless human suffering

and enormous social costs that have emerged under

the existing global drug-control regime'.

 

 

 

I appreciate that this editorial may disappoint you.

 

 

 

Increasing numbers of people around the world support the sentiments of this Lancet editorial while support for the unrealistic drug free approach is shrinking rapidly.

 

 

 

best wishes,

 

 

 

Dr Alex Wodak,

 

St. Vincent's Hospital,

 

Sydney, Australia

 

 

 

Dr. Alex Wodak,

Director, Alcohol and Drug Service,

St. Vincent's Hospital,

Darlinghurst, NSW, 2010,

AUSTRALIA

 

Telephone: (61+02) 9361 8012

If no prompt answer, try 9361 8014

Facsimile: (61+02) 8382 4738

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skype: alex.wodak

 

 

 

>>> 9/03/2009 6:17 am >>>

 

Dear Alex

 

 

 

Thank you for your e-mail. I am sure you will get over your disappointment in us. It would be best for you if you made no further emotional investments in us. We are sure to only disappoint you.

 

 

 

Your argument is: "everyone disagrees with you and therefore you must be wrong and you need to apologize." Sorry, but that is just not persuasive. Not everyone disagrees with us. Attached is the Declaration of the World Forum Against Drugs. Many individuals and organizations around the World have signed on to it. We are not alone.

 

 

 

Drug free schools and a drug free world are goals. Yes, we have substantially reduced drug use in thousands of schools including the two schools that my children went to and at a reasonable cost. I have seen it with my own eyes. It got my kids through and that is all that matters. Here is our information kit on student drug testing. It worked for us.

 

 

 

I normally do not get involved in these e-mail wars and I will not respond further. I had a little extra time today and thought I would say hello. Come and visit New Jersey and I will show you our schools and how they do drug testing. We also have great pizza here (there are lots of Italians in New Jersey). We call pizza "tomato pies" here.

 

 

 

As we say in New Jersey "have a good one."

 

 

 

Dave Evans

 

 

 

In a message dated 3/7/2009 6:39:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it writes:

 

 

 

Dear David,

 

 

 

It is disappointing that the Drug Free Schools Coalition does not want to support the UN systems approach to drug policy, but rather to undermine it.

 

 

 

On 4th March 2009, Executive Director of the UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa called for support for "opiate substitute therapies (OST), needle-exchange and other scientifically proven harm reduction measures to be made available worldwide" and that this should be "explicitly stated in the Political Declaration" to be published next week. Following communication from the new US Administration, Dr Costa has called upon all countries to sign up to the evidence based harm reduction strategies that are known to save lives. He says that it is "negligent to follow a strategy which has allowed the death of thousands of people and which continues to unnecessarily expose millions to HIV and AIDS when science has provided simple solutions to significantly reduce the number of new infections".

 

 

 

I hope that you and your colleagues will be magnanimous enough to admit that you got harm reduction wrong and start supporting the UN system soon.

 

 

 

It is also disappointing that the Drug Free Schools Coalition now does not even support US government policy. I am sure you know that on 12 February in Vienna U.S. Charg? Geoffrey Pyatt made the following Statement (Wien. UNODC: Preparations for the High-level Segment of the 52nd CND - Consultations on the Political Declaration):

 

 

"... Most importantly, I want to make clear that the United States supports needle exchange programs as part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce the transmission of HIV/AIDS and other blood-borne diseases".

 

 

 

Please let me know if there is some part of that you do not understand.

 

 

 

I have also attached a recent commentary by the highly respected US academic Peter Reuter.

 

 

 

I am sure you will learn a lot reading that.

 

 

 

Reuter refers to the arrogance of the US lecturing the world and also emphasises the fact that the US is the largest consumer of illicit drugs.

 

 

 

There is a lot here for you to read.

 

 

 

But I would also be interested to hear more from you about your own work.

 

 

 

Since your organisation is called 'Drug Free Schools', exactly how many schools have you made 'drug free'?

 

 

 

How long did this take?

 

 

 

How much did it cost?

 

 

 

Were there any unintended negative consequences?

 

 

 

How did you prove that these schools were in fact 'drug free'?

 

 

 

Do you mean by 'drug free', that no one in the schools took any legal or illegal psychoactive drug (including alcohol, tobacco,  - responsible for over 95% of drug related deaths - and pain killers for period pains, tea, coffee)?

 

 

 

Don't you think it is better to have more realistic objectives?

 

 

 

I have also pasted a recent leader from the highly respected and very influential British weekly, The Economist, dated 5 March 2009..

 

 

 

best wishes,

 

Alex

 

 

 

Failed states and failed policies

How to stop the drug wars

 

Mar 5th 2009

From The Economist print edition

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

 

Illustration by Noma Bar

 

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commissionjust a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a 'drug-free world' and to 'eliminating or significantly reducing' the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

 

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

 

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

 

'Least bad' does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure

 

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has 'stabilised', meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world's adult population, still take illegal drugs - roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

 

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country-Guinea Bissau-was assassinated.

 

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

 

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West's efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale

 

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN's perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with 'blow'). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to 'crack' or 'meth' are outside the law, with only their pushers to treat them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters.. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a 'narco state' as their neighbour.

 

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and 'harm reduction' (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of soft drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

 

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

 

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

 

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

 

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state's job to stop them from doing so.

 

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

 

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts-a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?

 

This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

 

Dr. Alex Wodak,

Director, Alcohol and Drug Service,

St. Vincent's Hospital,

Darlinghurst, NSW, 2010,

AUSTRALIA

 

Telephone: (61+02) 9361 8012

If no prompt answer, try 9361 8014

Facsimile: (61+02) 8382 4738

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

>>> 7/03/2009 9:33 pm >>>

 

Dear Friends

 

 

 

Attached are the two position papers of the Drug Free Schools Coalition in opposition to needle exchange programs and to "medical" marijuana.

 

 

 

David G. Evans, Esq.

Executive Director

Crime and Justice Project

Drug Free Projects Coalition

Flemington, NJ USA

800-588-9903

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