Professor David Nutt recently delivered an interesting lecture at Oxford University which highlights the distortion and bias in media reports about drugs. This is an issue close to home.
Watch the lecture here.
David Nutt DM, FRCP, FRCPsych, FMedSci is Chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, a Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology and Head of the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Molecular Imaging at Imperial College London.
January 27, 2012
Sir Richard Branson has made the observation that the ‘war on drugs’ has been a very costly failure. The Sydney Morning Herald has the story as well as audio commentary by Dr Marianne Jauncey from The Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC).
The online polling shows overwhelming support for the decriminalisation of drugs.
January 26, 2012
UPDATE: This debate can now be heard online: LISTEN HERE
The post debate results are as follows:
|
Pre-debate poll |
Post-debate poll |
| For: |
46.8% |
69% |
| Undecided: |
32.3% |
8% |
| Against: |
20.9%
| 23%
|
ADLRF President Dr Alex Wodak will be speaking
for the affirmative in a Sydney debate put on by
IQ2 (St James Ethics Centre: Intelligence Squared)
Topic for discussion:
“All drugs should be legalised”
Tuesday 10 May 2011; 1845 – 2030 hrs;
at the City Recital Hall in Angel Place, Sydney City
Speakers FOR are:
Nicholas Cowdery QC, Wendy Harmer and Dr Alex Wodak AM;
Speakers AGAINST are:
Jade Lewis, Dr Greg Pike and Paul Sheehan;
…with ample opportunity for questions and comments from the audience.
Tickets $32/$22, details on www.iq2oz.com.
It looks like being an important and entertaining evening.
The ADLRF hopes very much to see you there.
April 21, 2011
A success rate of 1%. In what area of public life would we accept that? Last year, Professor Neil McKeganey of the University of Glasgow, one of the most respected academics in Britain, established that the authorities seize just 1% of the heroin that enters Scotland in any one year. He sees no reason to think this would be any different for the nation as a whole.
Where were the headlines? Surely the press, obsessed by crime and drug-fuelled violence, would have it splashed across the front page. Not a peep. Why not?
(Article continues, click heading to access)
Continue November 18, 2010
This article originally appeared in The Australian on 9 November 2010. It can be viewed in its original context here.
NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nick Cowdery QC has released his own legislative agenda.
It includes legalising drugs and abandoning the war on terror.
Mr Cowdery would also free more people on bail, enact a charter of rights and give judges more discretion over sentencing by abolishing standard non-parole periods.
The DPP’s policy “wish list”, which clashes with the government’s approach on key issues, was unveiled at a weekend conference hosted by the Rule of Law Institute. His criticism follows a series of clashes between the DPP and Attorney-General John Hatzistergos over management and resourcing of the Office of the DPP.
Mr Hatzistergos was last night considering Mr Cowdery’s remarks.
Mr Cowdery said the current approach to illicit drugs was “ineffective, wasteful and inconsiderate of the human rights of those concerned”.
“I would decriminalise drug possession and use and small-scale trafficking,” he said.
Mr Cowdery believes the only area of drug use that should remain a crime should be large-scale commercial enterprises.
On terrorism, Mr Cowdery said he would stop waging a war on what he described as “abstract nouns such as terror or even terrorism”. Instead, he would rely on traditional laws to deal with terrorism crimes.
He would divert resources into addressing the “underlying social and political conditions that give rise to threats of terrorism, rather than into combative means of addressing the symptoms”.
Mr Cowdery, who retires in March, criticised the effectiveness of the state government’s changes to the criminal justice system and accused it of being too responsive to what he described as the “ranting” of the tabloid media.
“Much of this legislation, at least so far as the criminal law is concerned, has been to tinker at the margins of substance and procedure in an ad hoc fashion,” he said.
Author: Chris Merritt
November 18, 2010
The NSW Government will remove the “trial status” of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre and formalise the facility.
As a trial, it has been subject to extensive evaluations and over the last nine years, it has been the subject of a number of independent evaluations, including by BOCSAR, KPMG, UNSW and SAHA International.
To read the media release, click here.
October 7, 2010
This article was originally published in The Age on June 17, 2010. It was written by Hal Sperling & Dr Alex Wodak (President, ADLRF) (click to access)
It isn’t smart to hold election auctions on tougher penalties.
IN THE run-up to the next state election, Victoria has started a law-and-order auction. Until now, unlike New South Wales, Victoria has avoided such things.
Law and order has been an election issue since the 1980s in NSW, yet for the 2008-09 financial year, the state had an imprisonment rate of 184.8 per 100,000 adults, nearly double that of Victoria at 103.6 per 100,000.
Crime rates are lower in Victoria across nearly all categories. And, worldwide, there is no clear positive relationship between the severity of prison sentences and the crime rate.
The law-and-order auction assumes that people want tougher sentences. Some do. For victims of crime and their families, no sentence is heavy enough. They want revenge. That is understandable, but it is not an objective response.
Retribution is a different sentiment. It is a response to wrongdoing shared by the community at large. It explains why people used to take their children and a picnic lunch to public hangings.
We have gone past that now, but retribution is still there. It is the chord that politicians strike when they call for tougher penalties.
It cannot be assumed, however, that retribution is now the prevailing attitude in the community. Recent studies in Britain indicate that a lot of people are more interested in offenders making recompense than in punishment for the sake of punishment. That would suggest that the community would be just as satisfied – perhaps more satisfied – with visible and useful community service as the penalty for much of the crime that currently attracts a prison sentence.
Retribution and making recompense are emotional responses. There is another side to the coin – commonsense.
Locking up prisoners is expensive, costing more than $70,000 per inmate per year. If Victoria had the incarceration rate of NSW, the cost of its penal system would be increased by close to half a billion dollars every year.
The state would have to raise taxes, borrow, or cut health and education or other services. Is this what Victorians really want?
A lot of people have to be locked up to reduce the crime rate even slightly – and benefits are only short term. In the long term, prison may have a negative effect by actually increasing crime. About half the prisoners released from jail are back again within two years. As Douglas Hurd, a retired senior British conservative politician, said in the 1990s, ”Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.”
If we wanted to be smart about crime, rather than just tough on crime, we would take a very different approach.
First, we would invest a lot more resources on early intervention with problem families. ”Early intervention” refers to regular home visits by specially trained healthcare workers to infants born to high-risk families.
Remarkably impressive benefits have been reported from modest interventions. There is evidence of improved attendance at school, reduced alcohol and drug use in teenagers and young adults, and reduced crime. But early intervention is not readily available in Australia.
Second, we should increase funding for community mental health and alcohol and drug treatment programs that are based on evidence. For every 100 heroin users on methadone treatment for a year in NSW, a study conducted by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research showed that there were 12 fewer robberies, 57 fewer break and enters and 56 fewer motor vehicle thefts.
The global financial crisis is going to force governments to make some savage cuts. Better to cut expensive and low-impact services, such as prisons, than inexpensive and high-impact services, such as early intervention with problem families and evidence-based community services.
Most judges and magistrates hate having to send the less serious offenders to prison. But they are forced to do so because there are so few options in the community. We should be debating the role of imprisonment for these groups. A distinction is to be made in relation to offenders who have committed seriously violent crimes. No one would doubt that heavy sentences are required in such cases. But they represent a minority of offenders.
The United States locks up four times as many people per capita as NSW – that is why the US accounts for 25 per cent of the world’s prison inmates despite having 5 per cent of the world’s population. And, despite this, the US has much higher crime rates than Australia. With an incarceration rate of 754 per 100,000 resident population, a debate about the size of the prison population has at last begun in that country. Let’s hope our prison population does not have to get to that size before we start thinking about other options.
Australia began as a British penal colony in the 18th century, when Britain considered that prisons might be a way of solving its then severe social problems. Of all people, Australians should not make the same mistake.
Hal Sperling is a retired NSW Supreme Court judge and convener of the Crime and Justice Reform Committee. Dr Alex Wodak is director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
September 13, 2010
This story originally appeared in SX News on 18 June 2010, and was written by Brendan Bolger (click to access).
Several key LGBT community figures have become members of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s birthday honours list.
Two pioneers in HIV transmission prevention, a champion squash player who came out at 14 and a former Jesuit priest who could no longer live “a lie” have become members of the Order of Australia in the annual Queen’s birthday honours list.
Dr Alex Wodak from the St Vincent’s Hospital Alcohol and Drug Service was recognised for “service to medicine and public health”, most notably through his work in raising the profile of HIV transmission among injecting drug users.
He said he was “delighted” to receive the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) but “also conscious as anyone in public health … all my work is a member of another team”.
“The crux of the problem is the drug laws. It’s the drug laws that forced me to break the law to try and protect the health of all Australians,” he told SX.
Wodak began issuing syringes to injecting drug users when it was becoming evident there were large numbers of people at risk of HIV infection in the inner city, which until a needle exchange program was approved by the government was still illegal
His groundbreaking work has ensured that HIV infection through shared syringes remains very low in Australia when compared to other “rich” countries.
Kirketon Road Centre director Ingrid Van Beek was honoured for her service to “public health and community medicine through the promotion and provision of primary care for people affected by mental health issues, substance and physical abuse, and HIV/AIDS”.
Former Jesuit priest Phil Grano who became depressed about “living a lie” by hiding his sexuality but then leaving the priesthood was honoured for his work with people with disabilities and the law.
And former coordinator of Gsquash and Squash Manager of the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney, Carin Clonda, was honoured for her “service to the sport of Squash through administrative roles and to the community”.
September 13, 2010
BY HIS own admission, Alex Wodak’s stellar career has been little more than a series of accidents, most serendipitous.
But now 64 and being appointed a member of the Order of Australia for services to medicine and public health, he clearly remembers the day it almost slipped through his fingers.
”The 12th of November, 1986,” he says.
Wodak had been the director of drug and alcohol services at St Vincent’s Hospital, in Darlinghurst, for four years. The AIDS epidemic had cut a swath through Sydney, making its presence felt in the streets around the hospital where thousands of young gay men and injecting drug users lived.
(Continues)
Continue September 13, 2010
This article was originally published by The Guardian on 28 May, 2010 (click here for original context).
Mephedrone was banned on the basis of limited evidence and media hysteria. We need a new approach to drug classification, writes David Nutt.
On 17 March I was giving a lecture in Barcelona when I received a call from CNN. They wanted my reactions to the international press conference that the Lincolnshire police were holding on the deaths of two young men that they claimed had taken mephedrone (the new synthetic drug also known as “meow meow” or “M-cat”). At that point I realised that all sense had left the ongoing debate on the question of the harms and control of this drug.
Why were the police holding a press conference when they had no idea if the men had taken any drugs? Why implicate mephedrone when the only established facts were that deaths occurred in the context of a heavy alcohol binge that went on into the early hours of the morning? As a stimulant, mephedrone is likely to reduce not increase the risk of alcohol-related respiratory depression (suppression of breathing). There was little evidence at the time of serious harms from mephedrone use, despite it having become almost as widely used as MDMA (ecstasy). Moreover, the earlier epidemic overdose use in Israel had not revealed significant harms and few if any mortalities.
The “media madness” that followed the Scunthorpe event probably tipped the balance in the decision to ban mephedrone which was enacted by a depleted ACMD in an intemperate and rushed manner, and which lead to the resignation of several more members and a coruscating editorial in the Lancet.
It has been revealed today that my suspicions were correct – there was no evidence that either of the two had taken mephedrone. It appears they took some other sedative drug – probably methadone – which is highly dangerous in combination with high levels of alcohol.
It is probably too late now to reverse the government decision to make mephedrone Class B but we do need to learn the lessons from the debacle of its being banned on limited evidence and media hysteria. The first lesson is that the police and other public bodies should not make pronouncements and certainly not hold press conferences on mere conjecture or hearsay; the public interest is not served by inciting media attention in this way. In addition the media should apply some traditional journalistic principles such as evidence collecting and testing and allow the scientific process to take place before claiming harms of drugs, especially new legal highs.
There are lessons for government and their advisers too. They should have the courage to resist media hysteria and let the truth drive decision-making. Moreover there should be proper research investment in the science of new drugs. Quite frankly, it is an insult to the country that the ACMD report on mephedrone didn’t have some basic pharmacological facts about the drug, even though it had been under review since last summer and the data could have been obtained within a few days or weeks at little expense.
What we now require is a guaranteed minimum set of core pharmacological and behavioural data to be acquired for any new drug that is being considered for classification and control in the UK, before a decision to ban it is made. The new Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) is currently developing a set of guidelines for this that we hope the government will endorse.
The whole mephedrone debacle illustrates what has been known for many years – there is a real need for a new approach to the drug laws. The 1971 MD Act is 40 years old, and in its current classification system is fatally flawed and not fit for purpose. In this new world where drugs may be invented one day and sold over the internet the next, there needs to be a fundamental revision or better still a completely new approach to drug classification.
Finally there is a personal lesson from the Scunthorpe deaths to young people who drink and take drugs. Alcohol itself is very toxic (killing by acute poisoning, hundreds of young people each year through respiratory failure) and these actions are magnified when in combination with other drugs that suppress breathing such as opiates (heroin, morphine, methadone) and GHB/GBL. If in doubt, don’t drink and drug.
September 13, 2010
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Ban Ki-Moon
In addition to criminalizing HIV transmission, many countries impose criminal sanctions for same-sex sex, commercial sex and drug injection. Such laws constitute major barriers to reaching key populations with HIV services. Those behaviours should be decriminalized, and people addicted to drugs should receive health services for the treatment of their addiction’.
For example, in Eastern Europe, people who inject drugs represent more than 80 per cent of all people living with HIV but account for less than 25 per cent of those receiving antiretroviral treatment.
Progress made in the implementation of the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS and the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS
Report of the Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
7 May 2009
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