Puff goes the drug liberaliser

[grace]

Author Miranda Devine

May 15, 2008

http://www.smh.com.au/news/miranda-devine/...0444525877.html

 

 

The photograph of Mercedes Corby apparently pulling on a pipe, which was put to her in court and appeared in newspapers all week courtesy of her defamation case against Channel Seven, must delight her sister Schapelle, locked up in a Bali jail until 2024 for cannabis importation.

 

Mercedes said she had only been "posing" in the picture and had not smoked marijuana since she was "young and silly" in her teens. But the image can't help Schapelle's pleas of innocence in Indonesia, where anti-drugs campaigners picketed her trial to demand the death penalty.

 

Diverting though the snapshots of Mercedes have been, they lead me to a confession: I made a mistake in last week's column about the drug liberaliser Dr Alex Wodak, for which I have been chided by numerous readers. It was not the Mercy nuns who founded St Vincent's Hospital and therefore are accountable for the irresponsible pronouncements of its head of drug and alcohol services, but the Sisters of Charity, who arrived in Sydney from Ireland in 1838 to minister to the poor and disadvantaged. Apologies to the Mercy nuns.

 

The question still needs to be asked of the Sisters of Charity: how do you solve a problem like Alex Wodak?

 

Wodak has been working for the nuns for 26 years, but his presidency of two prominent drug-liberalising organisations, the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and the International Harm Reduction Association, colours his motives. He appears unmoved by mounting evidence that cannabis is not a soft drug but among the most harmful, and that prohibition is the most certain way to reduce drug use, as Sweden demonstrates.

 

Hence his preposterous proposal to sell cannabis at post offices, made at the Mardi Grass festival in Nimbin. Wodak took offence at last week's column, firing off a letter to the editor, claiming legalising cannabis would not lead to increased cannabis consumption. "Evidence should trump intuition," he wrote, and cited a 2004 study comparing cannabis use in laissez faire Amsterdam with relatively prohibitionist San Francisco: "39 per cent of San Francisco residents had smoked cannabis more than 25 times, compared with 12 per cent of Amsterdam residents."

 

Unfortunately for Wodak, Dr Don Weatherburn, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and Wayne Hall, Professor of Public Health Policy, University of Queensland, had his number, so to speak. They also wrote a letter to the editor, pointing out the flaws in his research, which compared apples with oranges. "The San Francisco sample was older, less likely to have children and more likely to have been unemployed in the preceding two years. These factors may be the reason for the higher level of consumption in San Francisco," they wrote.

 

Their coup de "grass", if you pardon the pun, was NSW research showing "most regular cannabis users say they would use it more often if it was legal. Consumption increased substantially in the Netherlands after the creation of a de facto legal market."

 

The world has moved on from Wodak's neo-liberal drug dreams. Even Britain last week toughened cannabis laws, reversing its 2004 liberalisation, arguing the public must be protected from newly potent "skunk".

 

US research this week from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy shows teenagers who use marijuana are at high risk of depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and suicide; those who smoke it just once a month are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than non-smokers. Last week our new National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre reported that half of all drug treatments for 10- to 19-year-olds relate to cannabis, compared with 25 per cent for alcohol and 10 per cent for amphetamines.

 

Wodak must be aware of the success Sweden has had with its zero tolerance approach to illicit drug use, coupled with generous (coercive) treatment programs.

 

As last year's United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report, Sweden's Successful Drug Policy, said: "Lifetime prevalence and regular drug use among students and among the general population are considerably lower than in the rest of Europe." Just 7 per cent of 15- to 16- year-olds in Sweden had tried cannabis compared with 21 per cent in Europe.

 

Sweden also has some of the lowest levels of injecting drug-use-related HIV/AIDS infections. Young Swedes are more aware of the dangers of cannabis, with 83 per cent of 15- to 16-year-olds surveyed saying there was a "great risk" of harm from regular cannabis use, and 30 per cent perceiving a great risk in even using it once or twice.

 

Thanks to experts such as Wodak who continue to push the laissez-faire line on drugs, the same cannot be said for Australia, which ranks in the top 10 drug users of 193 nations in the UN's 2007 World Drug Report.

 

Manly councillor Pat Daley has grown increasingly concerned about illegal drugs in Manly. He says the recent focus on curbing binge drinking, which he supported, has been at the expense of drug enforcement. He believes drug liberalisers are "using the alcohol stuff as a cover to normalise and legitimise illicit drugs".

 

In a motion he plans to put forward to council on Monday night he will ask for "increased … enforcement of the law in relation to the distribution and possession of illegal drugs" on The Corso. He claims police "are basically not enforcing the law - they have basically given up in relation to [drug] possession". Doctors at Manly Hospital complain about drug-related violence, and yet whenever Daley raises the drugs problem he says he is "howled down" by the independent Manly mayor, Peter MacDonald, and other councillors who have branded him an "extremist".

 

The relative of a 28-year-old cannabis user who has been in and out of mental health wards for the past five years rang me yesterday to rail against those who claim it is a benign drug. He is convinced this "bright, run-of-the-mill kid's" psychiatric problems are due to heavy use of cannabis from the age of 16. "His life is pretty much on hold, if not wrecked."

 

How many more ruined lives would result from Dr Wodak's prescription?

 

devinemiranda@hotmail.com

[bufo marinus]

That loud mouthed slag needs a good punch in the throat OR some of the studies we have on record here sent to her email address to shut her the fuck up!

[grace]

My thoughts too but thank you for saying that as I am a lady he he

 

PS sending email now

[bufo marinus]

I really dislike swearing grace and I do apologise for the other reply, I don't know how to respond to the crap that people like Miranda Devine spew up as the truth.

Her contempt for her fellow man and self righteous bleating make me mad as hell.

Her failure to view things from another perspective highlights her arrogance and how little she knows of the real world.

Trumpeting her message to the masses as some sort of 'authority' just adds insult, grrrrrrr

Good post though, certainly pushed my buttons

[s4l]

Doctors at Manly Hospital complain about drug-related violence, and yet whenever Daley raises the drugs problem he says he is "howled down" by the independent Manly mayor, Peter MacDonald, and other councillors who have branded him an "extremist".

 

The article overall is about cannabis but she does work this in rather nicely. Giving the impression that its cannabis that causes the violence rather than meth.

[mull]

The relative of a 28-year-old cannabis user who has been in and out of mental health wards for the past five years rang me yesterday to rail against those who claim it is a benign drug. He is convinced this "bright, run-of-the-mill kid's" psychiatric problems are due to heavy use of cannabis from the age of 16. "His life is pretty much on hold, if not wrecked."

 

How many more ruined lives would result from Dr Wodak's prescription?

 

 

Nice work grace, bufo and s41.

 

A bit of hearsay eh...

 

The hearsay 28 year old has been smoking 'heavily' since he was 16. So 12 years.

He's been in and out of psych wards for only the last 5, why?

 

Perhaps cannabis was treating his illness effectively for the first 7 YEARS.

 

Perhaps the illness didn't develop until the normal stressors of life occured to a 23 year old, unrelated to cannabis use whatsoever.

 

Perhaps cannabis is the only effective treatment for his illness, yet he still believes all the nonsense told him by the psych ward people and the NCPIC and from here has developed symptoms that fit a mental illness. Perhaps there is no illness, or 28 year old.

 

How many more lives would be ruined by Dr Wodak's prescription Miranda? None, except for those that profit from demonizing cannabis. e.g. conservative cow towing columnists.

[Indycar]

Reading that opinion of Miranda's. Made me think of this

 

Seems fairly young 'n would have a mountain of it to get thru, before she gets anywhere near the top of the pile...