The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  However, a question many are left with is: why wasn’t there more money spent on treatment services? If we compare this plan to the successful New Zealand plan, it is clear the approaches are very similar; it is also clear, though, that unlike the New Zealand model, there is no standalone provision for more places in treatment ‘for problematic methamphetamine users’ or for better routes into treatment.

  One key set of recommendations from the Victorian report was ignored in the subsequent Ice Action Plan. The parliamentary committee recommended the expansion of the Drug Court of Victoria. Commencing in May 2002, the court currently operates in just one location — Dandenong — and diverts drug dependent offenders into treatment.

  Three years after the court started, Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre and Health Outcomes International carried out a joint evaluation, which found: a drug-court program graduation rate of 15 per cent with a projected completion rate of 30 per cent per annum in subsequent years once the program had become more established; a reduction in unemployment rates of participants by 32 per cent; significant reductions in re-offending rates (graduates re-offended 68 per cent less than a ‘control group’ of non-drug-court criminal offenders) — leading the researchers to conclude that for every $1 the program uses, the community dividend is $5.

  Australian drug courts were largely based on models that were developed in the United States. Under Californian law introduced in 2000, 35,000 people convicted of drug or drug-related offences have been diverted from jail to drug treatment — half of these people were methamphetamine addicts. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the US-Based Drug Policy Alliance testified before Congress in 2010: ‘A recent evaluation by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) found that California taxpayers saved nearly $2.50 for every dollar invested in the program. Of people who successfully completed their drug treatment, California taxpayers saved nearly $4 for each dollar spent. In all, Proposition 36 is estimated to have saved state and local government more than $1.3 billion over its first six years.’

  The Victorian parliamentary committee suggested expanding an alternative justice program that runs in Melbourne, Sunshine, and the Latrobe Valley, but that recommendation was also ignored.

  If we widen our lens a little more, it is clear just how much state and territory governments’ love for ‘law-and-order’ may be limiting the amount of money it could spend on all types of health and education services — including those that relate to crystal-meth abuse. The Andrews government will spend $18 million on crystal-meth treatment; its budget that year set aside $243 million for upgrading and expanding prisons, and another $90 million for the Department of Corrections to assist them in administering community corrections orders. In delivering its 2015–16 budget, the New South Wales government dedicated $11 million to better drug rehabilitation services; at the same time, it dedicated nearly $7 billion of its $70 billion state budget to ‘public order and safety’ (keeping it in line with Victoria and Queensland state governments who also spend about 10 per cent of their budgets on ‘public order and safety’), announcing that the government would ‘appoint 310 new police officers by 2018, including 250 specialist police and 15 specialist civilian staff’. By the end of 2018, police numbers are expected to reach 16,795, up from 15,806 in 2011 when the government came to power.

  In 1982, there were 9,826 Australians in prison. In 2015, there were 36,134. I looked across different Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data from the last three decades, and found that the per capita rate of imprisonment has doubled since I was born in 1980: from 92 per 100,000 people in 1982 to 186 prisoners per 100,000 in 2015 (a rise again from 158 per 100,000 in 2004). Our prison system is funded and administered by state and territory governments, and people are imprisoned as a result of state and territory law. Crimes against the person such as assault account for the biggest rise, followed by drug offences: just over 3,000 of Australia’s prisoners are in there for drug offences — which is a 10-fold growth increase since 1982.

  If you are charged with a drug offence in Australia you will either be charged with possession (having two grams or less for most drugs, including methamphetamine — two years in prison is the maximum penalty), or trafficking. The ACC’s 2014–15 Illicit Drug Data report reveals 79,070 people were charged with drug offences during that period, and 66 per cent, or just over 52,000, of them were charged with possession. Over the same period, 112,049 people were arrested for suspected drug offences (evidently not everyone arrested is charged, and not everyone charged with drug offences goes to court, instead receiving fines); 59 per cent of those were arrested for cannabis charges, and 87 per cent of those arrests are for possession-only charges.

  As remarkable as this may appear, it’s not the most remarkable fact about drug offences in Australia: that title almost certainly belongs to a statistic I found in a relatively obscure section of an ABS data series called ‘Finalised Defendants’, which measures the number of people going to court as defendants and the types of offences they had been charged with. The data shows that the number one offence an Australian will be charged with and required to go to court for is a drug offence. In 2013–14, there were 579,152 cases completed in Australia’s criminal courts: 10 per cent of them were for drug offences, and of those roughly 50,000 cases, 28,000 were there for drug possession. To express this in another way: about 5 per cent of everybody in Australia who goes to court does so because they were caught with less than two grams of drugs. The overall trend of drug offences, and in particular drug possession offences, is up and up: the number of defendants finalised with a principal offence of illicit drug offences increased by 15 per cent or 6,442 defendants.

  Alison Ritter’s 2011 study showed that the biggest sub-group within drug-related law-enforcement costs was police services and correctional services work, which shows why, in essence, most of the money directed at drug-policy law enforcement has been spent on the costs of employing and administering police officers. When we consider this in the context of the ACC’s Drug Data Report and the ABS Finalised Defendants scheme, what the study demonstrates is that about $700 million a year — twice the amount of the total state, territory, and federal government spend on drug treatment — was being spent on police activities and correctional services related to charging, arresting, and prosecuting people for possessing an amount of illicit drugs — usually marijuana — deemed by the law itself to be for personal use only. At the same time, addicts and frontline workers continue to cite a lack of treatment services as the biggest barrier to reducing personal and social harms arising from drug abuse.

  By way of example — and it is quite an acute example of drug-related expenditure on law and order — let me take you to Queensland, which has the highest number of illicit drug arrests in the nation. Arrests for cannabis use and possession are particularly high: nearly five times more people are arrested for cannabis use here than in more populated Victoria. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of people behind bars in Queensland has increased by more than 20 per cent. As a result, nine of the state’s 11 high-security prisons are now filled beyond capacity, resulting in an increase in staff and inter-prisoner assaults. When the Queensland Newman government came to power in 2012, it promised to balance the budget and get tough on crime. This meant less money for specialist courts, legal aid, and youth social programs, and more money for the police. Newman’s Liberal National Party government axed the Murri Court, the Drug Court (which had been operating in Beenleigh, Ipswich, Southport, Cairns, and Townsville) and the Special Circumstances Courts (for those offenders with mental-health issues). It also wound back several prison work programs. The Newman government then funded 1,100 extra police, at a cost of $358 million (though when the Australian Labor Party Palaszczuk government was elected in 2015, it quietly restored the Murri Court, the Drug Court, and the Special Circumstances Courts).

  Now Queensland Crime Stoppers is funded by the state government. As you no doubt a
lready know, it is designed so people can call in and report crime anonymously. This information is handed over to the police. I stumbled across a press release from the organisation from February 2016 boasting that: ‘Reports made to Crime Stoppers Queensland in 2015 led to 2,622 arrests and 9,452 charges being placed, which is a significant increase’.

  However, 9,105 of those 9,452 charges related to drug possession and supply. A further 36 were for drug trafficking. Which left just a few other offences to make up the other 300 or so charges: five child pornography offences, 12 prostitution offences, 31 breaches of bail offences, two rape offences (but no murders or assaults).

  ‘These are the best statistics we’ve seen since our program commenced in 1989, and it’s the third consecutive year our program has broken historical records for the number of arrests resulting from community information reports,’ the press release continued.

  History is crucial to understanding how and why Australian states and territories ended up spending so much of their money on arresting, charging, and attempting to prosecute people for using certain mind-altering substance.

  Australia’s legislative position has, in effect, come from several major international treaties. In the early twentieth century, opium use in China was considered to be very detrimental to the local population, and British traders were exploiting the local Chinese population through the opium trade. The British government removed their support for the opium trade, and a short time later the Chinese government banned opium altogether. A few years later, the International Opium Commission was founded and an International Opium Convention was signed by 13 nations at The Hague in 1912. This amounted to the world’s first drug control treaty, and would be later registered at the League of Nations in 1922. Effectively it meant that all signatory nations to the treaty, which later became part of the much larger Treaty of Versailles, had make the sale, distribution, and use of narcotic drugs illegal, unless they were used for medical or scientific purposes. This convention was revised again in 1925. In 1961, the Narcotics Convention made this a binding contract, as members signed an agreement that they would keep the use of certain plants and substances illegal. Following that was the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances — a United Nations treaty designed to cover a range of new psychoactive drugs not covered in the 1961 convention. This included methamphetamine, which was all but completely outlawed in Australia by 1976. So it was ultimately the interpretation and application of these conventions by member-states including Australia that led to drug use, not just drug supply, being made illegal all around the western world.

  And for some, criminalisation of drug use is at the core of why drug harms continue to occur across our societies. In July 2001, the Portuguese government decriminalised the use, possession, and acquisition of all illicit drugs, including cannabis, heroin, amphetamines, and ecstasy, when deemed for personal use. However, it is still illegal for a person to possess illicit drugs, and if a person is found by police to have illicit drugs they are referred to a special panel comprised of a treatment professional, a social worker, and a lawyer. All other drug offences, including trafficking-consumption, trafficking, manufacturing, and cultivation continue to be criminal offences with punishment of up to twelve years’ imprisonment.

  The results have been reported as both a success and as a failure by different sides of the argument, but what is clear is that although there was a slight increase in the use of all illicit drugs in the general population between 2001 and 2007, the levels of ‘problematic drug use, HIV, and offending’ all saw a reduction. The biggest change was in the drop in drug-related new HIV infections: these decreased between 2000 and 2009 from 1,400 to fewer than 200 cases per year.

  Other countries in Latin America have followed the same path, but it is too early to measure the effectiveness of drug decriminalisation in countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, and Uruguay.

  For me, the three strongest arguments in favour of decriminalising crystal meth, or any drug for that matter, are these: first, the proposed decriminalisation and legalisation is about the use of small quantities, meaning drug traffickers would still face jail time. Second, the idea really centres around good use of resources — money that would usually be spent on arresting, prosecuting, and convicting individual users could be spent instead on chasing higher-end dealers and investing in better treatment services. And third, although it is difficult to imagine a world in which substances such as methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin are legal, drug prohibition is very much grounded in recent history.

  And for many around the world, the ‘prohibitionist approach’ to narcotic and amphetamine use is just not working. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, a 22-person panel that issued an assessment in 2011 of the global ‘War on Drugs’, opened its report with the following sentence:

  The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.

  The commission is headed by the former secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, a number of former presidents and prime ministers (including those of Brazil, Colombia, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland, and Chile), businessmen, intellectuals, and senior administrators from around the world. The commission called for a reopening of the debate on drugs policy, and that regulation ultimately replace prohibition. Speaking at a World Economic Forum in Switzerland in 2013, Annan said ‘I believe that drugs have destroyed many people, but wrong governmental policies have destroyed many more … When we realised [alcohol] prohibition wasn’t working we had the courage to change it.’ Based on the data outlined in this chapter, I believe there is a convincing argument to be made that too many resources are being spent arresting and prosecuting individual users when the money could be better spent elsewhere.

  I asked the researcher Nicole Lee, whose work I have quoted earlier in this book, what she thought of, respectively, decriminalisation and legalisation of meth. Lee told me that in general, she is in favour of decriminalisation of all illicit drugs:

  Criminalisation is based on a conservative moral view about drugs and has been, globally, heavily driven by prohibitionist countries like the US and others (e.g. Sweden) for many decades. It increases harms and stigma and reduces our ability to provide treatment to those who need it. Treatment is more efficient and cost effective in reducing drug use and harms than policing. I think in Australia the couple of states that decriminalised cannabis show that it doesn’t increase drug use or problems. And the Portuguese experience, a fairly bold move, shows more benefits than harms. Legalisation is a different, more complex issue, but I think decriminalisation is a good step to reducing harms among drug users and for the community.

  Other supporters of decriminalisation include former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer, former New South Wales premier Bob Carr, and ASPI’s Vern White. The ‘Geelong Our Town’s ICE Fight’ lead project officer Police Senior Sergeant Tony Francis has also called for decriminalisation. The Geelong Advertiser published his comments, along with a response from Premier Andrews, who has ruled out the possibility of decriminalising ice, as has Nationals senator Fiona Nash, who is both the assistant minister for health and the government head of the National Ice Taskforce that was launched on 7 April 2015.

  Nash was actually quoted from a press release in which she plainly conflated legalisation and decriminalisation: ‘However, legalising the drug would send the message that ice is not dangerous. This is the wrong message to send. Legalising what is arguably the worst drug Australia has seen is madness.’

  But it is again important to point out the nuance in this debate — Nash can hardly be characterised as a hard-liner, also saying: ‘During my recent 25,000-kilometre tour holding community consultations on ice — I’ve now done so in 12 regional communities — police of all ranks have repeatedly told me we can’t arrest our way out of the ice problem. I’ve been open to new suggestions and understand a range of measures is ne
eded. Education is key — we must teach our young people about the dangers of ice. There’s no need to exaggerate the message — the truth is scary enough.’

  Perhaps even more telling was that the then Abbott government appointed Ken Lay, former Victorian police commissioner, to the role of taskforce head. Lay’s most famous remark about Australia’s ice problem had been up to that point that ‘we can’t arrest our way out of the ice problem’.

  A Fairfax/Nielsen poll taken in 2012 found that two-thirds of Australians oppose decriminalisation. The poll showed 27 per cent of voters support decriminalisation, although that figure rose to 50 per cent of Greens and 34 per cent of Labor voters. Support among Liberal and National party voters was much lower, at 18 per cent. The poll results were almost exactly the same as they were when taken thirteen years earlier. Attitudes seem pretty fixed — just 4 per cent of respondents said they neither supported nor opposed decriminalisation, and 2 per cent said they did not know.

  In any event, Australia will be unlikely to make any serious changes to criminalisation until there is a change in some of these international treaties, and for that to happen, it would need America’s support.

  Another side of the debate, and one that is similarly about the role of government, is the extent to which the harms associated with the crystal-meth surge are only symptomatic of other service gaps and social problems. The author James Fry, whose memoir That Fry Boy was released in early 2015, published an article in September 2015 in which he identified underfunding as the main problem facing people seeking access to appropriate drug and alcohol support:

  Critics against the allocation of scarce public funds towards mental health are right to say that to bring the system up to an effective level, one that could rapidly respond to the Janes of the world when they need it most, would be very costly. But such critics fail to acknowledge that when we are not providing rapid access to mental-health treatment we default to providing far more costly responses to the problem. Largely this takes the form of law enforcement and emergency departments.