Australia21How illicit drugs policy relates to the budget black hole
by Alex Wodak
In the last half-century Australia has allocated substantial resources to try and limit the supply of drugs, yet drug-related deaths, disease, crime, corruption, violence and threats to our national security have all soared. Illicit drugs policy is one of the areas where we don't get value for money.
A sudden reduction in corporate profits has blown a $12 billion hole in the federal budget. This development should spark a debate within and outside government about how we deal with illicit drugs in this country because it’s one of the areas where we aren’t getting value for our money.
In 2002-03 commonwealth, state and territory governments spent $3.2 billion preventing and responding to illicit drugs.
Governments allocated 75% of this money to law enforcement (customs, police, courts and prisons), 10% to prevention, 7% to drug treatment, 5% to health care for drug users and 1% to harm reduction. The final 2% was spent on miscellaneous items.Taxpayers should consider what value we obtain from this not inconsiderable expenditure in response to illicit drugs.
The $2.4 billion expended in 2002-03 on drug law enforcement brought a miserable return to taxpayers. Former Australian federal police commissioner, Mick Palmer said in 2012, “Australian police are now better trained, generally better equipped and resourced and more operationally effective than at any time in our history, but, on any objective assessment, policing of the illicit drug market has had only marginal impact on the profitability of the drug trade or the availability of illicit drugs.”
While in the last half-century Australia has allocated substantial resources to try and limit the supply of drugs, drug-related deaths, disease, crime, corruption, violence and threats to our national security have all soared. In the longer version of this article, published on The Conversation website on 6 May and available here, Dr Wodak provides a series of referenced examples to support these assertions.
In Australia, supporters of a “war on drugs” approach vigorously opposed pragmatic policies (such as needle syringe programmes) needed to control the spread of HIV among people who inject drugs. If common sense had not triumphed over ideology in the 1980s, Australia would now be dealing with a much larger and more expensive HIV epidemic.
Property crime in Australia has generally followed trends in heroin use, increasing steadily as heroin consumption soared in the three decades leading up to the new millennium. And then declining in the new century as heroin production in Burma decreased by about 80% in the decade following 1996.
Corruption is an inevitable cost of drug prohibition. At least three of the 36 deaths of drug traffickers in Melbourne seem to have involved high-level police corruption. In 1987, Barry Moyse, former head of the South Australia drug squad received a 27-year prison sentence for selling drugs. In 2011, Mark Standen, formerly assistant director of the NSW Crime Commission, received a 22-year sentence for his involvement in a $300 million drug operation. HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, was fined $US 1.9 billion by US authorities in 2012 for laundering rivers of money from Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers.
Drug prohibition has helped enrich the Taliban and fund the weapons used against Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. About 70% of the opium produced in Afghanistan comes from two southern provinces controlled by the Taliban.
Despite minimal evidence of effectiveness, and abundant evidence of serious collateral damage, gold bars continue to rain down on drug law enforcement. It’s just the opposite for drug treatment and harm reduction where there is substantial evidence of benefit and minimal evidence of serious collateral damage. Lousy policy is still good politics. But treasurers may now want to change that.
In contrast to the money spent on law enforcment, the $224 million spent in 2002-03 on drug treatment was an excellent investment. Methadone maintenance treatment saves between $4 and $7 for every dollar spent.
The $32 million spent on harm reduction in 2002-03 was also a great investment. Needle syringe programs save $4 in healthcare costs and $27 overall for every dollar spent.
Instead of governments spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money to make a bad problem worse, they should shift spending to get a better return on our investment while reducing deaths, disease, crime, corruption, violence and threats to our national security. This approach would also help them balance their budgets.
The picture shows a 5mg bottle for legally produced heroin from an earlier time.
Dr. Alex Wodak AM, is an Emeritus Consultant, Alcohol and Drug Service, St Vincent's Hospital; Visiting Fellow, Kirby Institute, UNSW; President, Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation; and a Director of Australia21.