Pubdate: Mon, 21 May 2001
Source: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Copyright: 2001 The Sydney Morning Herald
Contact:  http://www.smh.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/441
Author: Deborah Cameron

A VERY PERSONAL ODYSSEY

Until the Drug Summit, Bob Carr was a complete conservative on heroin 
reform. Two years on, he talks to Deborah Cameron about his full circle and 
conversion to pragmatism over morality.

Bob Carr is between anger and fatigue. He is remembering how he handed tea 
and biscuits to a 20-year-old heroin addict and searched the young man's 
face for an answer. "Why?" was his question.

"They shrug,"Carr says with despair. "They shrug as they take a terrible 
risk with their own health."

It's something he'll neither understand nor forget. Even in an office 40 
floors above a city that always looks perfect from a distance, thoughts of 
drugs waft in.

"I can't think of a day when this whole area isn't on my mind one way and 
another," Carr says. "I've got to admit to an irritation, even a weariness, 
that the human animal is so gullible about something like heroin.

"For goodness sake! How often have people got to be told that this is 
monstrously addictive. That the joy of anaesthetic oblivion is paid for by 
a desperate dependency. How many times have people got to be told this?"

It is two years since the 1999 NSW Drug Summit, a pivotal event for Carr, 
and one that changed his mind and, in a sense, radicalised him. He has gone 
from a position of zero-tolerance on drugs to being an open-minded 
supporter of experiments such as the Kings Cross safe heroin injecting room 
and medical trials of cannabis for the acutely ill.

"It's not a moral argument. It is an argument about what is effective and 
what policies work. We're feeling our way ... and I have a sense that we've 
got the trust of the community."

The change of heart has been described by the Australian MedicalAssociation 
as Carr "moving himself from a position of intransigence".Before the Drug 
Summit, Carr was a prohibitionist who had no time for talk about loosening 
up laws. He would not agree to the extension into NSW of a proposed 
heroin-dispensing trial, stood against the decriminal-isation of heroin and 
cannabis, stiffened up jail terms and cast himself generally as a complete 
conservative on the topic. That was then.

This is now: "There is a case for sticking with a trial of a medically 
supervised injecting room, likewise on the medical use of cannabis. I think 
that it carries weight with normally conservative opinion."

In his dark, square-shouldered suit and cufflinks Carr, 53, is of another 
era. He drinks warm water from a dainty teapot with thin lemon slices. 
Unsweetened.

When he was a boy at Matraville High School, drugs practically did not 
exist. If not exactly innocent, it was certainly a quieter time. He says 
that he's never even smoked pot.

"What would have happened, though, if it had been pushed at me? And spoken 
about on the way to school and on the way home from school and over the 
weekends?"

He's wondering aloud whether he'd have buckled. About the difference it 
would have made if he too had shrugged. Other people around him did; his 
younger brother, Gregory, died of an overdose. On a rare occasion when he 
has spoken about it, he has unemotionally said: "Greg's death made me more 
interested in this policy area than I would otherwise have been."

And there have been other times he has felt it closely. He recalls a recent 
meeting with a senior adviser, "someone who could do my job".

"We were sitting at this very table. I was talking about The Salvation Army 
approach, which is abstinence-based. And I wondered out loud about the 
success rate ... and he said, 'It worked for me.' He was referring to a 
heroin addiction in his youth."

Apart from regarding the admission as "very impressive", Carr also thinks 
that the experience of his reformed policy adviser is the kind of evidence 
that is needed when a government reshapes drugs policy.

"I say let's trial, let's experiment on many fronts. Let's be ruthlessly 
pragmatic, let's be totally empirical when it comes to approaches to 
treatment. It is a shift from a monolithically prohibitionist system."

That image - of the monolith, the prohibitionist - being dislodged is 
striking. Behind it is years of wearying experience seen from behind the 
broad expanse of a premier's desk.

The delegations of worried police, health officials, teachers, counsellors, 
employers, parents and victims who have faced him across it and wanted him 
to see the picture as they see it.

"At the end of the Olympics I said that this had to be the most blessed 
land and the happiest people at the best time in their history ... The one 
real blemish is the persistence of a deep-seated and widespread problem 
with drugs.

"It tarnishes our national life. It explains so much of crime; it's related 
to problems of depression, it's related to suicide in the young; it 
explains a lot of homelessness and mental illness.

"It really is the soft underbelly of Australian life at this time. Because 
I help make policies I am driven to think [of drugs] all the time and I'm 
conscious that we are managing a given situation."

He worries that there is "something about Australians" that explains the 
nation's attraction to illegal drugs and looks forward "to the day when we 
move beyond this".

"Is it related to old-fashioned drinking in Australia, the 6 o'clock swill? 
The sustained alcohol abuse you've seen in city and country at different 
times in our history? It might reflect a certain hedonism - you can't be 
definitive about it."

In 1989, Carr wrote an article for the Heraldoutlining his position against 
the legalisation of heroin, which was then being proposed as the only way 
to solve the problem.

"I hope it's not melodramatic to say this debate raises that old question 
of, 'What kind of a society do we want to be?"Carr wrote.

He disputed that anyone really knew what would happen to a society where 
heroin was legal and defied supporters of the idea to explain the nuts and 
bolts of organising such a system.

"To say 'use of these drugs is against the law' is still an important and 
useful statement. If we remove that sanction, apart from anything else, we 
massively undercut all our anti-drug education. Why would any school 
student believe official warnings about the deleterious effects of heroin 
when it is being handed out at government dispensaries?" he wrote.

He says that his position on decriminalising banned drugs remains unchanged 
and will not concede that there is an inconsistency in allowing the safe 
heroin injecting room or cannabis trials in medical cases for the relief of 
suffering.

He has not, he insists, abandoned his long-standing zero tolerance position.

"I believe in zero tolerance when it comes to drugs in schools, I believe 
in zero tolerance when it comes to someone getting rich dealing in large 
quantities of heroin and causing misery and death. But I also believe in 
harm minimisation by shifting the heroin use from a filthy alleyway or a 
car park into a medically supervised environment that is an entry point for 
rehabilitation."

But he is at the same time cautious about the injecting room because it was 
not a remedy for heroin addiction: "It will make a difference at the 
margins only if it makes a difference at all. This is a hugely complex 
problem."

On cannabis, he says that it should remain illegal because it was harmful.

"I concede all the difficulties: that it is widely used, that it is a 
different category to heroin. But often in public policy you have to choose 
between the distasteful and the disastrous."

Ultimately he says he wants to be guided by research and evidence.

He keeps asking people in drug education: "What works?" They say that peers 
have more influence than teachers or parents. Perhaps sports people are 
effective too, he says, questioning the idea even as he utters it.

"But you've got rock stars referring to drug use and movies full of 
references to it. We are managing a given situation and in some contexts 
zero tolerance is valid and in other contexts it is harm minimisation."

Every so often, Carr goes to a movie theatre. Last time it was to see 
Traffic, a film about a conservative judge appointed by the US president to 
be an anti-drug tsar only to find out that his teenage daughter is a heroin 
addict. It is about the way the law struggles against drugs and the 
futility of it.

"The scene on the plane when the drug czar says to his staff 'We need some 
new thinking' and there's a resonant silence. That rings true," Carr says.

The second scene that echoes involves a schoolboy who asks how long a 
middle-class suburb would last if every hour of every day people were 
cruising the streets tempting others into the life.

Picture the Premier, sitting in the dark with the music swirling all 
around, his thoughts drifting back to Matraville.

The Premier's Journey

1982: Brother Gregory dies of a heroin overdose. Carr stridently against 
any drug liberalisation laws.

1989: Writes newspaper article putting case against legalising heroin.

1997: Restates opposition to decriminalising heroin.

May 1999: After Drug Summit, leaves door open for setting up injecting 
rooms but remains wary of liberalising cannabis laws.

May 2001: Injecting room opens in Kings Cross; he hints strongly at 
allowing medical patients to grow five marijuana plants, for use in pain 
relief, without being prosecuted. 
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager