Pubdate: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 Source: Australian, The (Australia) Copyright: News Limited 1999 Contact: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ Author: Roger Martin PARTIES TEST OUT JOINT DRUGS PLAN LABOR'S drug spokesman Alan Carpenter and Police Minister Kevin Prince offered yesterday to produce a bipartisan approach to the drug debate if they could reach agreement on policies. Mr Carpenter wrote to Mr Prince, who has assumed responsibility for drug issues from Rhonda Parker, suggesting the Opposition and the Government take a bipartisan approach to the issue. But Mr Carpenter said this should be achieved by the Government accepting Labor's call for a drug summit, decriminalisation of cannabis, and an inquiry into injecting rooms and heroin trials. "We think ours is basically already an apolitical position," said Mr Carpenter, who has admitted using cannabis, most recently on a holiday to Italy in 1986. "The Government is being hamstrung by political imperatives rather than good policy-making," he said. "It would be of great satisfaction to everybody if they could remove those impediments and come on board the same sort of policy positions that have been advocated by people like (drugs researcher David) Penington, and which other governments are taking up." Mr Prince welcomed Mr Carpenter's call for a bipartisan approach, but suspected the offer was less than genuine. He said the Government's policies had been developed over four years, and that the results had been beneficial. "If he wants to come on board, then fine," Mr Prince said. "But what he said in his press release is (we should support) a drug summit, heroin trials, safe injecting rooms and so on. "Sorry, they are things he has been trotting out for the past few years, and it is not policy at all." Mr Prince, who says he has never smoked cannabis, predicted there would be little change to the drug policies established by Mrs Parker. Mr Carpenter and Mrs Parker regularly antagonised each other on their opposing drug policies, which both claimed were based on ideology. But after her resignation from cabinet on Wednesday, Mrs Parker maintained that her policies had been based on thorough and open examination of the issues and not on ideology. This included her opposition to heroin trials and safe injecting rooms. "This has resulted in a genuinely held conviction that introducing these initiatives would not be in the best interests of Western Australia," Mrs Parker said. - --- MAP posted-by: allan wilkinson