Four years after random drug testing of NSW police was approved by Parliament, none is taking place, despite the Premier's belief that such checks are routine. Questioned by Channel 9 last Wednesday about the suspension of a senior constable who returned a positive cannabis result after a fatal shooting, Mr Carr said: "We have random drug and alcohol testing. That is something that came out of the Police Royal Commission. It has helped to change the culture in the police service." [continues 224 words]
While the State Government yesterday was boasting about the biggest drug bust at a NSW prison, police were parading the latest recruits to their dog unit - four cannabis-sniffing labradors. The Police Minister, Mr Whelan, said the dogs were being used to beat the transportation of cannabis, particularly in trucks, but the program might be expanded to include checks on trains. In a six-month trial, the dogs had searched 285 vehicles and found drugs 184 times. . The Corrective Services Department's dog detection unit led to a record drug bust at Silverwater Jail at the weekend, when a male visitor's Holden Commodore was found to contain "all the ingredients of a mobile amphetamine laboratory", the Corrective Services Minister, Mr Debus, told Parliament yesterday. [continues 205 words]
The NSW Cabinet today is expected to approve changes to child protection laws, allowing courts to take young children permanently from parents who refuse to end their abuse or neglect. The proposals make the rights of children to supportive and caring environments explicit and paramount and overturn decades of welfare policy that insisted on keeping families together, sometimes with tragic results for children. The Premier, Mr Carr, strongly supports the changes recommended by his Minister for Community Services, Mrs Lo Po', and is also understood to want adoption spelt out in the legislation. The changes are additional to the December 1998 child protection legislation, which has not been proclaimed. [continues 119 words]
The old Sydney Harbour Casino's top 10 high rollers bet $386 million in six months and a total of $66 million in just one month, according to casino monitors. The "Endeavour Room Top 1,000 Members" list, part of which has been obtained by the Opposition, showed that the biggest punter in the casino's high rollers' room in the latter half of 1996 was a Hong Kong resident, who bet a total of $96 million. Second was heroin supplier Van Duong, who bet $94 million. He topped the list for the month of June 1996, when he put $21 million through the high rollers' room. Van Duong was one of 30 high-profile gamblers excluded from the casino in September 1997 on orders of the Police Commissioner, Mr Peter Ryan. [continues 303 words]
Methadone patients will need to sign good-behaviour contracts, including binding themselves to random urine testing, to continue on the anti-heroin addiction program. The new deal is part of the State Government's undertaking to implement last year's Drug Summit recommendation for an expanded methadone program, shifting from the traditional bigger dispensing clinics to local pharmacies. Already, 300 pharmacies are involved in the NSW program. The contract system is also a response to residential anger at the behaviour of methadone users around suburban clinics. [continues 388 words]
Young people caught with small quantities of hard drugs including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and LSD will be given the chance of a caution or counselling rather than court. And from Monday, police will be able to formally caution, rather than prosecute, people possessing the equivalent of up to five joints of cannabis. The new police discretionary powers flow from last year's Drug Summit but stop short of the summit recommendation to decriminalise cannabis. The Special Minister of State, Mr Della Bosca, outlined yesterday the cannabis cautioning scheme for adults, to be run as a 12-month trial, and the extension of the Young Offenders Act to include police alternatives to prosecution for minor drug offences for people aged 18 and under. [continues 257 words]
Offenders may be ordered to undergo drug or alcohol rehabilitation as part of their bail conditions, under drug laws that came into effect in NSW on Friday. Gazettal of the Drug Summit Legislative Response Act also means sniffer dogs will be allowed into children's detention centres and police powers have been boosted to shut down "shooting galleries". Police options will be expanded in dealing with children caught possessing small drug quantities and the way is now clear for a medically supervised injecting room at Kings Cross. [continues 235 words]
Parents whose children are removed from the family home because of drug-related abuse or neglect will be drug tested as a condition of retrieving them, under a plan by the Community Services Minister, Mrs Lo Po'. Today she will release the report of a special investigation by the NSW Child Death Review Team, which found that 86 children of drug-dependent families had died in the State over the past 3 years. For too long, Mrs Lo Po' said yesterday, authorities had been forced to accept "hollow promises" of parents to give up drugs. But the review team's report had reinforced determination not to return children to dangerous home environments. [continues 302 words]
The Carr Government's legislation for a supervised heroin injecting room trial faces a close vote in the Upper House after the Independent MP Mr Richard Jones vowed yesterday to oppose it because "it's so weak I'd rather not have it at all". It raises the prospect of the Kings Cross trial, urged by the Drug Summit, being rejected by an alliance of conservative MPs who think it too radical and radical MPs who think it too conservative. Mr Jones told the Attorney-General, Mr Shaw, on Wednesday he would vote with the Coalition to oppose the 18-month trial, to be conducted by St Vincent's Sisters of Mercy, because "it's so weak it's not worth anything anyway". [continues 290 words]
The drug reform debate is about to get much tougher for the Carr Government. You may have had an earful of hysterical talkback and commentary, and been aware of the proliferation of drug use, and the attendant tragedies. You may also have noticed experts and so-called experts protesting at the inertia, a five-day drug summit intended to shift the responsibility to all of us, and three days of Government responses. But now come the real hard yards. Government stabs at a compromise between the two extremist positions - hardline heavy-punishment prohibition, and decriminalisation - are doomed to appease neither. [continues 256 words]
The drugs debate won greater sophistication when MPs showed they could change, writes DAVID HUMPHRIES. THE Liberal MLC John Francis Ryan is known around parliamentary haunts as Ned Flanders, the Simpsons' neighbour in the cartoon series to whom, admittedly, he bears some physical resemblance. But it is the shared elements of their characters that makes the comparison stick. They are both devout Christians, diligent at their work and their families and possessing, through a shared common decency often misrepresented as dorkiness, propensities to annoy the hell out of buffoons who exhibit neither. [continues 620 words]
New South Wales could be on the verge of introducing the nation's most liberal drug laws after the personal conversion of the state's Premier, Mr Bob Carr. Mr Carr was a surprise supporter of a proposal at the NSW drugs summit to introduce safe heroin injecting rooms. He said this was the hardest decision he had made at the summit, where his previously hard-line views were changed by speakers such as the police royal commissioner, Justice James Wood. [continues 452 words]
The Premier has conceded that his position on drug law reform has softened as a result of the Drug Summit which wound up a historic week in NSW politics yesterday, recommending changes beyond the expectations of even its more enthusiastic advocates. Mr Carr acknowledged "it took something to persuade me to a position to say we will not veto" community-approved, non-government heroin safe injecting rooms, but he was less enthusiastic about relaxing the State's cannabis-use laws. "It's something the Government is going to investigate before we move on this. That's very much a cautionary note." [continues 541 words]
Few hard-core heroin users would consider detoxification treatment even after the traumatic, life-threatening event of an overdose, unique research funded by the NSW Health Department has found. Addicts were questioned for a survey minutes after ambulance officers had revived them from overdoses, and in follow-up interviews seven days later. Just 11 per cent of 48 addicts - fewer than six people - said they were willing to stop injecting heroin and seek treatment. Twenty-six per cent said they would continue using but with greater safety, 23 per cent said they would try to stop, 15 per cent said they would definitely try to stop, 13 per cent said they would use less often and 15 per cent said they would not change, citing reasons such as lack of willpower and "I love it". [continues 256 words]
The Premier yesterday tried to dampen expectation of breakthrough solutions at next week's Drug Summit, warning "we're not going to solve this problem by five days of talking". The best result, Mr Carr said, might be identifying "greater areas of co-operation". Releasing the list of the 80 delegates and 45 associate delegates who will join the 135 State MPs at the summit, he stressed the public should not expect magic solutions. "We'll only wind back the problem of drug dependency by working together as a community," Mr Carr said. "This is something that governments cannot solve." [continues 135 words]
The Premier, Mr Carr, will take a seven-point plan to tomorrow's premiers' conference on drugs, urging the other States to take up a NSW trial on drug courts and backing Federal Government plans to divert young drug offenders from the criminal justice system. He said the Howard Government must fund a national drug treatment and research program, including the fast-tracking of controversial treatments such as naltrexone and buprenorphine, which will be the subject of a 500-person trial at Westmead Hospital. [continues 410 words]
By DAVID HUMPHRIES, State Political Correspondent The Premier, Mr Carr, yesterday increased pressure for a national summit on drugs by writing to the Prime Minister urging him to turn a November meeting of police ministers into a heads of government council. Mr Carr said the summit, which would be the first on drugs for 12 years, should focus on issues of supply and demand for heroin, now less expensive than "a slab of beer". Meanwhile the Federal Government was cutting the Customs budget and limiting the chances of detecting heroin imports. [continues 393 words]
