Still need for heroin trial says specialist
By Naomi Mapstone, Health Reporter

The "fat lady has not sung" where the projected ACT heroin trial was concerned,
a leading Australian drug policy spokesman said yesterday.

Alex Wodak, director of drug and alcohol services at St Vincent's Hospital in
Sydney, strongly criticised Prime Minister John Howard for intervening to quash
the trial earlier this year, but said not all hope had been lost.

"The arguments for a heroin trial are as compelling now as they were before the
prime ministerial intervention," Dr Wodak wrote in an editorial in the Medical
Journal of Australia.

"As Justice Wood [of the NSW Wood Royal Commission into corruption] pointed out
.. 'Without such a trial ... its efficacy or otherwise will never be known.'
Until attempted, it is very difficult to move forward or to consider alternative
strategies."

Dr Wodak said a heroin trial was needed to act as a circuitbreaker to move
Australia from policies based on "arbitrary historical decisions" to a one based
on evidence.

He said Mr Howard, in intervening to quash the ACT trial, had followed a
longstanding tradition of basing illicit drug policy on politics rather than
science. He had also sent Australians the wrong message about drug policy.

The Government's actions had signalled its intention to continue with law
enforcement as the prime solution to the problem an approach "now widely
recognised as to be prohibitively costly and hopelessly impractical".

And it also signalled it would not threaten the lucrative profits of illicit
drug trafficking.

"The decision also sends a powerful message to medical researchers throughout
Australia. Six years of careful scientific work on a significant community
problem, widespread consultation, publication in quality peerreviewed journals,
openness to scientific scrutiny, support by the Australian Medical Association,
presidents of medical colleges, numerous leaders of the medical profession,
police commissioners, directors of public prosecution and a Royal commisioner
are not enough," he wrote.

"An important, but contraversial, scientific research project will be brought
down politically if opposed by 51 per cent of respondents in a community opinion
poll and if subjected to a relentless campaign of media villification and
misinformation ... This makes a mockery of the present Government's advocacy of
evidencebased medicine."

A federal Opposition backbencher has accused The Daily Telegraph newspaper of
hypocrisy over its stand on the heroin trial and accused columnist Piers Akerman
of using drugs.

Kelvin Thomson (ALP, Victoria) told Parliament last week that Akerman snorted
cocaine in the toilets while employed by The Australian newspaper.

"The copy kids who worked at News Limited in Sydney in the mid1980s could hear
him in the toilet at night snorting cocaine while he was working on The
Australian," he said.

"He used to reminisce at the local pub about his drughazed days in the US in
the 1970s.

"This is the man who is telling us how we should conduct the fight against
drugs."

The comments follow a similar attack by NSW Independent upper House MP Richard
Jones, who said Akerman used LSD, marijuana and cocaine while living in Kings
Cross and the United States in the 1970s.