> AUSTRALIA
>
> The real drug war
>
> Why the US won't let Australia reform its drug
> laws. By DAVID MARR and BERNARD LAGAN
>
> DAVID Pennington, investigating drug law reform for
> Victoria's Premier, Jeff Kennett, flew to Hobart in
> January 1996 to meet Bob Gelbard, President Bill Clinton's
> chief international drugs law enforcer. The meeting was at
> the request of the United States embassy in Canberra, but
> it was Pennington and several other members of Kennett's
> Drug Advisory Council who flew south.
>
> The Dallas Morning News recently praised Gelbard as one of
> the US State Department's "diplomatic dobermans". A former
> ambassador to Bolivia he was there when the Americans
> sent troops to try to bust the cocaine industry Gelbard
> was later promoted by Clinton to be Assistant Secretary of
> State for Narcotics and Law Enforcement and took the hard
> line he had worked in Latin America into the wider drugs
> world.
>
> Last year was a busy time for Gelbard. He saw Colombia
> punished for its part in the drug trade, cutting most US
> aid to the country and revoking President's Ernesto
> Samper's US entry visa because of his ties to the Cali
> cocaine cartel. Gelbard was in Nigeria lecturing its
> military ruler, General Sani Abacha, over his regime's
> entanglement with drugs. He joined in Clinton's public
> vilification of Burma, which led to aid and trade cuts for
> its regime's failure to clean up the local opium trade.
>
> To the meeting in Hobart, the American diplomat brought an
> embassy officer whom Pennington had noticed at every
> public meeting his inquiry had held. He understood the
> woman, in her late 40s, had "an intelligence role in
> providing information to Washington as to what's going on
> in this country with a particular interest in the drug
> issue".
>
> Gelbard took "a very traditional law enforcement
> position", at odds with Pennington's view that Australia
> should be relaxing its tough, prohibitionist drug
> policies. He found the American's message "heavyhanded".
> Gelbard was "scathing" about liberal Dutch marijuana laws
> and Pennington recalled him saying: " "The United States
> Government viewed with concern any countries who appear to
> be or are actively considering liberalisation of drug
> laws.' He told us he had a close interaction with
> President Clinton, that he had written a speech for the
> President in which the President indicated that with the
> Cold War now over the next frontier was the war on drugs."
>
> Gelbard's meeting with Pennington revealed here for the
> first time is a reminder that this country is not free
> to take radical action to solve its drug problems.
> Australians talk most of the time as though this country
> indeed, the individual States can decide the fate of
> their own narcotics laws. This is a delusion.
>
> As a good citizen of the world and a loyal supporter of
> the United States, we have signed international treaties
> which pledge Australia to stick to the prohibition
> strategy that has brought us to the position in which we
> now find ourselves, a sad situation nearly all local
> authorities including Pennington acknowledge must be
> changed.
>
> But Australia cannot now make any radical break with the
> past or with our allies. The treaties are the work of the
> United Nations and before that, the League of Nations
> but the passion and policing are mainly American. Wherever
> a nation seems about to break ranks, the US will be there,
> cajoling or threatening. As a result, the UN and US
> between them have achieved a remarkable international
> consensus, the more astonishing for surviving the almost
> universal verdict that the strategy of drug prohibition
> has failed.
>
> In the past, the American Embassy has lobbied here against
> the decriminalisation of marijuana, even though 11 US
> States have taken that step. More worrying for the US is
> the prospect that Australia, like Switzerland, might
> experiment by prescribing heroin to see if that radical
> step might break the terrible cycle of crime and death
> that heroin addiction now brings in its wake. Pennington
> recalled that Gelbard was "scathing" also about the Swiss
> heroin trial.
>
> So, too, is the International Narcotics Control Board
> (INCB). From its nest of glass towers in Vienna, this UN
> agency supervises the drug treaties signed by most of the
> world this century. Scientists and medical people sit on
> the board, but career antidrugs campaigners and lawyers
> have the numbers. Running the team is a former public
> prosecutor from Germany who is forcefully opposed to
> radical change in the world's approach to drugs. The INCB
> has the power to cut off the supply of pharmaceuticals
> and other legal drugs to errant nations. But its
> daytoday impact is to cast a legal grid over the world's
> drug debates.
>
> In 1995, an unknown Australian diplomat in Vienna
> approached the INCB to test its attitude to an Australian
> heroin trial in Canberra. A few lines of a leaked and
> partly censored account of the meeting between the
> diplomat and the board's secretary, Herbert Schaepe, were
> revealed a few weeks later on the ABC's Four Corners.
> Schaepe "was clearly not pleased with the prospect of the
> ACT trial". He belittled the Swiss trial and all such
> trials, saying they were doomed to failure. But the INCB
> would allow a trial to go ahead as long as it was "part of
> a genuine commitment by the Government to achieve a
> drugfree society rather than a concession to living with
> drugs".
>
> That would be that but for Tasmania, the
> weapon the INCB and the US could, if they
> wished, use against Australia if we ever found the courage
> to undertake fundamental drug reform. Tasmania has one of
> the world's most efficient and profitable legal
> opiumgrowing industries. It exists and prospers only with
> the sayso of the INCB and the US. According to the notes
> from that meeting with Schaepe in Vienna, relations
> between the INCB and Australia are "already testy ... as a
> result of [censored] past contention that our licit
> industry was overproducing".
>
> After that meeting, the diplomat cautioned Canberra that
> the Tasmanian industry meant we must "deal with the INCB
> regularly and on an intimate level. Our concern is that
> [censored] could make life difficult for us in our annual
> negotiations on poppy production. [censored] we see this
> as a real risk and one that should certainly be borne in
> mind when weighing up the overall pros and cons of the
> trial."
>
> Switzerland and the Netherlands are at the forefront of
> radical drug reform. Change has been contested by the INCB
> but there has been no international lever to compel those
> two countries to stay in line. They don't need US aid.
> President JeanPascal Delamuraz of Switzerland can hardly
> be banned from entering the United States. But Tasmania's
> very profitable opium industry could be closed down by the
> UN or the US, putting out of business 700 growers and a
> couple of processors earning between them $80million a
> year. The State most opposed to the ACT heroin trial
> indeed campaigning against it here and in Vienna is
> Tasmania.
>
> The poppy farmers have condemned the ACT trial to the
> Herald as a foolish exercise that could jeopardise their
> industry. Rod ThirkellJohnston, president of the
> Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association, spoke to Four
> Corners of their "mistrust and fear" of the US's response
> to the ACT experiment. "The big problem we have is that
> the trial's being conducted in Canberra, which is nowhere
> near Tasmania, which has a minimal relationship with
> Tasmania, but unfortunately the Americans use the argument
> that Australia is one country and you can't isolate
> segments of it."
>
> Tasmania's Minister for Justice, Ron Cornish, has written
> to just about every Federal and State minister over the
> past few years condemning the trial as a breach of our
> international treaty obligations. He is not saying it's
> necessarily a bad idea just that it's against
> international law. The Tasmanian Government is now shying
> away from this absolute verdict. Last week, a spokesperson
> told the Herald that there was "no official legal
> opinion". What matters more, perhaps, is that the
> extraordinary meeting between David Pennington and the
> heavy from the State Department, Bob Gelbard, took place
> in Ron Cornish's office.
>
> Officially, Gelbard was on the island to check out the
> opium industry. "He came out here," said Julian Green,
> head of the Poppy Advisory and Control Board, "to see what
> he understood, and proved to him to be, the most efficient
> producer of crude morphine and morphinebased drugs in the
> world". American officials, from Congress and the US Drug
> Enforcement Agency, come through Tasmania regularly. They
> keep a close eye on the industry and always raise the
> possibility that the US will lift its quota of Tasmanian
> product, a quota known as the 80:20 rule.
>
> This is the perpetual hope of the industry, which resents
> the privileged access of Indian and Turkish legal opium
> product to the United States for the manufacture of
> morphine and codeine. This hope also keeps the Tasmanian
> industry in line. Again Gelbard was holding out the
> prospect of a better quota for the island, but Green
> denied the ambassador was using this to gather opposition
> to the Canberra trial. "It wasn't a factor," Green said.
> "He did say to a journalist in Tasmania that the heroin
> trial in Canberra is an Australian issue."
>
> Not only was Gelbard suggesting the opposite in private
> with Pennington, but nearly a century of successful US
> diplomacy has made sure that challenging the ground rules
> on heroin is notjust an Australian issue. Very far from
> it...
>
> WHEN America won the Philippines in its war with Spain, it
> discovered opium smuggling was rife in the islands. A
> passionate fear of opium had appeared in the US after the
> Californian gold rushes and this was mixed up with white
> distaste for the Chinese who smoked the stuff. Race was,
> and remains, a potent element in all of this: America set
> out in the first years of the century on a mission to
> protect the world, but especially the white world, from
> the scourge of opium.
>
> Not much might have come of this, but Britain elected its
> first antiopium government a few years later and after
> centuries of protecting the trade indeed fighting wars
> to force opium into China Britain was also keen to see
> opium controlled. So in 1909 America called a conference
> in Shanghai that set out, for the first time, to fight
> drugs through inter national cooperation. In a sense,
> every treaty since has been a forlorn attempt to make that
> Shanghai agreement work.
>
> Australia was locked into the system after World War I by
> the Treaty of Versailles. In Geneva a few years later we
> joined the rest of the world in putting cannabis the
> oldest continuously used drug on Earth on the banned
> list. Once available over the counter here as Cigares de
> Joy, cannabis had just about disappeared by the time we
> signed this Geneva convention. Perversely, the fact that
> the drug problem didn't seem to affect Australia much made
> us even happier to sign these treaties. As the academic
> lawyer Desmond Manderson wrote in his book From Mr Sin to
> Mr Big, "Australia was blown along by the winds of
> international opinion without genuine commitment or
> thought".
>
> The US had far higher ambitions than Britain. It wanted to
> make the globe free, for the first time in human
> experience, of all recreational drugs except cigarettes.
> This amazing ambition survived even the failure of
> domestic Prohibition of alcohol not that the UN will
> concede, even now, that this failed. The latest World Drug
> Report of the UN's International Drug Control Program,
> released in late June, concedes the crime, the violence
> and deaths from moonshine in America in those Prohibition
> years but concludes it is "difficult to extrapolate
> lessons for modern times".
>
> Others have drawn the conclusion and it's virtually a
> consensus now that absolute prohibition of drugs and
> alcohol cannot work. But this wordly realism is
> emphatically rejected by the US and the UN, which have,
> between them, persuaded the world that with greater
> dedication, tougher measures and more treaties, success is
> still possible. So they have held the line for nearly 90
> years in what must be seen as an absolutely successful
> diplomatic effort.
>
> As the conventions got tougher and tougher, Australia kept
> signing them. Only once was there any resistance here. The
> US was all along determined to wipe out opium's powerful
> derivative, heroin, by banning even its medical use and
> after World War II, through the World Health Organisation,
> it imposed that rule on the world even though heroin was
> then still the best painkiller available. Australian
> doctors fought back but were ultimately brought into line
> by Canberra. In Britain, a powerful counterattack by the
> medical profession preserved their right to prescribe
> heroin. That survives heavily circumscribed even
> today.
>
> Still we had no heroin problem of our own. That came in
> the early 1970s by courtesy of the American Drug
> Enforcement Agency (DEA). As the Vietnam War wound down,
> the DEA very successfully stopped heroin following the
> troops home. "The DEA in effect compelled the syndicates
> to sell heroin originally produced for American addicts in
> alternative markets," wrote the academic Alfred McCoy in
> his book Drug Traffic, Narcotics and Organised Crime in
> Australia. "In short, the DEA simply diverted SouthEast
> Asian heroin from the US into European and Australian
> markets, evidence for what we have called the iron law of
> the international drug trade."
>
> Now, when we needed the conventions, they were no help to
> us. Heroin washed into Australia and the cycle began of
> crime, corruption, addiction and death. The treaties we
> had entered into did little to inhibit supply and left us
> unable to take any radical initiative to cope with the
> unfolding disaster. Yet in 1988 we signed another of these
> agreements the Vienna Convention in which we made the
> strongest promises yet to keep recreational use of drugs
> in Australia a crime.
>
> The former Chief Judge of the ACT, Russell Fox, QC, was
> one of those calling on Australia not to ratify the
> treaty. "Australia should not, at this time, reaffirm (and
> strengthen) unsuccessful treaties of 20 and 30 years ago
> which tie our policy on most drug use to complete and
> unqualified prohibition. The inevitable result is a most
> dangerous illegal market which is by definition
> uncontrolled. There can be no quarrel with the making of
> international arrangements or with an attempt to eliminate
> illegal traffickers. The real question is how this can
> best be achieved..." But we ratified in 1992.
>
> Where does that leave us? In the sort of confusion that
> lawyers love and timid politicians use to make sure
> nothing is done. But two things are absolutely clear: no
> Australian State or Territory can go it alone on drugs.
> The Commonwealth has all the authority here because of its
> treaty obligations. Canberra can overrule any State
> initiative. The reforms Bob Carr might be persuaded to
> make in NSW are really a side issue. Nothing of much
> consequence can happen about drugs in Australia without
> Canberra's approval. It's John Howard's position that
> matters and that's profoundly unadventurous.
>
> The second consequence of our international entanglements
> is this: the Vienna authorities won't let us pursue the
> path of legalisation. We can't contemplate making drugs
> or some drugs at least available over the counter like
> cigarettes and alcohol. Though the INCB in Vienna is
> frankly encouraging treaty States to find ways other than
> imprisonment to punish marijuana smokers, it still insists
> that even personal possession and use of marijuana remain
> crimes. What we call "decriminalisation" of marijuana in
> South Australia, the ACT and Northern Territory, the INCB
> calls a crime with a very light punishment. But Vienna is
> not looking at the "decriminalisation" of heroin. That
> drug remains as absolutely demonised in the thinking of
> the United States and the INCB as its parent, opium, was
> in Shanghai in 1909. As Herbert Schaepe remarked in the
> course of ridiculing the Swiss trial and Australia's wish
> to follow the Swiss lead: "Heroin is too dangerous a
> substance to be playing with."
>
> WHEN the Australian health ministers meet in Cairns at the
> end of this month to discuss the proposed Canberra trial,
> they will have with them the promising results from
> Switzerland a "striking decline of criminal activities"
> and dramatically improved addicts' health and an
> information paper (so far secret) prepared by the Federal
> Department of Health's National Drug Strategy. It
> concludes despite the arguments from Tasmania that a
> heroin trial can be held in Canberra without breaching our
> treaty obligations. Australia, like Switzerland, will use
> the exemption under the treaties for "medical and
> scientific research ... including clinical trials". The
> National Drug Strategy's paper was prepared in response to
> the latest round of objections from Tasmania in the middle
> of last year when the island was arguing that a trial
> measuring outcomes such as burglary and muggings was
> neither medical nor scientific because criminology was
> not, Tasmania reasoned, a science.
>
> But the bigger treaty question looms beyond the trial
> itself: if we find the courage to hold a Canberra trial
> and it matches the encouraging results from Switzerland,
> will the treaties allow us then to prescribe heroin, not
> as an experiment but as a daytoday practice of medicine
> in Australia?
>
> The answer is unclear. The aim of the treaties is a
> drugfree world, but maintaining a supply of legal heroin
> to addicts continues in Britain on a very limited basis
> despite the disparaging views of the INCB that the British
> system "fell into disrepute" in the 1960s. Now Britain is
> preparing its own heroin trials with a view to one day
> restoring prescription on a much wider basis. Among
> Australian health authorities, the surviving system in
> Britain is used to argue that daytoday prescription of
> heroin is, at the very least, not impossible under the
> treaties.
>
> The Swiss are much more confident they can prescribe
> heroin daytoday if and when their trial succeeds.
> Margaret Rihs, the head of the Dependency Research Program
> for Switzerland, told the Herald: "Heroin is given to get
> addicts into treatment. All treatment is better than no
> treatment. They can then start reconstructing their lives
> and eventually the aim is that they will not need heroin."
>
> The Swiss have had to battle all the way. Our diplomat in
> Vienna cautioned the Australian Government that it should
> not underestimate the lengths the INCB may go to to
> express "displeasure were the program to go ahead" because
> of "the experience the Swiss have had [censored] in
> relation to their program..."
>
> Now that Swiss program may be about to hit the wall. A
> national referendum for "Youth Without Drugs" has been
> called by an outfit known as the Society for the
> Psychological Knowledge of Mankind. This group is allied
> to parties of the far Right in Switzerland and appears to
> have a great deal of money to promote the idea that heroin
> and methadone should be banned. Rihs notes that the INCB
> "pays attention to" the society's submissions and appears
> to treat it at times as speaking for the Swiss people.
> Previous polls on the heroin trials have been citybased,
> but this vote on September 28 will involve the whole far
> more conservative Swiss electorate. It's thought to have
> a fair chance of success.
>
> That would please Vienna, not so much because the INCB
> believes controlled prescription of heroin can't be
> handled properly by the Swiss or the Australians and
> British for that matter but because of the message
> heroin trials in the West would send to Pakistan, Burma,
> India, Bangladesh and other countries where heroin
> production and addiction are already completely out of
> control. The fear is that these governments would set up
> "trials" of their own as fronts behind which they could
> capitulate in the fight against drugs. Perhaps so, but
> Australia is now asking how much good sense and good
> medicine we should sacrifice to the failed objectives of
> world prohibition. Despite the relentless optimism of the
> INCB's reports, it is clear that the treaties 158 nations
> have now signed are not working. Here are a few facts from
> The Report of the International Narcotics Control Board
> for 1996, published about 90 years down the track from
> that first conference in Shanghai:
>
> 7,9
> * 9 In South and Central America: despite all efforts, more
> cocaine and heroin is heading for North America than ever
> before and causing even more drugrelated crime and
> corruption on the way.
>
> 7,9
> * 9 In "the biggest illicit drug market in the world", the
> United States: regular heroin use is rising while more
> young people than ever are trying cannabis, cocaine, LSD
> and other hallucinogens. The INCB deplores the referendums
> held in California and Arizona that have allowed easy use
> of cannabis "for alleged medical purposes" and
> congratulates Washington on its firm stand "against such
> indirect but evident attempts to legalise cannabis".
> Concern is also expressed that "wellfinanced, nonprofit
> foundations sponsor institutions that are developing
> strategies for the legalisation of drugs".
>
> 7,9
> * 9 In Asia: heroin is everywhere, opium smoking is being
> replaced "unfortunately" by heroininjecting, Burma
> remains one of the largest opium suppliers to the world,
> codeine cough syrups are being abused, and cannabis,
> growing both wild and under cultivation, is supplying
> Europe.
>
> 7,9
> * 9 In Europe: cocaine and heroin are in slight decline,
> synthetic drugs are on the rise, but cannabis remains the
> continent's favourite drug. The INCB is very worried about
> hydroponic cultivation of cannabis indoors particularly
> in the Netherlands and deplores the "ambiguous message"
> of an energy drink launched in Liechtenstein with the name
> Ecstasy. But the massive drugs impact of the fall of the
> Iron Curtain is masked by diplomatic language about "new
> socioeconomic frameworks" needing to find ways "to
> prevent drugrelated crime and to ensure more effective
> border controls". Drugs can now move unchecked across the
> former Soviet Union from the "Golden Crescent" of
> Afghanistan and Pakistan almost to the Baltic.
>
> In the face of all this, the United States and the United
> Nations expect the world to keep on keeping on, trying to
> snare with treaties an international industry now turning
> over $400billion a year. The treaties aren't working
> except to circumscribe and complicate the task of those
> who want to grapple with the real challenges of living in
> a world awash with drugs.