A good idea does not constitute a national strategy for tackling crystal methamphetamine, more commonly known as ice, a special report on Australia’s approach to tackling the use of the drug has warned the federal government.
Initiatives from the federal government’s National Ice Taskforce, such as the ‘dob in an ice dealer’ campaign, were unlikely to lead to a noticeable impact on the availability of ice within communities, the report from independent thinktank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said.
“This good idea will most likely divert police resources to the investigation, disruption and prosecution of low-level ice dealers and increase the number of dealers in Australian prisons,” the institute’s report found.
“To address this problem, the National Ice Taskforce is going to have to do more than recommend a few new policy initiatives to target supply, demand and harm reduction.”
The federal government announced the formation of the taskforce in April, saying it would form the foundation of its national ice action strategy.
The latest available national drug data shows 7% of Australians have used some form of methamphetamine at some point. According to the institute, roughly 400,000 Australians were using ice, a highly addictive form of methamphetamine, regularly.
While there is debate as to whether this constitutes an epidemic, it is high by global standards. And while ice use in Australia is stable, it was spreading from cities to regional areas, the report said. There is evidence that the ice being used is also more potent, leading to increased numbers of deaths and other harms.
A national strategy for addressing ice use should focus on two key areas, the institute found; disrupting ice supply where it was manufactured and trafficked instead of just focussing on arresting users, and by getting users into rehabilitation as soon as possible.
“The available research shows conclusively that the costs of treatment and intervention for addiction are far outweighed by the benefits from a criminogenic and healthcare perspective,” the report found.
“A significant body of research has found that a law enforcement model supplemented with healthcare strategies that reduce addiction has the greatest economic impact on the harm caused by addiction.”
For every dollar invested in rehabilitation, the Australian government would save seven down the track, the report said.
An author of the report and visiting fellow at the institute, Vern White, said Australia should learn strategies used by Canada’s capital, Ottawa, to tackle its drugs epidemic.
“I was a cop in Canada for 32 years, and at first it felt like the more drug seizures we made and the more users we arrested, the better job we were doing,” White said.
“My perspective has changed. In the five years since 2009 when we began focusing on targeting traffickers, getting people into treatment, and putting drug education counsellors into every school, we had the greatest success I ever had in my career of policing in terms of curbing use.”
At the time, 14–18 year-olds were on a six-month waiting list for residential drug treatment programs, he said. The Ottawa police service, in the face of government reluctance to fund drug treatment centres for young people, spearheaded a fundraising campaign to raise the money themselves, White said. The police, along with community groups, raised almost $6m for the construction of two youth treatment centres.
“It would be easy for police to just say, leave it to us and let us put drug users away in jail as soon as possible,” he said.
“But for us in Ottawa we used innovative thinking to combine a law enforcement approach that focussed on supply and trafficking with a health approach.”
The police also released drug traffickers on bail conditions that banned them from areas where they had been trafficking, cutting them off from their market, and the names of all dealers were given to hospitals so that treatment could be organised, he said. Often, dealers were themselves users.
Because China was a globally significant source country for ice, White said Australia must also focus its law enforcement efforts on disrupting the Chinese supply route, with the institute’s report calling for “a greater investment in resources to engage and work collaboratively with Chinese enforcement officials”.
Professor Michael Farrell, the director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of NSW, said the report of the National Ice Taskforce was due in December, and that he did not want to pre-empt its findings.
But there was a “clear consensus” among ice experts that rehabilitation programs, combined with community treatment such as mental health services, must be made more broadly available.
“The challenge is, across the country as a whole, particularly in rural and remote settings, it can be hard to make available those programs and deliver services,” Farrell said.
“While we need to keep our minds open to a range of treatment options, we need to ensure that the options we use have some evidence for them, and we need to put the resources where we get the best response to begin with.”
