The federal government has committed more than $300m in new funding over four years for the treatment of methamphetamine addicts and support for their families, in a comprehensive report launched on Sunday by the National Ice Taskforce.
The overwhelming focus in the report on tackling the problem from a grassroots level, including prevention measures such as educating children about the drug from the time they are in primary school, has been widely applauded by the health sector.
Most of the money – $241m – will go to the country’s 31 primary health networks which will then allocate the funding towards addiction treatments for ice and other drugs. The networks will use their local knowledge to determine where best to direct the money.
An additional $13m will be used to fund new Medicare items so that people can access government-funded addiction medicine specialists, a move the government hopes will make treatment more accessible.
A further $24.9m will be used to create resources support services for communities and families most affected by ice, while $18.8m will be used to establish a new Centre for Clinical Excellence to research and tackle emerging drugs of concern.
Making the announcement at St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said while a strong response from law enforcement was critical, it was impossible to “arrest our way to success”.
“We need to do a lot more,” he said. “Proportionally, Australians use more methamphetamines, including ice, than almost any other country,” he said.
“The reported use of ice has more than doubled since 2007, with an estimated 200,000 people reported using the drug in 2013. Anecdotal evidence suggests today, this is even higher.”
One of the big differences between ice and other drugs is that ice has the biggest impact on dopamine, strongly associated with the reward system in the brain, creating a strong “high” and increasing its addictive potential.
Its high potency compared with other methamphetamines means users can become highly aggressive and paranoid while on the drug, causing themselves and others significant harm, and overwhelming emergency department staff and police who respond to them. Recent research suggests its strength and purity has also risen in the past few years.
Because of this, rehabilitation programs for ice addiction need to run for longer than programs used to treat those addicted to other kinds of drugs, however this was not always possible.
The government announced the formation of the ice taskforce in April to tackle the problems of demand, sale and manufacture of the drug, headed by former Victorian police commissioner, Ken Lay.
St Vincent’s Health Australia CEO, Toby Hall, said St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney had the greatest number of emergency department presentations and the largest number of admissions related to methamphetamines in New South Wales.
This was why the taskforce’s focus on treatment was so essential, he said.
“The government has clearly listened to the taskforce and those working on the front line of the problem,” Hall said.
“Its recommendations around tailoring solutions to the needs of individual communities; a national public awareness campaign on methamphetamine and its effects; better connections between services and agencies to help people in need; significant extra resources for treatment services; and more training for frontline workers and GPs to help in prevention and early intervention, have been embraced.”
The CEO of Mental Health Australia, Frank Quinlan, praised the commitment to better coordinate the mental health system and the alcohol and drug treatment systems.
“These problems frequently coexist and we must ensure a service system that is built around the needs of individuals who require support,” he said.
The head of the Public Health Association of Australia, Michael Moore, said evidence had shown early treatment was the best way to deal with illicit drugs. Reduction in demand for the drug was essential to make it a less attractive market for drug dealing and distribution networks, he said.
“The most vulnerable people in the lowest socioeconomic areas are often the last to receive funding,” Moore said.
“This announcement marks the first steps in a sensible return to realign funding, focus and efforts into moving away from a largely prohibitionist approach to the much more effective approach of harm minimisation.”
The justice minister, Michael Keenan, said local police were working with intelligence and policy agencies in Mexico, Iran, China and other countries to stop the drug from entering the country and to arrest drug kingpins.
But ice was extremely easy to manufacture and, while demand was high, he said it would be “impossible” for law enforcement alone to stop the harm ice was causing to communities.
“If we are going to break the drug dealer’s model, we need to smash demand,” Keenan said.
“We need to work with local communities. Government alone can not tackle this issue. We need to help people get off this drug, and we need to make sure people never, ever start.”
The latest available national drug data shows 7% of Australians have used some form of methamphetamine at some point.
