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Major police seizures of drugs such as cocaine, heroin and ice do not seem to have an impact on the number of people who end up in hospital emergency departments, according to a study led by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
The findings indicate drug seizures, rather than eliminating a meaningful amount of drugs from the streets represent just the tip-of-the-iceberg, according to the paper published in the International Journal of Drug Policy.
Researchers examined the monthly number of emergency department presentations for heroin, cocaine and amphetamine-type substances, and the monthly number of arrests and seizures for those same drugs in NSW over the decade to 2011.
“If emergency department presentations are accepted as a guide to drug-related harm, increases in heroin, cocaine and amphetamine-type seizure quantity or frequency have little if any short-term impact on the harms associated with [those] drugs,” the study found.
“The primary implication of the present study is that the number of opioid, cocaine and amphetamine substances drug seizures and the quantities of these drugs seized should not be relied upon, at least in the short term in Australia, as indicators of the effectiveness of supply side drug law enforcement policy.”
It was the first time an Australian study had examined the impact of drugs seizures on emergency department presentations.
Director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and an author of the study, Dr Don Weatherburn, said when the public was presented with large seizures of drugs by police in the media, they were often led to believe those seizures could reduce the number of people who overdosed as well as the number of people arrested for using.
“But if every major seizure has only a limited or no effect on overdoses and arrests, do we need to spend the same amount of money on law enforcement, or could some of the money from law enforcement be directed elsewhere, for example into treatment for users?” Weatherburn said.
However, there was a theory seizures did have the effect of keeping drugs prices high to account for the perceived high-risk of arrest, Weatherburn said, which in turn might mean fewer people bought and used them.
“But are the drug traffickers and drug importers and drug manufacturers so sensitive to drug law enforcement that even winding spending on enforcement and seizures back by, for example, 10% would cause perceived risk to go down and them to reduce their drug prices?” he said.
“It opens the whole question of how much law enforcement do you need to scare the wits out of drug traffickers. Maybe not as much as we’re currently spending.”
Dr Caitlin Hughes, a senior research fellow with the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, described the findings as important.
A review by the centre of data from 2009/10 found federal and state governments spent $1.7bn in response to illicit drug use, including $1.12bn on law enforcement – two thirds of the total spend. Around $361m was spent on treatment.
“We spend a lot of money on drug law enforcement and big seizures are often claimed to be evidence of the positives of this,” Hughes said.
“The fact that the study found that increased high-level seizures either led to increased emergency department presentations and more arrests, or had no impact, is counter to many of the dominant assumptions about law enforcement and suggests there really isn’t evidence that even very large seizures are having much of a suppressive effect on the market or reducing harm to the community.”
But this did not mean spending on law enforcement was futile, she said, given there was no way of knowing what would happen in the absence of such seizures.
“It could be that harms would be much, much greater if not for these seizures,” she said.
“But this does further add to some international evidence which suggests perhaps, given there is such a big difference in scales of investment in drug law enforcement versus other areas, that there may be opportunities to consider whether it may be better to increase some of the investment in the other areas, like treatment and harm reduction.”
A report released last month from the independent thinktank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, found for every dollar invested in rehabilitation, the Australian government would save seven down the track.
President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, Dr Alex Wodak, said he agreed with the researchers that over-investment in drug law enforcement and under-investment in health and social interventions was detrimental.
“But taking money from law enforcement and handing those funds to health and social sectors is asking for trouble,” he said.
“It would be better to redirect the surplus funds within the criminal justice system and fund improved health and social interventions with new money.
“The encouraging development is that more and more countries are coming to the conclusion that relying heavily on drug law enforcement is ineffective, counterproductive and cost ineffective.”
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