A new report into ice has found that current responses by governments and agencies to the “ice epidemic” have not worked and called for a paradigm shift in strategies to combat the illicit drug in Australia.
The report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute argued that traditional efforts to counter ice use had “failed” and that new initiatives such as the formation of the National Ice Task Force earlier this year were “at best holding some ground in the crisis”.
“The fundamental reality of Australia’s ice epidemic is that the harm is not ice use but the impacts that ice use has on the individual and the community,” the report said.
It was critical of the former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s response to the crisis, which was to increase policing rather than look at prevention and treatment, labelling it counterproductive and politically motivated.
“Trying to target ice, or even ice use, while politically constructive, might prevent the development of strategies that are likely to have a greater harm reduction value,” it said.
The problem with Ice:
- A significantly large proportion of Australians (by global standards) use ice.
- Despite law enforcement agencies’ record seizures, the price of ice for Australian users is statistically stable, and the drug’s availability is spreading from capital cities to bush towns.
- From street dealers to global organised crime syndicates, there are big profits to be made in Australia’s ice market.
- Australia’s families and communities are feeling the impacts of this problem daily.
The report also notes that by global standards a significant number of Australians use ice, and do so frequently.
There is a call for less focus on policing and arrests and for more attention to harm minimization, community needs and community empowerment.
“A principled approach in the development of an ice strategy that’s strategically focused on reducing harm to Australian communities, not on seizing drugs or making arrests,” the report stated.
“With this focus, strategists and policymakers will be able to develop surgical interventions to disrupt the factors that contribute to harm, and not merely the symptoms of the problem.
Moving towards a solution
- Integration: Drug strategies have a better chance of being successful when all of their initiatives are integrated into a strategically focused harm reduction strategy.
- Innovation: Education, health and law enforcement stakeholders should be free from the limitations of wholly quantitative performance measures.
- Disruption: Initiatives to tackle the ice problem should be focused on the disruption of the problem, rather than the treatment of symptoms of the problem.
Study: Arrests not the solution
The national ice taskforce has already recommended drug treatment and education over drug policing to deal with the problem.
Taskforce chair and former Victoria Police commissioner Ken Lay will advise the federal government this week to focus on the ice scourge as a health problem rather than a law and order issue, the Courier-Mail reported on the weekend.
The newspaper also said Tony Abbott rejected the advice of an earlier Parliamentary Library report on ice, which said drug treatment was more cost-effective than drug policing.
Mr Abbott believed police could “arrest their way out of the problem” and allocated $1 million for a national hotline encouraging people to "dob in a dealer".
"These studies have consistently shown better outcomes and treatment is more cost-effective than incarceration," the report said.
