The 21 May 2012 edition of The Sydney Morning Herald contained an opinion piece by Australia21
Honorary Adviser Vivienne Moxham-Hall, under the headline Policy on Drugs endangers youth.
The thrust of Vivienne’s article is summed up in her
concluding paragraphs:
Our drug policy is a public
health issue. It is criminalising kids and endangering the health and safety of
the youth of today. My experience has shown me drugs aren't going away. It has
shown me prohibition has failed.
Australia needs to look for a
better way of dealing with drug use than turning a blind eye or punishing those
who fall prey to the allure of the promise of happiness in a pill. Portugal's
decriminalisation demonstrates there is a viable alternative that we should be
seriously considering.
Both personally and as Chairman of Australia21, I am
disappointed to hear that there is to be a spill of full-time positions at the
Australian National University’s wonderful School of Music, so that the 32
full-time staff have to apply for positions in a reduced establishment of 20.
Disappointed because I think we as a society should be
moving in the other direction – more engagement with music as high art – and I
have begun considering how to frame an Australia21 project that could examine
the social wellbeing benefits of the Venezuelan program known as El Sistema (“the
system”) and how the lessons from that might be applied in an Australian
context.
El Sistema is a state foundation which watches over
Venezuela's 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras and 270 music
centres, and the instrumental training programmes which make them possible.
While the organisation has 31 symphony orchestras, its greatest achievement is
the 310,000 to 370,000 children who attend its music schools around the country
where it is estimated that 70 to 90 percent of them come from poor
socio-economic backgrounds. The program
is known for rescuing young people in extremely impoverished circumstances from
the environment of drug abuse and crime into which they would likely otherwise
be drawn.
Interestingly, it has always been located under the wing of social
services ministries, not the Ministry of Culture, a fact which has helped it to
survive several changes of government, and political persuasions of government,
over a period of more than 30 years. We
are talking about classical music as a positive force for personal development
and a benefit to society, not simply as recreation, important as the enjoyment
aspect is. As Abreu himself puts it:
Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the
highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony,
mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to
express sublime feelings.
A detailed account of El Sistema’s achievements and history,
including its spread to the United States and the United Kingdom, may be found
in the relevant Wikipedia entry. A video of Abreu talking about El Sistema on
the TED website on the occasion of being awarded the TED Prize may be accessed here,
and a June 2010 TED Blog post on the graduation in Boston of 10 young musicians
from the the El Sistema USA program at New
England Conservatory may be accessed here. These young
musicians were to spread out to seven centres across the United States and
establish “nucleos” – programs and centres that will “teach children to play music,
believe in themselves, and reach for their dreams”.
I would like to see Australia as one of the next to take up
El Sistema, but sadly, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. To mix
the metaphors, we seem to see music as the icing on the cake, not as core
business. But for people “doing it tough”,
and especially their children, music offers great benefits and opportunities.
Post by
Australia21 Board Member Dr Alex Wodak AM, Senior Staff Specialist, Alcohol and
Drug Service, St. Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst, NSW
The War on Drugs, waged for at the last 40 years, has
failed comprehensively. Important leaders of the community in Australia and
other countries now increasingly acknowledge this. Governments in many
countries, including Australia, used a punitive rhetoric and allocated at least
75% of their expenditure in response to drugs to drug law enforcement (such as
customs, police, courts and prisons). While identifying the benefits of this
approach is difficult the many and major harms are self evident. The scientific
debate about drug prohibition is now over.
For decades the global cultivation, production, number of
drug users and number of different types of new drugs all soared. While the
price of street heroin and cocaine in US and Europe fell by more than 80% in
the last 20 years, the purity of street drugs has increased. But drug
prohibition is supposed to make street drugs more expensive, less pure and hard
to get. In an official annual survey, more than 80% of drug users in Australia
said that obtaining drugs like heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and cannabis was
‘easy’ or ‘very easy’. The number of prisoners serving sentences for drug
offences has grown as has the cost of drug prohibition to government, business
and the community.
While the global drug market under prohibition grew
spectacularly, so too did deaths, disease, crime and corruption. The number of heroin overdose deaths in
Australia increased 55 times between 1964 and 1997. The difficulties of
controlling HIV and hepatitis C among people who inject drugs were exacerbated
by the War on Drugs. Adoption of effective harm reduction prevention strategies
was delayed and implementation slowed because of the entrenched commitment to a
War on Drugs. The more intensively drug law enforcement was implemented, the
more violent the drug markets and the more dangerous the street drugs.
The threshold question now is to re-define drugs as
primarily a health and social matter. Funding for health and social
interventions should be raised to the level enjoyed by drug law enforcement
allowing the expansion, quality, attractiveness and effectiveness of drug
treatment to be substantially improved. Funding should be allocated by governments
to maximise the returns on investments. The human rights of people who use
drugs should have the same protection as other members of the community. Change
should be slow, cautious, incremental and carefully evaluated.
Cannabis should be taxed and regulated with packets
required to show warning signs, provide information for those struggling to cut
down or quit and provide consumer information. Hard-to-get but easy-to-lose
licences should be required for major cultivation, wholesale and retail. Purchase
should require proof of age greater than 18. Cannabis should be provided for
medicinal purposes regulated like other medicines.
Needle syringe programmes should be provided in the
community and prisons to maximally protect public health. Medically supervised
injecting centres should be established where there are large drug markets
spilling over into neighbouring streets, parks and supermarkets. Heroin
assisted treatment should be provided to the small minority of severely
dependent heroin users who have not benefited from multiple and diverse
previous treatments. One area where drug law reformers and supporters of the
War on Drugs agree is that 1 kg blocks of 100% pure heroin and cocaine should
not be sold at supermarket check-out counters. There may be a case, if the
results of the above are not considered adequate, for allowing the commercial
sale of small quantities of low concentration selected illicit drugs. Australia
has done this before. Small quantities of edible opium were taxed, regulated and
sold lawfully in Australia until 1906. Coca Cola contained cocaine until
1903.
The choice is between drugs regulated by the state or
regulated by criminals and corrupt police.
In a 26 April post on The
Globe and Mail’s online forum Community Virgin Group founder Sir
Richard Branson, a commissioner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy,
answers readers’ questions about drugs and why the war on drugs has failed.
In response to readers' queries, Sir Richard explores how
global drug policy can be modernized and reformed.
The preservation of the
essential services provided by Australia’s hugely diverse ecosystems has been a
major focus of the Australia21 Board since 2002. Over recent years the
Australia21 ecosystems team has put its efforts into promoting the development
of a National Ecosystem Service Strategy (NESS) and a National Ecosystem
Services Network (NESN). This work is led by Australia21 Director, Geoff
Gorrie. The team includes Australia21 Fellows Professor Mike Archer and Dr
Steven Cork, Australia21 Scholars Peter Ampt, Phillipa Rowland and Simone
Maynard, Dr Jeremy Thompson, Dr Allan Dale and another of our Directors,
Professor Bob Douglas.
Evidence of the diminishing
health of Australian ecosystems is unfortunately not hard to find, with decline
in soil fertility, fisheries stocks, water quality and quantity and loss of
carbon sinks that help local/regional climate regulation. There is both
national and global urgency about the need for a coherent strategy to preserve
ecosystems and the services they provide to humans.
Great potential can be
generated by fostering enthusiasm and passion from innovators and bringing them
together in a flexible network that brings together the interests, skills and
capacities of Federal and State Governments, the private sector, research
communities, local regional bodies and civil society. An approach that
encourages collaboration and builds on existing activity, while creating
opportunities for a broad consistent approach to the national valuation of the
essential suite of services could, Australia 21 believes, contribute
substantially to the solution of many natural resource issues including
biodiversity conservation, bio-sequestration of carbon and indigenous
employment.
In its preliminary proposal
for a NESN, the Australia21 Ecosystems team is suggesting that NESN members
would have the responsibility for overseeing the data needs, the research
activity, and the development of a framework for a coordinated regional
approach to the assessment and management of ecosystem services across the
nation. Australia 21 is currently seeking support from funding agents, to
undertake discussions and a roundtable with the many stakeholders who would be
needed to make the national strategy operational.
People contemplating donating to a non-profit organisation
quite reasonably want to know how much of the money they donate will be applied
to the purpose for which they make their donation, and how much will be expended
on overheads. Many of them will also wonder what other sources of support the
organisation might have, because they want to know whether their donations will
make a difference.
To deal with the second question first, we have sometimes
encountered in personal conversation and in the media an assumption that
Australia21 receives government funding. For example, one media commentator who
was hostile to the findings of our report on illicit drugs policy described us
as “a government-sponsored think tank”.
There is no foundation whatever in this claim, and in fact while we have
on occasion managed to secure funding from government agencies for specific
projects that were of particular interest to them, we have never sought
government support for our running costs because of the potential for our
independence to be compromised. In order to ensure our independence our preference is for our running costs to
be derived from a widely dispersed group of contributors.
Regarding the running costs themselves, we keep them to what
we regard as the irreducible minimum:
- Because we are a registered non-profit with Gift
Tax Deductibility, as a matter of law our Directors receive no remuneration for
their efforts in running the company, fundraising, or representing the company
at public events.
- We maintain a small secretariat: a part time
Executive Director who works a nominal two days a week and routinely contributes
extra time, for which we are grateful; a part time office administrator who
comes in for a few hours a week, and a part-time book-keeper.
- Our office is a single room in the former
Weston Primary School in the Australian Capital Territory, which the ACT
Administration has renovated as a centre for NGO offices. Our monthly rental is
currently $295.
- We conduct our Board meetings by monthly
teleconference: face to face meetings are a rarity.
- Our accounting and audit costs are provided
at concessional rates, but in order to be permitted to raise funds in some
jurisdictions we are still required to have a full annual audit of our accounts,
notwithstanding recent changes to the Corporations Law.
Averaging all of these costs over the year we need about
$4,000 per month or $48,000 per annum to provide the infrastructure which
enables us to undertake our projects and communicate the results to the public.
We also do our best to keep project costs to a minimum. We can usually find a university willing to
provide us at no charge with a venue for our conferences and roundtables, as
the Australian National University and Melbourne University have done on several
occasions, and as the University of Sydney did for our recent roundtable on
illicit drugs.
We encourage participants in our roundtables to meet their
own travel and accommodation costs where they are able to do so, but always
budget to meet the costs of some participants as we do not want capacity to pay
to be a limiting factor on participation.
Our directors participate in these events without fee. On
occasions we pay a suitably qualified person to write a discussion paper for a
roundtable, or to prepare a major research report. Usually we can identify a person with very
high level expertise who can prepare a top quality review paper quickly and who
is prepared to do so for “mates’ rates”. Where that suitably qualified person
happens to be a Director of Australia21 we will pay them a modest fee, but many
of our Directors waive their right to the fee, or donate it to Australia21.
When all is said and done, the cost of running a roundtable including
preparation of a commissioned paper, and write-up and publication of the
report, typically comes to around $25,000.
The above figures will illustrate why small donations are
important to Australia21. We get a lot
of bang for the buck, and depend upon private donors for our running costs.
To illustrate the point: within a few days of the release of
our report on illicit drugs (see here)
over 3000 visitors downloaded it from our website. If each of these visitors
had donated a tax-deductible $10 to Australia21, that would have covered over
60% of our running costs for a year, or alternatively have funded a new
project, such as the studies we are seeking to finance on Regreening Australia
(see here)
or a roundtable on the applicability to Australia of the Portuguese experience
in the decriminalisation of drug use.
So be assured that small donations really do matter, and
will be appreciated by Australia21. If you want to support our work, please
visit www.australia21.org.au and
hit the Donate button to make a tax deductible
donation. And tell your friends about us.
In an article in The
Conversation today 1 May 2012 Australia21 Director Dr Alex Wodak says it is
time for a Plan B in the war on drugs:
At the Summit
of the Americas in Colombia, on 14 to 15 April, over 30 heads of government
(including US President Barack Obama) took part in a closed-door discussion
about the failure of the war on drugs. President Obama was forced to concede
that this discussion was legitimate. And conservative Canadian Prime Minister
Steve Harper surprised many at the summit when he also conceded that the war on
drugs had failed.
Nigel Inkester, a former chief of MI6 in the United Kingdom, declared
on 17 April that the war on drugs had been lost and that drug legalisation had
to be considered.
First academics started saying these things, then retired politicians,
judges and police chiefs. Now serving presidents and prime ministers are also
finally admitting that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
When Plan A doesn’t work, it’s time to think about Plan B. As Gramsci
said, “the old is dead but the new is not yet born.
