The so-called 'war on drugs' has been waged in the US since at least the 1970s, when then President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one.” In Australia, there have been similar efforts to battle drug trafficking and use.
The so-called 'war on drugs' has been waged in the US since at least the 1970s, when then President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one.” In Australia, there have been similar efforts to battle drug trafficking and use. As prescription opioids overtake heroin as a public health emergency, those efforts have expanded to restrict the control and supply of those substances too.
But the evidence suggests that these goals are being frustrated by a number of factors, already touched on in the first two stories of this series.Research conducted for the Therapeutic Goods Administration in 2020 found that sharing opioids was “commonplace” amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants in the study, because of their shared community focus.
Australia’s current investment in alcohol and drug treatment has been conservatively valued at around $1.26 billion per annum - but that investment is small, compared to the estimated social cost per annum of $24 billion.He has said that more money is spent on road safety, which claims less lives than drugs do.
The latest figures from the Institute show that cannabis is the most commonly used drug for Indigenous Australians, followed by cocaine, and pain killer opioids. That problem is even more acute in rural and regional Australia where an estimated 60 percent of the Indigenous population live. But a report card released earlier this year on these targets found many aren't being met, fifteen years after the framework was launched in 2008.
He says a Productivity Commission report concluded that too often, Indigenous communities haven't been involved with program design or implementation - when that is the crucial ingredient to success. The summit is likely to confront the dissonance between the official embrace of harm minimisation, and hardline policing that sees rising numbers of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system on drug offences.
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