Greg Barns, a former senior advisor to the Howard Government and erstwhile Democrat makes the case that "Van Nguyen is another victim of the refusal by the global community to end the futile policy of zero tolerance towards illicit drugs. If there was a more realistic approach to illicit drugs by countries then barbaric acts like the state sanctioned death of Van Nguyen would be consigned to history.
I agree with this view. The mindless differentiation between different classes of opiates has led generations of young people into a nightmare world of criminality, poor health outcomes and overdose deaths. The legal opiate trade is managed under strict licence in countries like Australia and India. Opiate produced under these arrangements cannot be refined into heroin, the most effective painkiller devised by humans, because it is illegal. Morphine and other opiate by-products are utilised as pain managers by health professionals as an essential component of the legal pharmacopia, but heroin is only available on the drugs black market, and is produced by countries such as Burma and Afghanistan that are outside the legitimate opiate management regimes.
If all drugs were legalised, all opiate growers (for example) could be brought within the legitimate opiate production regulatory regime that benefits Australian producers. At the same time, heroin would become available as a pain management drug, of especial benefit to people experiencing extreme pain such as many with terminal conditions. All forms of drug abuse would be managed as the social and health problems they are, in the way that alcohol and prescribed drug addiction is managed today.
If this makes sense perhaps you could write to your Members of Parliament and let them know that this madness has gone on long enough, that zero tolerance of certain types of drugs has been an abject failure and it is about time public policy makers adopted a civilised and humane approach to drug use.
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