Word: heroinism
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Making the shortage last will depend on understanding its causes. An Australian National University-Australian Federal Police study to be released this week confirms that the success of police and Customs in stopping heroin at the borders was critical. Between 1992 and 1997, the a.f.p. intercepted 931 kg of heroin; over the next six years they seized 2,467 kg, including around 700 kg in 2000 alone. The historic shortage that followed, the report says, "provided the first opportunity in many decades to see whether supply and enforcement were in any way related." The link has been widely questioned...
...Whether dips in opium cultivation in key heroin-producing regions like the Golden Triangle - the region where Burma, Laos and Thailand meet, and traditionally Australia's main heroin source - also played a part wasn't looked at by the ANU study. But the federal government credits closer cooperation between Customs and federal police and a bigger a.f.p. presence overseas, as well as the simple size advantage Australia has over countries like the U.S. and Britain in coordinating its law-enforcement program. "In the U.S. they have 18,000 police forces; we have only nine," says Justice and Customs Minister Chris...
...latest national figures on heroin use won't be out until November, but in Victoria, where fatal overdose figures slumped from 359 to 49 between 1999 and 2001, deaths last year crept back up to 100. So could heroin make a comeback? Many argue it never really went away. Andrew Murray, executive director of Victoria's Youth Substance Abuse Service, which provides treatment, housing and support to about 2,000 young people each year, says heroin abuse remains common among young people with histories of abuse and violence, who use the drug to numb their emotions. When there...
Tregear, who works with Open Family, a street-based service for children, young people and their families in Footscray, has been helping the disadvantaged in Melbourne's western suburbs for more than two decades. The heroin supply recovered quickly there, he says, but purity - an indicator of supply levels, because dealers dilute with other substances when supply falls - has never returned to the "wild levels" of the late 1990s. He believes fewer overdose deaths and the record numbers of users entering treatment have taken the heroin problem off the front pages. "People think it's all O.K., but that...
That number of heroin deaths was last seen in Victoria in 1995, and Paul Dietze, head of the epidemiology unit at Turning Point, one of Australia's leading drug and alcohol agencies, says it's difficult to know where heroin use is heading: "We might be just in the trough of a cycle at the moment." Pina Bampi could easily have been one of those statistics, and many of the 33-year-old's friends still use the drug every day. Bampi used heroin for seven years, during which time she traveled to Israel for rapid detoxification. Three years...