Dr. Alex Wodak is director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St. Vincent's Hospital in Australia, and is on the Executive Committee of the International Harm Reduction Association. Below, Dr. Wodak examines the possible causes of decreased heroin availability in Australia.
Heroin availability in Australia increased by about 7-8% a year from the early 1970s until it suddenly decreased by about 20-30% from early in 2001. More than 7 years later, heroin availability in Australia has still not returned to the level it reached in the 1990s. What caused Australia's heroin shortage? And what can be learned from this heroin shortage?
There have been previous heroin shortages. But few have been as deep or lasted as long and none have been studied as extensively. A series of papers in a recent edition of the
International Journal of Drug Policy discussed rival explanations.
A study of the heroin shortage funded by the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund concluded that additional funding provided to drug law enforcement improved the effectiveness of supply control producing critical heroin seizures which disrupted major syndicates. Degenhardt and Hall argue that these factors thereby created the shortage. They dismissed a 79-89% reduction of Burmese heroin production from 1996 to 2004 as 'the least plausible explanation' for the Australian heroin shortage. Virtually all heroin reaching Australia at the time came from Burma. Burmese heroin also supplied Western Canada. Researchers found a sharp fall in the number of drug overdoses and needles and syringes handed out in Vancouver at about the same time as the heroin shortage started in Australia. However Degenhardt and Hall argued that the onset and severity of the shortage in Vancouver and Australia were not closely enough matched to suggest a common origin. Analysis of the quantity of heroin seized in Australia each year did not correlate well with the onset of the heroin shortage. Another contentious aspect of the Degenhardt and Hall study was the choice of a lower standard of proof.
The major lesson from this research is that the most severe, longest lasting and best-documented heroin shortage in the world cannot be confidently attributed, solely or largely, to improved domestic drug law enforcement. At best, domestic law enforcement may have made a small contribution compared to several other factors. Yet drug law enforcement continues to receive the overwhelming majority of government funding in comparison with demand reduction and harm reduction.
--Dr. Alex Wodak, St. Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, NSW, Australia
