Free Needles for Drug Dealers

Redfern’s $50m heroin turnover

A senior police officer with the Redfern area command, Sergeant Paul Huxtable, in a submission obtained by The Australian, says drug use is so much the norm on The Block that six-year-old children mill around the needle exchange bus as it daily dispenses clean syringes by the hundreds.

But wait…there’s more.

One eight-year-old child had committed 31 criminal offences including sexual assault, he said.

Sergeant Huxtable went on to say;

… more than 1 million syringes were handed out in The Block under a government-funded needle exchange program in 2001. At the current price for heroin of $50 per street deal, “if the current syringe handout is consistent with 2001, we have an annual turnover of over $50 million tax free”, he said.

He admits the figures may be a bit course but it still points to the ‘Block’ problems being more drug associated than ‘race’

…The Block’s problems had “little to do with race and everything to do with pure old-fashioned human greed. It is about the protection of a lucrative heroin trade”. “The needle bus has been like a honey pot for drug addicts and dealers from all over Sydney looking for an area where drugs are tolerated,”

Great, isn’t it? We have a deadly drug killing our kids and filling prisons and in response the Government help the dealers. You’d think the evil bastards could afford their own syringes. If we are going to officially help the drug dealers why don’t Occupational Health and Safety insist they give the addicts free clean syringes. Years ago I was at a BBQ at Canberra and had drinks with a senior AFP Inspector. In giving him the benefit of my opinion, as one does after a few beers, I told him what the world needs is a war against drugs. He replied – We already have one. No, I countered, I mean a war like D Day. Bombers, tanks, napalm…. I always thought a good start would be a coordinated napalm mission targeting all the opium fields in Columbia, Turkey, Burma and particularly Afghanistan (a major cash crop for terrorists). Time and time again we have stats that indicate as the supply of heroin dries up so associated crime and overdose deaths fall. Pictures of ‘crispy critters’ in burnt out poppy fields would certainly slow down worker recruitment and heroin production. Still, as my left wing detractors would say, a simplistic answer to a complicated problem but I do like to distill problems down to their base elements. Supply and demand. Kill the supply and watch demand fall.