Political dope: John Howard's 'drug war'

Political dope: John Howard's 'drug war'

On 2 November 1997 a press release buzzed from John Howard's office: 'Prime Minister Tough on Drugs'. It announced the Federal Government's National lllicit Drug Strategy, filling the great emptiness left by the scuttling of the ACT 'Heroin Trial' in September and following reports in early October of plans to exclude methadone treatment from Medicare. Howard's $87.5 million package
provoked disappointment amongst drug professionals, with in-house e-mail exchanges noting that its grandstanding language promised only a costly expansion of the 'zero tolerance' American system. 'Zero tolerance' means the technical removal of distinctions between different types of drug, different types of user, different degrees of 'offence', and no mitigating circumstance in the legal process. Zero tolerance also desocializes drugs, denies them an anthropology and history, and recasts the aim of drug policy-making as absolutist and punitive.