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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-16 Daily Xml
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DRUGBEAT

The Hon. A. BRESSINGTON (16:03): I move:

That this council recognises the valuable work and outcomes achieved by the DrugBeat Program of South Australia in Elizabeth Grove over the last 14 years and that this program:

1. was the first to develop a painless and humane detoxification process for opiate addiction and methadone;

2. was the first to use naltrexone in a therapeutic situation for opiate addiction;

3. was the first to recognise the need for a structured and sequential recovery program for addicts;

4. was the first to recognise the need to include family in the recovery process;

5. was the first to develop a proactive parenting program for recovered addicts to break the generational cycle of addiction; and

6. fulfilled all three objectives of the harm minimisation policy, those being to reduce the harm, reduce the demand and reduce the supply of illicit drugs.

It was 14 years ago that DrugBeat opened its doors in Elizabeth Grove. It will close its doors on 30 June of this year, after 14 years of dedicated service to the community, always striving for best practice. There have never been any concerns raised about the program, about how we conduct our business, our financial management, nothing. Our funding was cancelled out of the blue because apparently our submission was substandard. I will go into that in just a moment.

First of all, I want to make it very clear that I am convinced this was a political decision, political as in the politics behind drug policy in this state, but also a political decision that I believe leads straight to the Premier's office. Just as background on this, when I made it very clear to the Premier that I was not going to support the extended trading hours legislation, he said to me, 'Well, then it's time to go to the trading table.' When I asked him what that meant, his reply was, 'Well, what have we got that you want?'

This followed two previous meetings where I naively expressed my concerns for the future of the DrugBeat program. It occurred to me, at the time of that conversation, that I could have asked for double the funding for DrugBeat and it probably would have happened because the Premier was a desperate man, at that time. We all know that this is how decisions are made in this government, not in the best interests or for the true welfare of the people of this state, but out of self-interest and because debts owed to the powerbrokers of this state need to be paid, those who head up the unions. It is that simple. We are in trouble.

Of course we all know how that story ended. The Hon. Mr Darley changed his mind, for whatever reason, and the deciding vote was no longer in my hands. Two days after that deal was sealed and two weeks after the due date that we were to be notified, DrugBeat received a letter stating that our funding had been discontinued. Then, we have the Treasurer on the 7.30 Report on Friday night, when challenged on the priorities of this government, who was asked, 'Are you comfortable with the fact that DrugBeat of SA's funding has been cancelled but the Adelaide Oval went ahead?' Dear the Hon. Mr Snelling said, 'Well, the people in my electorate like football. I'm very comfortable with the decision that we've made and I'm very comfortable with our priorities.'

The people in my electorate, the people who live where I live and where I worked for 14 years, have been kicked in the guts. The only abstinence-based treatment program in the north will close on 30 June. The Hon. Mr Hill talks about open and transparent government. In 1999, Dean Brown went against all advice from Drug And Alcohol Services to fund our program. He went against all advice to provide us with a premises to work from, and he did that because he spent the time, he came out, he spoke to our clients, he spoke to our parents, he was a hands-on minister who ran his department.

He showed up on open day with a prepared speech in his pocket and after he had spent an hour speaking to clients, Mr Dean Brown tore up the speech that had been written for him by his bureaucrats, who told him to distance himself from our program and from me (I was referred to as 'the crazy lady from the suburbs'), and he spoke from his heart. On that day, he promised that if he remained in government he would expand the DrugBeat program by seven more houses in the Adelaide metropolitan area because of the outcomes that we were already achieving after one year and without any funding whatsoever. He had faith in us. As a result of that, we have always strived for best practice. We have always tried to honour the faith that was put in us by the then minister for health and ageing, the Hon. Dean Brown. We also did it because our community was in dire straits.

When we moved into that area, when I first went to look at the premises that Dean Brown was going to provide us, I cried. It was being used as a flophouse. It was being used as a shooting gallery. There were discarded needles spread everywhere, human faeces spread across the walls, windows were smashed, doors were smashed. This former Friends of the Elderly facility was being completely demolished by youth in our area who had no direction.

Within 12 months of being in Elizabeth Grove, three drug dealers moved out of the street. We had kids at the age of eight, nine, 10, 11 and 12 knocking on our door cold, coming to ask us, 'What do we do? Our parents are drug addicts; what do we do? How can you guys help us?' We worked with those children. We saved the life of a 12 year old who overdosed on her father's antipsychotic medications. Those kids had enough faith in us to come and tell us when they were in trouble.

We rocked up to work on a Tuesday morning and there was a sign painted on our front fence. We did not initiate it and we still do not know who put it there. The sign said, 'Don't let them close this down.' We have had neighbours come to us and say, 'Thank God; we no longer get up every morning having to go out and pick up discarded syringes in our front yard before our children or grandchildren can go out there and play.'

We have had people from the very street that we were in come and knock on our door and ask for help for their children. It was people who had been involved with the DrugBeat program who exposed the house of horrors in the street behind us. Our community started to grow a conscience. Our community started to wake up, because they knew that we were there to help them. They knew that we were from that community ourselves and that we genuinely cared for their safety and well being and wanted to provide them and their children with every possible avenue to live their lives well.

The DrugBeat of South Australia Program is an existential program, and the basis of an existential program is that everybody has the right to exist well. If they need help, assistance and support to do that, then we provide that help, that assistance and that support. We have done that exceptionally well. The DrugBeat of South Australia Program has an unrefuted 95 per cent success rate—not over three months, not over six months, not over nine months: over seven years.

Our clients seven years later are still drug-free. We have had clients—graduates I will say—go on to get their nursing degrees, to get their teaching degrees. We have had lawyers come out of our program. Just last year, the very first client that we ever treated graduated with an engineer's degree.

Tell me that these are not the outcomes that we want for people who at some point in their life cannot even get out of bed in the morning, cannot even relate to their families. These are the outcomes that we are supposed to be paying for with our taxpayer dollars. We have done this on $4.2 million of state money over this period of time—not a year, but over this entire period of time. We estimate that we have saved the community and the government around $450 million. We have saved $450 million, and it could only get better because we do not get referrals from DASSA (Drug and Alcohol Services).

They do not send people to us to try to get people off drugs because their statistics have to look good and their retention rates have to look good. No, we get our clients by word of mouth. For every one person who has come through our program, they have brought at least 10 others with them—after their friends see what they have got, the quality of life they have got, the recovery that they have got and the fact that they can move forward with their life. Their friends want what they have got, and they come and do the program and 95 per cent of them succeed—95 per cent. Who else could boast that? I do not say it lightly.

We know that addiction is a high relapse disorder. Everybody knows that. DASSA would have us believe that addicts may recover after 10, 15, 20 or 25 years on methadone—maybe—that one day they may wake up and have a spontaneous healing episode. Guess what? It does not work like that. The clowns who pass themselves off as experts, who keep our children, our mothers and our fathers addicted to drugs because—and only because—it serves their own political agenda should be inquired into now because they are not using the millions of dollars they get in taxpayer dollars for the benefit of our community. They are not interested in getting people off drugs.

I have a statement from one of the people that we were referred to (because we have nowhere to refer our clients now, of course) from the northern health service. I might add, before I go on to that, that the program manager rang the northern health service and asked for a service that would be able to support our clients, because some of our clients are going to have to leave the program midstream, which is very traumatic for them. This is going to be the most vulnerable time of their recovery and we have got to close our doors. There is no proper wind-up process to this. It is just: get out, the funding is gone. So our clients are now left. Who knows? They could neck themselves. This is not a consideration of the people who made this decision. This is not a consideration of our Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse. They do not care. 'Kick them out!'

Where do we refer them? Our program manager said we need a program that understands central nervous system disorders; that understands dry-drug, dry-drunk; that is able to deal with grief and loss issues; that is able to deal with early childhood issues; and that is able to deal with abuse and trauma issues and domestic violence issues. My program manager said there was stone cold silence on the other end of the phone—stone cold silence. So she referred us to DASSA, which is not abstinence-based. However, there were four to five-week waiting periods for DASSA and they have a harm reduction program with a spectrum incorporating harm minimisation and hoping—hoping—the end result would be abstinence. Wish, hope, dream. There is no plan to get them there, just a hope.

DASSA has relapse prevention groups—not abstinence-based of course, 'seeking safety model'. So, relapse prevention with safe but recreational use. Our clients do not recreationally use. Second Story for clients under 25 years of age, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, ADIS 24-hour counselling service, that is, Australian Drug Information Service. Our clients do not need information on drugs because they are not using them any more. They need information on recovery, and they need support to be able to move forward with their recovery by dealing with their grief and loss issues, their trauma and abuse issues and their domestic violence issues. But nobody offers that counselling, that quality of counselling, in any of the services that we have been asked to refer our clients to.

We have treated teachers, anaesthetic nurses, aged care nurses, public servants, aged care workers, gays and lesbians, youth who have been bullied and harassed at school, homeless youth, those who have been sexually abused, victims of domestic violence, perpetrators of domestic violence, prostitutes, bikies, operators of heavy machinery from the mines, long-term addicts who have never been able to secure or maintain meaningful employment, university students, carpenters, plumbers, mechanics, high school students who have succumbed to the stress of study and work and have turned to the use of amphetamines as a coping mechanism, small business owners, social workers (and, curiously, some of those are doing a Cert. IV at TAFE on drug and alcohol), TAFE students, housewives and mothers, and people who have been diagnosed with a various range of mental illnesses, such as bipolar, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

These people had three things in common: they used drugs, the drug use had become problematic (they had crossed the line and become addicted), and all were dealers to support their habit. Even the mums at home with their children were dealing drugs to support their habit, and 95 per cent of these people are not involved in that sleazy lifestyle any more; 95 per cent of these people are at home, at work, at study, getting on with their lives. But we were told in our debrief that, for our submission to get past the first stage of scrutiny, outcomes were not a priority. No, no, no—it was the quality of the submission.

I know that this procurement board believed that some little hick organisation from Elizabeth Grove, some dummy from the organisation, had written that submission. But I knew last October when we were asked to retender for this that we were in trouble. I said to the chief executive, 'We will get somebody to write a submission, somebody whose job its to understand the quality of submission needed.' So, we sourced a federal health and ageing bureaucrat, whose previous job, just 12 months ago, was to assess and evaluate submissions. But even that submission was not good enough for the State Procurement Board of South Australia, because we have such excellent services in South Australia.

The PRESIDENT: Hear, hear!

The Hon. A. BRESSINGTON: So, it would not have mattered who wrote that submission, how thorough that submission was or how many i's were dotted and how many t's were crossed: that submission from DrugBeat of South Australia would never have been good enough, because Drug and Alcohol Services never wanted DrugBeat to get this funding in the first place—never wanted DrugBeat to have this funding. The Hon. Dean Brown let us know, in April 2000, that we had been granted funding and he said, 'The process is underway and the money should be in your bank account by the end of the week.' That week came and went; that month came and went; May came and went; July came and went; October came and went—no money. Dean Brown believed the money had already been put into our account. When I contacted him and said, 'WTF, where is the money?' he was shocked. He thought that it had all been taken care of.

This is the same organisation that said to him, 'Don't go anywhere near this organisation, distance yourself from them. She's the crazy lady from the suburbs, she doesn't know what she's talking about. You don't need this headache.' They delayed our funding by almost nine months. This is the very same organisation we went to after we had been using naltrexone for 12 months—and successfully using naltrexone—for heroin and methadone addiction. We went to Drug and Alcohol Services in good faith and told them the protocols because they were just about to start a trial on naltrexone. We thought, to be fair to addicts, and only to addicts, we would share with them what we had learnt over a 12-month period—that, no, naltrexone just on its own is not a golden bullet.

People on naltrexone need counselling. If they get the right kind of counselling, they will only be on naltrexone for a very short period of time. Naltrexone is non-addictive and people can come off it whenever they like. We laid out our protocol and what we had been doing to get the successes that we had been getting—we were laughed at. They did exactly the opposite: they detoxed these people in a hospital, they put them under anaesthetic first, they detoxed them, they put them on naltrexone, and by that afternoon these people were released onto the street with no support and, even if they had nowhere to go, they were left to wander around in an anaesthetic haze. That was their naltrexone trial so that they could write the paper and say, 'It doesn't work.'

We were the first organisation to develop a humane and painless detox for methadone using buprenorphine, or Temgesic as we knew it then. Low doses over a 10-day period could get a person off 120 milligrams of methadone, which would normally take, with the reduction process, around two years for them to detox properly and to stop feeling the signs and symptoms of withdrawal. Again, Drug and Alcohol Services Warrinilla, our detox centre, was about to do a trial on buprenorphine and use it for detox.

Again, in good faith and as part of our responsibility to make sure that addicts could access the best possible treatment, we spoke to their doctor, Dr Jason White (their pharmacologist) who was going to head up this trial for detox using buprenorphine. We had been using this, remember, for 12 months, the first organisation, service provider, in Australia to use this method—100 per cent success at detox, no ifs, buts or maybes—because it was painless and, if they had a job, people continue to go to work through the day, take their Temgesic and come down off methadone (and 120 milligrams at that).

We said that we started them off on very low doses, that the most that they would have in a day would be two milligrams, that they popped a tablet under their tongue every hour and detoxed through the day over a 10-day period, and that then they could go onto naltrexone after that until they got counselling, if that is what they wanted to do—again, we were laughed at. What did Drug and Alcohol Services do? It introduced detoxification using buprenorphine with clients on 16 milligrams a day and then reduced them from 16 milligrams down.

In the minds of pharmacologists, that is back to front, because you usually start with the lowest dose and work up. You do not start with the very highest dose and then try and work down. The result of that failed detoxification process was that people were suffering with agoraphobia and paranoia because their system was overloaded with buprenorphine. And who was having to clean up that mess? DrugBeat, of course.

DASSA's clients were coming to DrugBeat saying they had been put through this most horrendous process. They had stayed in Warinilla for six days doing this detox and it was only seven days after they were released from Warinilla that they started to experience detox from the buprenorphine, which is even more severe than detoxification from methadone.

This organisation known as the drug and alcohol services council did not want any information from anybody, especially not this crazy lady from the suburbs. Why? I do not believe they want to fix this problem. I do not believe they want to find a cure for addiction, because there is an empire that depends on having addicts in the system, and the more the better, because the more they have, the more taxpayer money they will get. That is the bottom line.

Nobody sitting in this place knows more about the policy and the politics behind the drug issue than I do. I have not learnt it out of a book; I have not read it out of ministerial statements; I have not read it out of policy and procedures. I have lived it. I have seen the subversive attitude of these people and the fact that they will use drug addicts as lab rats. They treat them like garbage, and they get paid to do this.

They get paid to do this and they are our children, our grandchildren, our family that they are mucking around with. They have no conscience, and I sat with these very same people for four years on the Australian National Council on Drugs, the peak advisory body to the Prime Minister. What was their main concern? For four years, what did we talk about? Retractable syringes and how many fit boxes we could fit in public toilets.

That was the priority of our drug policy at the federal level. They were not worried about getting cannabis off the street. No; they were quite happy for that legalisation movement to just roll on, and they did not respond to any of the ridiculous research that was put out about heroin trials, shooting galleries and legalisation of drugs. Why? Because some of the very people at the top of the decision-making cycle of this are involved with the drug legalisation movement.

I have mentioned Dr Wodak in here many times. He is head of drug and alcohol services in New South Wales and he believes that cannabis should be sold from every post office in Australia. He is in charge of drug and alcohol services. He is the one who is making decisions about what treatment road they go down in New South Wales. That is why they have their shooting gallery. Professor Robert Ali, head of Drug and Alcohol Services here, I know for a fact is linked at the hip with Dr Alex Wodak, and I know that they support the Parliamentary Group on Drug Law Reform.

This is an incestuous little circle that is perpetrating misery. This is the industry of human misery, and nobody cares. Nobody cares that people's lives are on the line because these people want to pursue a political agenda. That is the other side of the politics of the decision behind the cancelling of DrugBeat money, and nobody will convince me any differently.

Let us look at the other achievement of the DrugBeat program. We were the first to recognise the need for family involvement in the recovery process. When we first made it clear to our funding body that we were going to include family, that we were going to run a parent group, and that we were going to help parents to cope with the behaviour of an addict both before and after detox, do you know what we were told? 'Well, we won't be referring people to you. If you are going to include family members, we won't be referring people to you because that simply doesn't work.'

All my research showed that it did work—research from programs in Italy, Spain, and Sweden. As for the 5 per cent in our program who do not make it, guess what? Their family does not come. Family involvement was crucial not only to support the addict but to try to reconcile those bridges that had been burnt by an addict's behaviour—the thieving, the lying, the deception. It was time to start helping people to heal. The ironic part about this was that we found that parents were coming to our program before their addicted child and going home and changing their behaviour.

Within 10 weeks of changing the way they were talking to them, changing their expectations of them, putting reasonable limits and boundaries in place and allowing them to take responsibility for the decisions they were making, their kids were following them into the program because life was not easy any more. They were not being rescued, they were not being enabled, they were being given the opportunity to experience the full consequences of the choices they were making. And guess what? They did not like it, so they came along to get the help they needed. They succeeded.

The next step was to develop a proactive parenting program for recovered addicts. It became obvious over a period of time that an addict can take over their own recovery. They can take responsibility for it, but they did not have the skills to cope with the pressures and the stresses of having to change the way that they related to their children because of their years in the drug culture. So, we researched that, and we developed a six-month proactive parenting program to help them change their behaviour and break that generational cycle of addiction.

Those parents went on to be able to grow their children up in a reasonable way, to get those children back to school, to get some systems in place at home, some normality. The parents had to make sure that they fulfilled their roles and responsibilities. We got them to run their home and their family as you would run a business: set up a schedule, set up a timetable, break down roles and responsibilities, and do a checklist and time lines of when things were done, to get them into that structure—and it worked.

Those kids went back to school and they finished their education. They are now moving into high school and university. These are kids who would still be caught up in the drug culture because that was their first five years of life experience, and that is what makes or breaks us—that first five years. That is not my research, that is out there for everybody to know.

Then, of course, to fulfil the objectives of our harm minimisation or harm reduction policy, to reduce the harm we eliminated it. We eliminated it to reduce demand. We had people go back to their bikie mates who had a crop growing in the shed with 3,000 plants and take the stuff back because our program is proactive with that. We would give our clients three days to make up their minds, and would say to them, 'Either you take that stuff back, or we call the cops.' They chose to take it back, so the supply and demand were also diminished via our program. Because our clients did not use drugs anymore, the demand was on a decline.

I challenge anyone in here to tell me that this procurement board—and this was all included in our submission—could look at this and say, 'outcomes aren't a priority' and mean it, or say that they were not convinced that the taxpayers were getting bang for buck out of our program. The other thing—and I should have included this in the reference points—was quality assurance.

The NGO sector was called to a meeting nine years ago by the department of health, and we were told that there was going to be a quality assurance program put in place. It as going to be called the 'service excellence framework' and that every non-government organisation needed to participate in this process. It was a tough process: it was quality assurance but, if you did not get it, you would never be considered for funding.

If you did not have the little emblem on your letterhead that said that you had achieved quality assurance—under the service excellence framework—do not even bother to submit for funding. If you did have it, it was a very good signal that you were going to be good quality; that you had done your work, had met certain standards, and that your organisation should be funded. We have had that status for four years. We are one of the only organisations to reach award level. Others are still in certificate level, whereas we have reached award level, which means our policies, procedures and internal systems are of international standards.

What did the debrief say? They were not sure about our ability: our policy and procedures for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients was lacking. Well, do you know why it was lacking? It was because, in 14 years, we have never had one single Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person in our program. Our policy was to refer those clients to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander service 250 metres down the road at the Lyell McEwin Hospital.

That was our policy, but apparently our policy and procedures were lacking. When I said to the person doing the debrief, 'That is what this is for: this certificate says our policy and procedures are of international standard and are all acceptable for the award level of the service excellence framework,' she did not even know what the service excellence framework was—did not even know.

I then went on to ask, 'Of these mysterious 14 organisations where this same pool of money is going to be spread around, did they have the service excellence framework? Had they achieved this?' Her response was, 'Well, you know, striving for best practice is a process; it is a process, and these organisations are in the process of getting service excellence.'

Well, we have had it for four years, and we have been audited for it, and we continue to strive for best practice. We continue to upgrade to make sure that that status is maintained because, if we do not, we lose the status, but it does not seem to matter because, no matter what DrugBeat of South Australia does, it is never good enough.

I am not moving this motion today expecting the minister to reverse the decision. That is not my intention. DrugBeat would not go back and do this again for the same amount of money because, for the first time in 14 years, our staff are under stress.

Another reason we were given as to why our tender failed was that our clinical supervision was not up to par. We have clinical supervision of our program manager. That clinical supervisor is the same one who Mental Health Services use. So, does that mean that Mental Health Services' clinical supervision is under par as well and it is going to be defunded? I think not. Our program manager has achieved the qualification of clinical supervisor. So, she clinically supervises our other staff, but even that is not good enough, that we would have our own clinical supervisor on premise, that that clinical supervisor is clinically supervised every quarter and that she is a qualified clinical supervisor and used by the mental health system. As I said, nothing DrugBeat does would ever be good enough.

We have had three independent university evaluations of the program done by the University of South Australia. Those evaluations were included in our submission. I have a couple of little quotes. This is from the service excellence auditor and the executive summary:

ADTARP provides a specialised treatment program that approaches the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of recovery. The program is based on a drug and alcohol free abstinence basis. This program is unique within this state as all other drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres use a harm minimisation approach. The abstinence based program appears both professionally and ethically sound and is endorsed by The Southern Cross Bioethics Institute and has been subject to external evaluations by the University of South Australia.

Open and transparent communication is clearly a strong focal point of the organisation and was strongly supported and demonstrated by all staff interviewed, and demonstrated through the daily work planning process.

Evaluation of the programs is extensive and feedback is sought from clients and families on an ongoing basis.

Recruitment, selection, orientation and ongoing development of staff is of a very high standard. Clinical Governance is long standing and appears to be the basis of the credible culture within the organisation. The organisation's commitment to retaining quality staff is evident in the service delivery model and subsequent training and community network opportunities that are presented. This is apparent through the benchmarking undertaken against the Australian Counselling Association standards.

Observations during the audit process indicated a dedicated staff and management team. All staff interviewed are commended for their obvious passion and enthusiasm, and apparent commitment and dedication to their positions and the clients and families who utilise the service.

That is our quality assurance executive summary statement. Andrew May, our financial auditor:

My firm, Major, May & Associates, Chartered Accountants, has been the auditor of ADTARP since its inception in 2001. The annual audits of ADTARP's financial statements have been conducted in accordance with the Australian Accounting and Auditing Standards, mandatory professional reporting requirements and other authoritative pronouncements of the Australian Accounting Standards Board.

In my opinion the books and the accounting records of ADTARP have always been appropriately maintained by a competent person, and I am satisfied that the ongoing maintenance of ADTARP's accounts on the MYOB Accounting Software continues to be appropriate to the needs of the organisation.

From my annual audit visits, and my knowledge of the staff that have been employed by ADTARP, both currently and during prior years, it appears to me that ADTARP continuously strives to achieve best practice in all of their operations. Given ADTARP's history of effective financial management of public funds,—

you know, bang for buck—

I am confident that ADTARP will continue to be financially viable if it is awarded a contract to provide ongoing services.

Page 19 from the University of SA evaluation states:

Participants complained that other services they had accessed were not as forthcoming with information as ADTARP Inc. and indicated their frustration about the lack of public information on drug treatment and rehabilitation services. Many commented about the general lack of recovery-based services other than ADTARP Inc. ADTARP Inc. delivers its programs in Elizabeth Grove. The latter is located in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, approximately 30 kilometres from the Adelaide CBD. Some participants travelled from Adelaide's southern suburbs each week for the program, in some cases travelling as much as 100 kilometres in a round trip because they said that there was no similar service provided in their area. One participant commented: 'ADTARP Inc. is the only place where you do something, not accept it but get through it and bring about change.'

There can be no reasonable explanation for the defunding of this program other than the fact that the decision was political.

We have provided other services as well. Mr Faschingbauer and I have been going to schools for some 14 years now, speaking to year 9 and year 12 students and telling them the truth about addiction, not about the fanciful, recreational use of drugs or that there has to be a genetic predisposition and all that garbage that is not actually backed up by real science or real medicine.

Central nervous system disorder—if you continue to use drugs on an ongoing basis, your central nervous system is changed; the chemistry of your brain is changed. Then you are an addict. And if you do not abstain, you will continue to be an addict and life will become out of control. The more your brain chemistry is upset and the more it is put under stress, the more side effects you will feel and the worse your life will get. It is not a matter of if: it is a matter of when. A letter from the principal of Golden Grove High School states:

We would like to express our appreciation to both yourself and Ann Bressington for the drug presentation you organised for year 9 and year 12 Golden Grove High School students...We were very impressed with the way in which Ann captivated the students' attention for over one and a half hours—

more than I can do in here—

This was a very challenging task as she spoke to up to 90 students at a time.

Ann's talk will help many of our students make educated decisions about drugs and social situations that they may encounter. The personal stories and knowledge she presented on drugs were powerful and inspirational. Both staff and students were impressed by her integrity. We all respected her willingness to share her personal experiences which will help prevent drug use by the adolescents present.

Many students approached staff after the talk expressing their appreciation at having the opportunity of hearing Ann's message. Several students sought teachers' advice with concerns about their own experiences with drugs as a result of this presentation.

We thank DrugBeat for organising such a meaningful presentation.

Are these not the outcomes that state and federal governments say they want to achieve through drug policy? Are these not the outcomes that state and federal governments say we should be striving for? Are these not the outcomes that state and federal governments use to justify the expenditure of millions and millions of taxpayer dollars?

We do not get these outcomes anywhere, because people in this industry of human misery do not want to hear the other side. They do not want to hear that we have not lost the war on drugs. We have never had a war on drugs. We have had a war of words on drugs, we have had a war of policy on drugs, but we have never actually had a war on drugs, as in striving to bring people off drugs.

If there is no demand, there will be little need for supply. If there is no demand, there will be a minimal amount of dollars needed to be expended on reducing the harm. This is just pure economics at its most basic. But the government does not want to hear about it, Drug and Alcohol Services do not want to hear about it, the experts do not want to hear about it, and the policy makers at a federal level did not want to hear about it. Why not? Because we have to convince the public that nothing works—nothing works.

We are just about to head around that same debate about heroin trials, shooting galleries and legalisation yet again, because there was a paper released just three weeks ago saying we have lost the war on drugs. We are losing it because governments want us to lose it. We are losing it because bureaucrats have another agenda. They are involved with the drug legalisation movement and they should be exposed for that; and they should, because of a conflict of interest, lose their jobs.

They should not be in charge of trying to develop decent policy and decent treatment programs when their main objective is to ensure that eventually legalisation will happen because everybody is going to throw up their hands and say nothing works. This is not good enough. If I was like you lot sitting there and I had not been involved in this for the last 15 years and I had not seen this stuff with my own eyes and I had not had to research treatment and rehabilitation and pharmacology and biochemical repair for people and the counselling that was needed and develop the programs, I would not be believing what I was hearing today, either.

When I started on this journey, I was involved with an organisation called Drug Aid. We lobbied. We lobbied hard for heroin trials, we lobbied hard for shooting galleries and we lobbied hard for legalisation, until my daughter said to me, 'You've got it all wrong. We don't want to be addicts. We want to get off.' So we put together a survey of 1,120 active drug users from Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, and we asked them 265 questions. We were flooded with people who wanted to participate in this, because the questions we were asking them were questions they had been waiting to be asked for many years.

They had people out there saying, 'Drug addicts? It's a lifestyle choice.' No, it is not: it is a death sentence. I have had addict after addict say to me, 'There are worse things than death, and that is living this life.' It is not a party. They are not hedonistic. They use drugs so that they can simply get out of bed in the morning and work hard all day to earn the money to pay for their next fix. That is it. That is their life. They do not eat, they do not bathe, they do not look after themselves because there is no time. Their life is consumed with earning enough money to pay for their daily habit that is ever increasing, and they have to do some of the most horrible things to support that habit.

Tell me that we are doing our best! Tell me that we are making the right decisions! Tell me that we are listening to the right people! Tell me that we are doing our job! It will take a lot of convincing. I hear these crackpots talk about lifestyle choice, victimless crime, and drug use being a complex issue. You know what? It is not that complex. People have emotional issues, people have trauma and abuse issues, people have grief and loss issues that need to be resolved.

At the age of 12, when they were going through puberty and all these issues were hanging around their head and involved in their life, they did not know what to do, so they started smoking dope, and it took their mind off these issues. It took them away from that reality they did not want to be in. They started popping pills, they started having a drink here and there. You know what? For a very short time they felt better. Why wouldn't you keep doing that? God, we still do it as adults, but these are our children. Our children are using drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism for the stuff they cannot handle in their lives. We talk about wanting to prevent, but we do not do anything about it.

We have not changed what we have been doing in drug policy for 25 years. We have let this myth go on and on and on, and all we do is repeat the bureaucratic doublespeak that does not make any sense. If you really break it down, it says nothing. It says nothing, it offers no hope, it offers no help, it offers no change. Let me tell you that the reason the Drug and Alcohol Services Council hopes that abstinence will be an outcome is because they do not know how to help a person become abstinent. They do not know, they do not have the skills, and they do not have the training in dealing with addictive behaviour and helping that person to change that behaviour over a period of time.

The DrugBeat program runs for 15 to 18 months. If their people are not taken care of within three months, 'Well, too bad, you're sad, baby.' Let me also inform members sitting here that when one of our clients, who we were told to refer to Warinilla, although he did not need detox—detox was done, over, six months clean, but Warinilla was the only option—set foot inside that gate, and before he reached the front door, he had been approached six times to score. Tell me why a person in recovery should have to be confronted with that crap. This organisation is government run and government funded, although there is no service excellence framework for this organisation.

This is what we now are supposed to subject our clients to—to go to a needle exchange program. They do not want to use needles, they have no use for them. To go to a parent program through family drug support, which is supported by Warinilla, their home page says, 'Harm minimisation is our objective,' and the fifth dot point is, 'Teach your kids how to mull up safely.' Our parents do not need that advice. They need advice on how to communicate with their children. They need advice on how to continue to help them to heal. They need advice on how to continue to build those family relationships. But, no, they are going to get 'how to teach your kid to mull up'. What a disgrace! What an absolute disgrace!

I am not saying that there are not parents who will not access those services and whose families will not benefit. Don't get me wrong: everyone is at a different level, everyone is at a different stage, but why are they funded better than abstinence-based programs? Why do they get a bigger piece of the pie? Why are they on Warinilla's website and DrugBeat is not? Why has Drug and Alcohol Services never, ever referred a client to the DrugBeat program?

Why is it that when we have done a dummy call to Drug and Alcohol Services as a parent wanting to access a treatment program and asked, 'What about the DrugBeat program?' they have said, 'Oh, you don't want to go there.' This is the drug information service phone line saying, 'Oh, you don't want to go there. They charge $10,000 for that program. People have died on that program, you know. Do you really want your kid to go there?' Tell me there are no subversive moves on hand here.

These were cold calls and, yes, we set it up, but now we have the information and we know why people do not refer from Drug and Alcohol Services to us, because they want the clients and they want them to be diverted into the programs that they want them to go to. As I said, it is time to shine a light on this. I have gone soft on this for six years because I knew that if I started raising these issues publicly DrugBeat's funding would have been cut a lot earlier—but now the gloves are off.

This is war. The truth will come out; the truth will be exposed and you will all be expected to sit here and listen to it, because we are all responsible for allowing this to continue to be perpetuated. There is no plausible deniability—there is none; there will not be; there cannot be, because our kids' lives depend on the fact that we do our job. If we are not prepared to do it we should get out—get out of the job.

I am not going to take up any more of this council's time. As I said, I am going to be asking for a select committee inquiry into Drug and Alcohol Services and I will be consulting with the Hon. Dennis Hood and the Hon. Martin Hamilton-Smith on the terms of reference. They will be broad and sweeping and it will be a long inquiry because, unlike some people here, I am prepared to ask the questions and wait for the answers. I want the truth, and I want these people exposed for what they are—frauds. With that, I leave it with you.

There being a disturbance in the gallery:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. G.A. Kandelaars.

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