Archive for the ‘Drugs’ Category
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Natasha Bita; 5/3/10
Wine and beer could be required to carry smoking-style health warnings under an overhaul of food labelling laws. The changes would mean cafes, restaurants and fast food outlets might be be forced to list the ingredients of meals. Former health minister Neal Blewett, who is chairing the Council of Australian Governments review of food labelling laws, said yesterday he had an “open mind” about health warnings for alcoholic drinks. “All you’re required to show is the percentage of alcohol – the rest you’re never sure of,” Dr Blewett told The Australian. “The health advocates are wanting healthy-drinking labelling, like `Don’t Drink and Drive’. We’ve got to take it on board — I have an open mind.”
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Tags: Australia, Drugs, Trade
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010
4/3/10; Paige Taylor; (2 Texts)
Opal fuel, which provides no “high” when sniffed, is being rolled out in the West Australian Goldfields area following regular outbreaks of petrol sniffing among indigenous youths in the past year. Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said the Rudd government would spend $2.3 million on Opal subsidies’ for nine outlets in six communities, help establish a bulk storage facility for Opal fuel in the Goldfields city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder and pay for bowser upgrades. “Over the years petrol sniffing has wrecked too many young indigenous lives,” Ms Macklin said. “We have seen positive results from the rollout of Opal fuel in regional and remote areas of Australia, and we want to see this extended to the Goldfields.” There are 122 sites receiving or registered to receive Opal fuel.
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Tags: Aborigial, Australia, Death in Custody, Drugs
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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Debbie Guest; 2/3/10
Western Australia’s Corruption and Crime Commission will review an internal police report that cleared an officer who shot a petrol sniffer with a Taser in the remote desert community of Warburton. Ronald Mitchell was engulfed in flames and suffered third-degree burns to up to 30 per cent of his body after the incident last July. The internal police report into the incident found Sergeant Nick Hamer was justified in using his Taser because he fired it in self-defence. No changes to police procedures were recommended. At the time of the incident, police claimed Mr Mitchell ran towards Sergeant Hamer with a container of petrol and a lighter and WA Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan said there was a “strong possibility” that the fire was caused by the lighter.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Legal
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Friday, February 26th, 2010
Misha Schubert; 26/2/10
A plan to force non-Aboriginal welfare recipients in poor areas to have their income managed by Centrelink – an extension of rules applied to remote Aboriginal groups in the Northern Territory – has split the welfare lobby. In a dramatic break with its own sector today, the Brotherhood of St Laurence will tell a Senate inquiry that the new laws would be part of a century-old tradition in Australia of placing conditions on welfare, and not a radical departure from fairness. Its stance is at odds with scores of other welfare groups, which have argued that the laws would strip people of dignity and self-responsibility.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Human Rights
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Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Dan Oakes; 16/2/10
The second-in-command of Australia’s armed forces has admitted that the army has an alcohol problem and demanded that officers tackle a culture of heavy drinking. Lieutenant-General Ken Gillespie said in an email to commanders that he was tired of hearing about soldiers killing and injuring themselves and others through drunken behaviour, according to the army’s internal newspaper. ”To be quite frank, I am sick of seeing the near-daily reports which tell me of officers and soldiers killed, injured or arrested for behaviour that could have been avoided,” he wrote. ”I am saddened when I realise the impact these avoidable incidents have on the members, their families, their units and the army.
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Tags: Australia, Drugs, Military
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Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
Tony Koch; 9/2/10
Police in north Queensland are frustrated by what they say are token fines handed to people caught sly-grogging or illegally in possession of alcohol in Aboriginal communities where bans exist. The Queensland government introduced laws five years ago restricting alcohol consumption in communities, in a response to violence and the squandering of welfare money on booze and gambling. Roads into Cape York and Gulf of Carpentaria communities have signs setting out the liquor restrictions. They warn a first offender is liable for a fine of up to $37,500, a second offence up to $52,500 and/or six months’ jail, and a third or later offence a fine of up to $75,000 and/or 18 months in prison.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Trade
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Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Roy Williams; 30/1/10;
Roy Williams is a Sydney lawyer and writer. He is the author of: God, Actually
My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey; Ross Fitzgerald; New South,
Many great writers were alcoholics. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, James Joyce and Henry Lawson are but a few from a very long list. Shakespeare’s drinking habits are not known, but several of his most memorable characters put away plenty of grog. The Porter in Macbeth, severely hungover, pronounces to his aristocratic betters that drink “is a great provoker of three things … nose- painting, sleep and urine”. For Ross Fitzgerald, those three afflictions must have seemed relatively trivial. Starting at the age of 15, he drank for a decade to horrible, destructive excess. Now 65, he has been a teetotaller for 40 years. Among other accomplishments, he has built a career as a broadcaster, historian and political commentator (for this newspaper).
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Tags: Australia, Drugs
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Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Geoff Munro; 22/1/09
So the Big Day Out music festivals – a series of events around Australia and New Zealand that attract 3 million young people – have signed a two-year sponsorship deal with the distributor of Jim Beam. Many in the audience at the Big Day Out are too young to buy alcohol but they will be bombarded with the message that they are not part of it unless they are drinking. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says binge drinking is an Australian epidemic and Victorian Premier John Brumby says alcohol is the state’s biggest social problem. They are right. Yet binge drinking begins among teenagers and peaks among young adults in their 20s – precisely the people who throng to the Big Day Out. We do not protect them from the epidemic, choosing instead to offer them to the alcohol industry as marketing fodder.
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Tags: Australia, Drugs, Trade
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Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Ernest Hunter; 22/1/10
Is Sam Tomarchio, the Laverton-based lender of last resort to Aboriginal residents of remote desert communities, a prince or a profiteer? Tomarchio, who denies wrongdoing, says his services should be understood in terms of “a f…king humanitarian, sympathetic, humanitarian aspect”. According to Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, by contrast, his actions are so “appalling” that the situation is a crisis. A crisis? Well, if one reflects on the “crisis” that precipitated the Northern Territory emergency intervention, it might be so identified. Both relate to longstanding activities of which there was wide awareness – Tomarchio’s business may be brazen, but it is far from unique. Into small communities across remote Aboriginal Australia there flows a constant stream of government funds from which a broad range of players profit. Drawing on my experience as a medical practitioner in remote communities of north Queensland and the Kimberley, the stream of funding is like a river system (think of the Murray-Darling) in which a flow barely able to sustain its dependent ecosystems is serially depleted from source to sea. Little remains when it gets to the mouth, or in this case the mouths of the most vulnerable: children and those unable to scavenge to survive in remote communities.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Human Rights, Trade
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Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Jeremy Bass; 19/1/10
On Australia Day, I’ll be sitting down with family and friends for our traditional barbecue lunch. My mates and I will have a beer as I turn the meat; the ladies will have a sparkling white as they prep the garlic bread and salads indoors. That’s what the liquor industry has us doing anyway. According to it, it’s our right to rejoice in the pleasures of Aussie family life and mateship over a drink or two, and we should resent having that right trampled by do-gooder politicians and nanny-state troopers on account of a few mischief makers. Such is the response to police suggestions to restrict full-strength liquor sales on the public holiday. ”We seem to be targeting everybody for the actions of a few and I just don’t really understand why that’s the case,” Darren Pearson, who runs four bottle shops on the North Coast, bleated to the ABC. The acting Queensland Premier, Paul Lucas, said he hadn’t seen any such problems with Australia Day: ”I wouldn’t want to be saying to mums and dads that you can’t have a beer.” Buried under the romantic imagery of such responses to the threat of clampdowns is an alcoholic’s argument: the notion of the right to imbibe alcohol uber alles.
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Tags: Australia, Drugs, Trade
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Monday, January 18th, 2010
Natasha Robinson; 18/1/10
The federal and Northern Territory governments are set to introduce intensive support services to combat alcohol abuse within the town camps of Alice Springs and provide early childhood intervention to Aboriginal families. Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin will today announce a $5.4 million Safe and Sober alcohol rehabilitation program, targeted at reducing the number of assaults within town camps and the wider Alice Springs community. Under the program, intensive therapy and rehabilitation will be provided to those abusing alcohol. The program will also expand alcohol rehabilitation to prison inmates in Alice Springs, who have very limited access to alcohol support services. Additional to the Safe and Sober program, the Territory government has announced.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Human Rights
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Saturday, January 16th, 2010
Milanda Rout; 16/1/10
More Aboriginal women are smoking while pregnant and more of their babies are dying in the first month of life, according to a government report that paints a sobering picture of indigenous maternal health. In a snapshot of the health, education and employment status of Victoria’s mostly urbanised Aboriginal population, the Brumby government’s 2008-09 indigenous affairs annual report reveals a number of “areas of concern” that need to be urgently addressed, as well as some that have not improved in the past 12 months. This includes that 40 per cent of indigenous women who were admitted to hospital one month before their babies were born were smokers in 2007-08, up from 38 per cent in 2006-07 and 30 per cent in 2002-03. Just 8 per cent of all the women in the state were smokers while pregnant. The report also shows that the perinatal mortality rate per 1000 births for indigenous mothers.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, health
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Friday, January 15th, 2010
Julie Bowen: 15/1/10
A harm minimisation approach is a realistic way to deal with young people using drugs. It is disappointing that proactive measures to protect our youth from drug-related harm continue to be met with resistance from the public and politicians. The NSW Department of Health’s 2006 brochure Drug Safety – Guide to a Better Night Out provides relevant, potentially life-saving information for young people about the effects and dangers of commonly used drugs. Far from encouraging the use of illicit drugs, the brochure includes information on mental health issues, legal ramifications, addiction warning signs and a final message: “Remember the best way to avoid problems with drugs is not to use them at all.” Whatever we might like the reality to be, the fact is that drug use among young people is not an unusual or isolated behaviour. The 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey found that nearly one in three people (31 per cent) aged between 18-29 uses at least one illicit drug a year. Unfortunately, we still regularly encounter the myth that all drugs will lead to inevitable addiction and self destruction. However, this is not the experience of many people who try either legal or illegal drugs.
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Tags: Australia, Drugs
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Friday, January 1st, 2010
Tony Barrass; 1/1/10
Fitzroy Crossing is finally “breathing” two years after becoming the first town in Western Australia to demand liquor restrictions, but local police are now confronting a new dilemma; how to stop Christmas hampers brimming with hard liquor being home-delivered to the town’s alcoholics. As one part of the community becomes more sophisticated in side-stepping the booze bans now in place across the Kimberley, another more dominant aspect of the town continues to grow by rediscovering its uniqueness and celebrating its strengths. At the Mangkaja Arts Centre, where dozens of indigenous artists from the Fitzroy Valley’s four main language groups gather to sit and paint images snapped up by galleries in Melbourne and Sydney, centre manager Katie McGuire says she noticed a big difference in some of the artists since the original alcohol restriction were trialled in October 2007.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs
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Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Tony Barrass; 30/12/09;
After yet another thunderous editorial — “It’s time to form a political party exclusively for the north of Australia and let the southerners rot in hell” — outback editor Gerard R. Willett refuses to soften his newspaper’s relentless attacks on booze bans in Halls Creek. The Halls Creek Herald, a kick ‘em-in-the-teeth fortnightly circulated throughout the tiny towns and indigenous communities of the east Kimberley in Western Australia, has been rabid on anyone else supporting the alcohol restrictions. According to the tough-talking Willett, who cut his teeth as editor on the then equally bombastic Kimberley Echo before launching the Herald in 2004, the bans enforced in May were a direct attack on democracy and racist in their intention. Someone needed to stand up and let the authorities know that many businesses — including the local pub and bottle shop, not surprisingly — were hurting. After forming a chamber of commerce that took in both Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing, 300km to the west, Willett — appointed as chairman — began to bellow even louder.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs
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Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Michael Sainsbury; 30/12/09
China has ignored last-minute pleas by the British government and executed its first European national for 50 years, putting convicted drug courier Akmal Shaikh to death yesterday. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “appalled and disappointed” after Shaikh, 53, died in the northwestern city of Urumqi for possessing 4kg of heroin. The British government and Shaikh’s family had claimed the former minicab company chief and father of three should not have stood trial because of a severe bipolar disorder. He had been denied an independent mental examination since his arrest in 2007.
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Tags: Capital Punishment, China, Drugs
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