Ban On Sale Of Heroin In Australian States

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27638, 20 April 1955, Page 11

Ban On Sale Of Heroin In Australian States

(From a Reuter Correspondent)

SYDNEY. The New South Wales Government has passed an Act which will ban the sale of heroin and give the Government power to deal with other drugs. These measures will help to reduce drug-taking, and particularly the consumption ox heroin, until recently the largest in. Australia. Other States are taking or have taken similar measures.

Heroin has hitherto been available on prescription and drug addicts forced up the consumption of this, the most vicious drug of addiction known to man. In 1949 Australians were taking 2.85 kilogrammes (nearly 5 lb.) of heroin for each 1,000,000 inhabi- ; a PJ s a year —compared with Finland’s 1.98 kilogrammes (nearly 4 lb.) and the United Kingdom’s 1.79 kilogrammes (about 34 lb.). The position was so serious that the United Nations d J u J? control body drew the attention of the Australian Government to the danger. In June 1953, the Federal Government ordered a ban on imports of heroin. But this drug can be manufactured from morphine, which can be freely imported. So the Federal Government asked the State Governments to plug the gap. Synthetic drugs have replaced heroin in medicine and it is not now required for that purpose. Alarming drug statistics do not, however, mean that drug addiction is as serious in Australia as it is in. say, the United States. In New South Wales, with a population of more than 3,000,000, there were 85 prosecutions for drug offences in the past year.

Customs and police efforts have broken up the organised drug trafficking of the 1920’s in Australia. The •popular drugs, marijuana and opium, are almost unknown here. Seamen manage to smuggle a little ashore but only one opium-smoker, a Chinese, was caught in the year. Barbiturates, used as sleeping draughts, are another menace in Australia. These cause the drug bureau more worry than any other compound. Barbiturates kill three times as many peopie m New South Wales as any other drug or poison,” say the detec--1 Y e j A d ?J cts are sometimes stimulated by the sleep-giving drugs, but more often they suffer from depression, loss of memory and fall into a state of automatism. Control of barbiturate prescriptions here is tight, but addicts fake symtoms or forge prescriptions to get the drugs many of which, including morphine and some barbiturates, can be obtained free under Australian medical services. Police have a double check on all prescriptions because the chemist making them up has to enter each in a special register. Failure to keep the register may lead to a cancellation of the chemist’s authority to sell x x rugs \, Prescriptions themselves bear the date, name and address of the patient and the maximum number of times the drug -may be dispensed. They must also show the intervals between dispensing and must be signed each time the drugs are provided. But the fight against drugs, as ln most countries, is never-ending and police welcome the new controls as another weapon in their armoury.