Last week, Canberra had three armed robberies in one 24-hour period. That horrific treble came as the climax of two months of high figures for armed robberies. It came after Chief Justice Jeffrey (SUBS: check spelling) Miles said in court that heroin was so commonplace in Canberra that many people no longer saw the possession of it as criminal or at least highly criminal conduct.
There is an obvious correlation between the high armed robbery rates and the drug problem. People on heroin need to finance their expense habit. Even with more heroin on the streets at a cheaper price, there is a concerning pattern with the drug trade which society as a whole must deal with. Armed robbery is not the only way of financing a drug habit, tough it is one of the most visible ways. Another way is to encourage friends to get hooked so they may be a source of funds to buy heroin of which the first user gets a free cut. It is a vicious pyramid-selling scheme.
As to the armed robberies in Canberra, some of them are plain pathetic. These are not Great Train Robbers in which well-organised thugs take money on a grand scale, not caring who they bash on the way. These are usually single heroin addicts not using loaded firearms, but rather toy guns, knives or syringes. There are more failed attempts than successes. They are not directed at banks and financial institutions which have large amounts of cash on the premises. Rather they are against shops and service stations. The dividends are usually very small. Nonetheless they pose terrible fear in innocent people working behind the counter and on-going trauma. They pose a very large economic loss.
The armed robbery increase is coupled with a report last week of more home burglaries in the ACT. It came in the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Atlas of Australian Crime. The atlas pointed to a strong correlation between drug use and trade (high in the city centre) and residential burglaries (high in suburbs close to the centre).
Society as a whole must work harder to stop this ugly trade. It must do so on as many fronts as possible. There are no simple, single solutions. Heavy sentences for drug use and the crime it spawns is not the answer as the experience in the United States amply demonstrates. Moral strictures along the lines of “”Just say No” are equally unrealistic. Nor will legalisation of government-supplied heroin either on prescription or open-slather be a solution. Methadone programs have been running for some years. They have not provided a solution. The rapid detoxification drug Naltrexone (subs: CHECK SPELLING) has been lauded as a magic solution. But it is not.
Drug use will never be entirely eliminated from human society. It seems that very humans are prepared to live their lives drug free. Coffee, tea, pain killers, nicotine and alcohol are used by a huge percentage of the population. The last two are particularly damaging. Again, outright prohibition of alcohol did not work in the United States in the 1920s. Nor did outright prohibition of tobacco in schools work – it required education and changes in peer pressure as well. Indeed, smoking prohibitions on school children might have fostered rebellion.
We must tackle some of a causes of drug abuse: youth unemployment, alienation at work, depletion of social capital and so on. The chase for the dollar has eroded the social connections that come with membership of social, sporting and charitable associations and clubs. We must engage in harm minimisation, but in doing so we must have a longer-term aim of minimising the use of hard drugs in society.
If we do not do this, every shop, service station and home will become a fortress, again just increasing fear and alienation which are part of the cause of the drug problem in the first place.