Mrs VALE(4.58 p.m.) —Initially, I wish to record that I applaud the stand of the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) in his getting tough on drugs campaign and welcome the fact that at last a leader of this country has the courage and fortitude to make a stand on one of the most serious challenges against the happiness and fulfilment of the lives of many young Australians. In making his strong stand, the Prime Minister is sending out a positive message to our young people to say no to drugs and is providing sound leadership for the youth of the nation at a time when young people often look for guidance from their elders.

This is in stark contrast to the useless, failed policy of harm minimisation that has been the government's policy since 1985, which begins with the premise that people are going to take drugs anyway so let us teach young Australians how to take drugs safely and hence minimise the harm drugs may inflict upon them. When the then federal Minister for the Aged, Family and Health Services, Mr Peter Staples, opened the third international conference on drug related harm in Melbourne in March 1992, he strongly endorsed the harm reduction approach and came out in an extremely strong way to say that in his view there was no such hope as a drug free society. Strangely, as we have been able to observe over the last few years, this is not the policy used in the very successful anti-tobacco campaign, where total abstinence has been the platform in the full frontal attack in educating young Australians on the dangers of smoking tobacco.

As if anyone could smoke tobacco safely. How could any responsible adult even begin to suggest to young people that they can use illicit drugs in safety. My main focus today is to address the concerns expressed to me by many parents in my electorate of Hughes about the way in which the Australian print media has appeared to be biased against those who argue for a policy of total abstinence as a desirable aim in relation to the use of illicit drugs.

In my state of New South Wales, the Daily Telegraph and Mr Alan Jones of Radio 2UE have had the courage to take a strong position against harm minimisation. Both have articulated with considerable intellectual force, compassion and plain commonsense sound arguments against the failures of the harm minimisation drug strategy. The parents of our young Australians may be interested to learn that in Washington DC in 1992 at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Mr Bill Stronach, the then Executive Director of the Alcohol and Drug Foundation of Victoria, now the Australian Drug Foundation, made some interesting statements about the foundation's use of the media to change public opinion in favour of the foundation's policy of harm minimisation. I quote from his speech at the conference in 1992 where he said:

Our foundation believes that if we're going to have any significant impact we're going to have to focus on social and legislative changes and we know quite clearly that the formation of public opinion, and the gathering of information in relation to alcohol and drugs is gained through three main sources. One is the police. Another is alcohol and drug health agencies. But by far the overwhelming source of information which obviously is related to attitudes is the media. And we have focused, as an organisation, quite clearly strategically on the media.

He continued and made an alarming statement:

. . . we have employed journalists not to churn out press releases but to get in there as subversives and work with their colleagues in the mainstream press.

`Subversives' is the word he used. He continued:

. . . and that's been done through developing, very slowly and very gently, a level of trust, a level of credibility. More importantly, the ability to respond because the press want instant answers and they want instant responses. So we have got 24 hours availability of those journalists. And what we're finding now is that in the last eight months, over 50 per cent of the mainstream print, radio and television reporting on alcohol and drug issues has now been generated by the foundation or has been filtered through it. And it's a wonderful opportunity when the press ring up, as they invariably do with some sensational story asking for comment, for us to talk often for an hour and try and turn that around and get the reporting perhaps presented in a different way, because we know that the nature of reporting that we have seen in the past has been sensational, it's been inaccurate, often dangerously inaccurate, and it's always, well not always, but by and large, focussed on those drugs which are illicit and their usage within Australia.

He then went on to say:

. . . and the harm caused by them is minuscule compared to legal drugs. So we're having a significant impact there, I believe, and I think that's an exciting project. So the thrust of the foundation is to move via the media the public perception which we hope will move towards legislative change in the areas we would see as desirable.

With the recent thrust in the print media this year from the drug law reformers who would like to see the decriminalisation of marijuana, heroin trials, shooting galleries and our young people maintained on the drug of their addiction without help or hope for any better future, you can see that this strategy has been very successful. As a parent, I am concerned with the comments by Mr Stronach in 1992 and with the prevailing public perception that has followed. I quote again from his reference in his speech to illicit drugs:

. . . the harm caused by them is minuscule compared to legal drugs.

Perhaps a lot has been learned about the dangers of illicit drugs since 1992. Perhaps today even the Mr Stronachs of the world are better informed. But this is a serious subject, and the taking of illicit drugs has such serious consequences for our children that the parents of Australia have a right to know exactly what illicit drugs can do to their children and their hope for happiness in the future.

There is the public perception that the illicit drug marijuana, or cannabis, is soft, safe or even recreational. Nothing could be further from the truth. I quote from one of Australia's leading neuroscientists, John Anderson, Bachelor of Pharmacology, Diploma of Social Science, Master of Literature, MAPsS, consultant psychophysiologist at Neuroscience Psychological Services, Westmead, New South Wales, who tells us about marijuana:

. . . the areas of the brain which are targeted by the drug are the hippocampus and the cerebellum, the former is concerned with relaying memory consolidation and the latter which controls equilibrium and coordination.

Young people who use marijuana in their pre-teens and in their teens are at a great risk of progressing to being dependent on the drug and at a higher risk of using other illegal drugs. As tolerance develops and the drug no longer seems to give the buzz or it is no big deal, it is then just a small step onto the more spectacular drugs.

What does it mean to have a juvenile stoned on pot? S. Cohen, before the US Senate hearings on the health consequences of marijuana use in 1990 stated:

It means that they are losing learning time, growing up time, problem solving time, doing themselves a great disservice, remaining in a state of psychological immaturity, and never learning to cope with the difficulties of life. The professionals call this amotivational syndrome.

In the `Health and Psychological Consequences of Cannabis Use', monograph 25, National Drug Strategy, Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, Canberra, we were told in 1994:

There is sufficient evidence that indicates that cannabis use adversely effects adolescent development. Therefore, it is a desirable goal to discourage its use, especially regular use. While it is still true that peer pressure, curiosity and a feeling of rebellion against the establishment contribute to marijuana's popularity, the single most important factor seems to be its intoxicating properties, the altered sense of reality that marijuana creates is pleasurable for some people. What is not known is the price these people may be paying for their pleasure.

Teachers in our schools have observed the impact of marijuana use on their students. Vane Tempest, from Teachers Against Drug Abuse, Sutherland, New South Wales in 1994 observed:

Students who are marijuana users are often tense, anxious, disruptive, restless, rowdy and given to daydreaming. They skip classes, do not submit easily to homework and try to avoid exams. Some are suspended from school. Others, who previously had good grades start failing or skipping classes as their drug use accelerates. Students who are users are often high before school starts and they tend to lose interest in all aspects of education.

If such threats to the physical health and wellbeing of our young people is not enough to raise the concern of parents, then the devastating effect of marijuana use on the minds of vulnerable young people would be sufficient to worry loving parents in the extreme. In 1982, Professor D.A. Milman of New York University, in his paper `The Psychological Effects of Cannabis in Adolescents', pointed out:

Hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and feelings of depersonalisation and derealisation are not uncommon and are seen in acute intoxicated states as well as acute or chronic psychosis. It is believed that smoking marijuana may trigger an underlying psychosis.

A study in Sweden by Allebeck, Anderson and Rydberg reported in the Scandinavian Journal of Social Medicine 1990 and in the Lancet , 26 December 1987, involving over 50,000 people found:

. . . those who have used cannabis over 50 times have a risk factor of schizophrenia six times greater than non-users.

These researchers also found that the proportion of suicides increased sharply with the levels of cannabis consumption. In the American Journal of Diseases of Children , volume 144, March 1990, researchers Berman and Schwartz noted:

Substance abuse has been found to be a significant risk factor in suicide attempts and completed suicides during adolescence. Marijuana and/or hashish was 61 per cent of the drug of choice for abuse.

Dr Juan Negrete, at the Second Paris Conference on Cannabis and Cocaine in 1992, warned that:

Cannabis use is associated with an increased risk of developing schizophrenia. Clinical and epidemiological data suggest that cannabis could act as a trigger, prompting the overt expression of schizophrenia in individuals who suffer the basis of pathological anomalies. Therefore, despite the fact that schizophrenia may have a genetic basis, the use of marijuana triggers its onset.

There are many issues surrounding the debate on appropriate drug policies, but throughout it all it seems to me that parents and young people are not given the full facts or unbiased information about the very real risks of taking illicit drugs, especially marijuana. The policy of harm minimisation sends very wrong messages to our young people that this stuff is not harmful and that, indeed, it is only recreational when it is the opposite that is true.

Again, I record my respect of and appreciation to the Daily Telegraph and to Mr Alan Jones of Radio 2UE for their intellectual rigour and judgment, which proved tough enough to withstand the self-professed seduction by the foundation to promote their misguided and failed policy. Very often they have provided the only other easily accessible source of information on this issue that has been available to the parents in my electorate.