This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A social worker has vowed to take a busload of former and current ice users to Canberra to confront the social services minister, Scott Morrison, over his plan to quarantine welfare payments of those who use the drug.

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Morrison’s proposal, which would involve Centrelink and employment service contractor staff reporting clients they suspected of using ice, has also been dismissed by a leading drug policy researcher as a “thought bubble” that would drive more criminal offending by addicts.

Matt Noffs, the chief executive of the Ted Noffs Foundation, said he would marshall a contingent to “bring the message to Sheriff Morrison that this is first and foremost an issue about humans and putting people above the ideas of law and order and discounting the lives of drug users”.

News Limited reported Morrison on Friday as saying ice addiction should not be treated as a health issue but a social “toxin” that was destroying communities.

“It’s a social issue, it’s a law and order issue,’ he said.

Morrison said the government was considering a plan to force users into rehab or have their welfare payments set aside for use on food and other essentials, under an expansion of a cashless welfare card being trialled in South Australia and Western Australia.

Jake Najman, a University of Queensland sociology professor and director of the Queensland alcohol and drug research and education centre, said the proposal betrayed “an appalling ignorance of what the problem is”.

Najman said those with heavy levels of addiction often turned to various crimes to fund drug habits costing “many hundreds of dollars a week, in some cases thousands of dollars”.

“Welfare payments, whatever they are, are not likely to amount to that kind of money,” he said.

“These people are already breaking the law in a dozen different ways and quarantining welfare payments will just simply make it worse.

“The minister simply doesn’t understand anything about the nature of amphetamine use in Australia and the likely impacts that what he’s suggesting may or may not have.”

Najman said the body of international experience on drug policy showed that “trying to punish people into not doing what they’re doing has simply just not worked”.

“You might get a level of satisfaction from punishing people who are doing something you don’t like them doing – but wouldn’t it be nice to actually make a difference,” he said.

Noffs said that Morrison was preempting the outcome of the government’s national task force on ice, which had already framed the issue as one of health over law and order.

“When Morrison comes out saying this, the problem I have with it is he’s acting like a tough guy in the schoolyard but he hasn’t been paying attention in science class because he’s not looking at the evidence,” he said.

“This is going against the word of people like [ice task force head] Ken Lay who said we can’t arrest our way out of this issue.”

Noffs said the group he would take to Canberra would include “young people who are using or coming off drugs, as well as adults who are functional users of drugs including ice, as well as dysfunctional people”.

“We had that rhetoric around heroin users but I don’t think we ever went down that track of quarantining welfare for heroin users,” Noffs said.

“Our health response does work and we need to remember that drug users, both functional and dysfunctional, are human beings.”

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Najman said attempts by untrained bureaucrats to detect ice habits through observation would miss the “vast majority” of users, two-thirds of whom consumed the drug only occasionally.

“You might pick up the most affected – but you worry about that because a lot of people who are using drugs have morbid mental health problems,” he said.

“The question is, will people who lack the expertise be able to tell the difference between someone who’s got a mental health problem and someone who’s addicted or someone who’s got both?”