Sam Biondo knows drugs can kill people. But he knows bad politics can too.
As he prepares to leave after 16 years at the helm of the Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association (Vaada), Biondo has revealed his immense frustration at having watched thousands of people die unnecessarily because governments fear “being crucified” by the media and opposition.
“In Victoria alone on an annual basis we have more than 500 people dying from overdoses. That’s like an A380 going down every year,” Biondo tells Guardian Australia.
“In the time I’ve worked here … it’s probably about 7,000 people who have died of overdoses. It does your head in when you know many of those deaths are preventable.”
According to Biondo, the “war on drugs” – as it was coined by US president Richard Nixon – has been an “abject failure” on severals fronts: people with addiction have been stigmatised and criminalised, millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted and the use of legal drugs such as alcohol and prescription painkillers has grown, with pharmaceuticals the state’s biggest cause of fatal overdoses.
He says it’s also led to a culture where politicians of all persuasions lack the courage to lead, and, instead, pander to fear.
“In the alcohol and drug space, if you want to try and do what works, you will end up getting crucified publicly and fearful of losing government,” he says.
“People in charge seem to avoid pursuing pragmatic policies that can make a difference because they’re scared of what the political backlash might be.
“The opposition – whatever party it is at the time – will politicise the issue, unfortunately, because that’s the culture. Common sense gets subjected to the immediate desire to retain power at all costs.”
The need for cultural change
The child of Sicilian migrants, Biondo was born and raised in Werribee, in Melbourne’s western suburbs, and raised with an innate sense of social justice.
He worked as a teacher then joined Fitzroy Legal Service, one of the country’s oldest community legal centres, where he stayed for 20 years. In that time he saw many people with mental illness turn to drugs or alcohol.
He was on the frontlines of the heroin epidemic of late 1990s, chairing the Yarra Drug and Health forum for several years and overseeing the introduction of the state’s first drug outreach lawyer, before joining Vaada in 2007.
Since then, Biondo’s seen the state undergo fundamental changes to the alcohol and drug sector, a royal commission into the mental health system, the legalisation of medicinal cannabis and the opening of Victoria’s first safe injecting room, in North Richmond. He admits he never thought the government would have the courage to open the facility, which has prevented 63 deaths since 2018.
Biondo urges the government to forge ahead with a second facility in Melbourne’s CBD as promised in 2020, though he concedes protest from nearby residents, businesses and the opposition leaves it in an unenviable position.
“You either put something in place that saves these people’s lives and get clobbered by the opposition and certain parts of the media, or people continue to die. Your life’s a misery whatever you do,” he says.
“It’s up to parties of all political persuasions to change this culture to respond to these issues in an evidence-based way.”
Biondo says the creation of an alcohol and drug commission would go some way to taking the politics out of the policy area. Such a commission, he says, could be led by experts, draw together evidence and provide advice to the government.
Comprehensive data – which he says the government already collects but is not publicly available – could be used to decide where an injecting room should go or track youth at risk of developing drug addiction in future to guide early intervention and prevention programs.
But Biondo stresses it would only work if governments actually heed such a commission’s advice.
“Take David Nutt, the British government’s chief drug adviser, who was sacked a day after claiming alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs,” he says. “It was true. But ultimately the government holds the purse strings and they will decide what gets done.”
A decade of ‘tough on crime’ policies
Reforming the state’s prisons is another issue Biondo says successive governments have lacked the political will to tackle. A decade of tough law-and-order measures has nearly doubled the state’s prison population, with women, Aboriginal Victorians, young people and peoplewith disability disproportionately affected.
Biondo says too often those in custody are there on low-level drug offences and suffering from addiction, mental illness or both.
“The government has nowhere else to put these people so they watch them fail and end up in the prison system,” he says. “It’s essentially a holding pen.”
Preventing people from ending up behind bars is also one of the reasons he backs calls to decriminalise cannabis use.
“So many people that have been caught up in the criminal justice system because of [cannabis]. They’ve been unnecessarily impacted by the current law and that’s had reverberations for their whole life,” Biondo says.
He says the state is on the “inevitable path” towards legalising cannabis, though he says there shouldn’t be a “laissez-faire, free market situation” as is the case in some US jurisdictions.
Pill testing is also a “no-brainer” Biondo says, despite the premier, Daniel Andrews, claiming it would create a false sense of safety for users.
“Tell that to the parents of the young people who have died because there wasn’t testing,” he says.
Another measure he says could save lives is by improving the way doctors use the SafeScript database, which provides a history of the high-risk medicines a person has been prescribed. Vaada lobbied for the service but Biondo says it’s being used to “tidy up paperwork” rather than help identify patients who are developing signs of painkiller dependence.
“If they used it for the research we’ve been requesting for so long, we’d have a clear picture of what happens to these people throughout their lives, how they are being treated and supported in the community,” Biondo says.
“And we could reduce the number of deaths from over 500 to a substantially lower figure. It’s worth a shot.”
