Police to target ecstasy dealers/users
Mike Welsh - 2CC Interview with Commander Shane Connelly, Deputy Chief Police Officer, ACT
October 27 2005
Mike Welsh: Canberra's talk radio 2CC with the Drive Show. Illicit drugs are rarely far from the headlines. I'm reading here about how 73 000 Australians are now addicted to amphetamines or methamphetamines which is more than double the number dependent on heroin. That's a new research and warnings are out today for a different drug, a trendier drug I suppose, ecstasy which will be around in big quantities this weekend with Stonefest. Police say they'll target the dealers and the users and Shane Connelly's the Deputy Chief Police Officer of the ACT is on the line, good afternoon.
Shane Connelly: Good afternoon Mike, how are you?
Mike Welsh: Good. This Stonefest in particular, I mean you know it's going to be wall to wall amphetamine use, sorry ecstasy use there, I mean how do you police something like that? How do you go about it?
Shane Connelly: Well Mike we use a number of tactics to police any major event, obviously I won't go too much into our methods.
Mike Welsh: No, no.
Shane Connelly: But realistically we target a lot of things as a result of intelligence we receive. Not everyone at festivals such as Stonefest is doing the wrong thing and in fact many people tell us what's going on, tell us who's responsible. That being the case, in any festival we target those sorts of people and there's an aim of bringing them to justice.
Mike Welsh: So let's take the last couple of years of Stonefest, hugely popular, a lot of people go to it. What sorts of stats are available on the arrests and convictions out of those who are selling and using ecstasy for example?
Shane Connelly: Look, I don't have the statistics available to me today unfortunately for that particular event. But what I can tell you is that our ecstasy and amphetamine seizures have been gradually increasing over the last few years, across the border and in the ACT. That trend is current all across Australia. These drugs are not just sold at the festivals themselves, they're available around bars, clubs, parties, streets, parking lots, right across the board so we target the suppliers and that's the aim of bringing this to the public view. The big thing that we've got to remember Mike is that it's not just about the fact that they're illegal; they clearly are, but these are very, very harmful drugs and in many cases we have fatalities. We've done a lot of research and we've shown that these drugs can contain heroin, LSD, anti-epileptics, ketamine and even occasionally rat poison.
Mike Welsh: So the point is you don't know what's in them?
Shane Connelly: Absolutely. You're taking a lottery ticket and the sad thing is that the lottery ticket is created by a person that wants to do nothing but make money out of you.
Mike Welsh: Well there's got to be a fair bit of money to be made on the weekend at that festival there, the Stonefest, I suppose there's a build-up period is there, with the suppliers, do you get suppliers coming from interstate?
Shane Connelly: Look we have suppliers who are locally based, we certainly have interstate suppliers, we have people who will take advantage of any festival or any activity, and we have people who come here regularly to sell drugs. So, there's no direct pattern. What you have though, particularly in Canberra as the summer months come on, is a greater propensity for people to stay out later and to party and to either take excessive amounts of alcohol or drugs or a combination which is a deadly approach.
Mike Welsh: Alright, penalties.
Shane Connelly: They're very high. The penalties range from between $5000 and $100 000 in fines or a jail term of between two and 25 years Mike. I want to talk just briefly if I could about the word "party drugs" because I particularly don't like it. There's just no party in these drugs. There's no party in dying of an overdose, there's no party in being locked up because you've been involved in drug related rage and you've injured or killed somebody, and there's no party in drug or drink driving and killing your best friend. I mean the real party is for people to live a long life and have fun.
Mike Welsh: Isn't it amazing how you can clean it up by giving it the name party drug, or how you can separate it from other less desirable drugs.
Shane Connelly: And you know there's nothing less desirable than ecstasy and all the other less desirable drugs; they are bad - let's make no bones about that.
Mike Welsh: Thanks for your time Shane.
Shane Connelly: Good on you Mike
Mike Welsh: Shane Connelly is the Deputy Chief Police Officer in the ACT, and that's the warning. I guess the guts of that warning from my point of view is you don't know what's in them, you don't know, the cops know what's in them but that's because they've seen the other side of it. It's not a party drug at all, no party there, and big fines for also possessing, using, possession and supplying between $5000 and $100,000 fines and/or jail terms. So you want to keep that in mind as the big events such as Stonefest come for us this weekend.
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