HEROIN'S most notable effect on the long-term user is not insanity, disease or moral turpitude - it's constipation

HEROIN'S most notable effect on the long-term user is not insanity, disease or moral turpitude - it's constipation. Regular users of opiates find it difficult to go to the toilet. This restricted state is an apposite metaphor for drug policy in Australia.

We remain stuck in antiquated law and order responses, when drug taking is actually a health issue. Police can do nothing to remedy addiction, all they can do is treat drug users as criminals first and people second. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their dealings with heroin use, the drug most feared by the community.

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Let's get one thing over with right away. When we say that a heroin addiction is bad, what we should really mean is that the bad things associated with heroin come about because the drug is illegal.

The fact that some heroin users turn to burglary or prostitution to finance their habit is a consequence of the legal system rather than the drug itself.

The purveyors of heroin operate outside the law. This makes the drug expensive and widely varying in quality. People overdose because they don't know how potent their supply is going to be. Users become sick and sometimes homeless because all their money and resources are directed towards the ceaseless maintenance of this costly addiction.

I've heard drug educators explain that a kilogram of heroin is no more expensive to produce than a kilogram of household sugar. Yet a heroin addict may need to spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars a week on a substance that's worth no more than a few bucks. Most of the crime associated with heroin is the unfortunate byproduct of its high price.

Dr Alex Wodak, director of the drug and alcohol service at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, maintains that heroin-related crime is perpetrated by only about 5 per cent of heroin users, who have a serious dependency. Many heroin users have jobs and function responsibly in the community. Wodak's proposed solution for severe addiction is to allow the user to obtain heroin safely and cheaply by medical prescription. It's the kind of response that has been recommended by many doctors and social commentators for decades. It's also a response that never fails to ignite a controversy. We're not ready for tolerance. The real question is, why?

It is impossible to have a polite debate about heroin. Right now there's a clamorous argument in Melbourne about whether we might save the lives of heroin users and benefit the community by introducing a safe injecting facility in Richmond. The debate has exposed the extent of the community's ignorance about drugs and revealed an ugly but widely held loathing of heroin users. If we continue to depict users as depraved souls, we'll never be able to solve this social problem.

Heroin use in the City of Yarra is so prominent that councillors have voted six-to-one in favour of trialling a safe, medically supervised injecting room. Their goals are to stop users from dying in public toilets and lanes and take drug use (and discarded syringes) off the streets. These were the same good reasons why the Wayside Chapel established an injecting room in Sydney's Kings Cross so successfully a decade ago.

Talkback radio can be a shrill arena, but it can also be a good place to find out how the community responds to putative social change. In Melbourne the inevitable question was put to listeners by several broadcasters: ''Are you for or against safe injecting rooms?''

Mary, a caller to 774 last Wednesday, articulately summed up the case against tolerance. She was adamant: heroin users are ''very frightening people'' who ''don't have normal empathy of people in the community''. There were more callers quick to support Mary's view by evoking the classic epithet ''junkie''. Junkies were ''horrible'', ''antisocial'', ''angry'', ''abusive''.

Ted Baillieu, a generally fair-minded and progressive Liberal, has spoken out against Yarra Council's advocacy of safe injecting rooms in terms that amplify and reflect the trepidations that were broadcast on talkback.

''We don't support the normalisation of this kind of behaviour,'' the Premier said. In other words, a safe injecting room was tantamount to moral failure and only encouraging people to use narcotics.

Police Minister Peter Ryan thought he had the solution to this moral panic. More police. The constipated law and order approach.

The Americans are hopelessly addicted to their war on drugs - a war they've never won. This wretched conflict is also being fought in Australia. A more enlightened approach is blocked by our tendency to see heroin users as the enemy, to demonise and describe them as the embodiment of all social ills.

The more aberrant heroin users seem, the easier it is to ignore their rights and accept their deaths and their violated lives as somehow unavoidable.

There's a bigoted and vindictive flavour to Melbourne's debate about injecting rooms. It's not really a discussion about whether we can save lives by building responsive support services. It's a debate about whether heroin users should be counted as human beings.