By contrast, about one in 20 heroin users are in trouble with the law each year, and about one in 60 users of amphetamines or ecstasy seem to get into trouble. One in every 32 of the estimated 1.9 million cannabis users gets into trouble.

Around the nation, about one in every eight Australians is a consumer of illegal drugs, and, of these, and of these, about one in every 35 gets into trouble each year.

If there were any relationship between the danger of arrest and use or abuse of these drugs, the order of battle would suggest that cocaine was virtually harmless. What drug researcher John Jiggens calls a relative regime of prohibition, comparing the arrest rate for particular drugs for every 1000 users, amphetamines rate about eight to cocaine's one, cannabis 15, and heroin 24. The main target of the war on drugs is cannabis, with 70 per cent of all drug offences being in relation to cannabis.

Jiggens estimates there are about 390,000 recent users of cocaine, and that the Australian market for cocaine is about 4.7 tonnes, worth about $2.5 billion a year. The market size equates to about 94 million lines of coke. Despite regular police boasts of massive seizures of cocaine, it seems likely police or customs stop less than 20 per cent of the drug crossing the border.

The big market is cannabis, with an estimated two million users, consuming between 150 and 300 tonnes of cannabis, worth about $6 billion a year. It might be Australia's most valuable cash crop. About 250,000 Australians use cannabis every day.

About 600,000 Australians have recently consumed ecstasy, or what they have thought to be ecstasy, or similar illegal stimulants, given there has been a worldwide drought of one of its precursor chemicals, and that much of what is now sold as ecstasy is adulterated with other drugs.

About 60 per cent of ecstasy users have also used cocaine and methamphetamines over the past year. Jiggens estimates the market at about 40 million pills a year, worth about $1.4 billion.

Methamphetamine use appears to be declining, but about 390,000 Australians report recent use, and the consumption is thought to be about 6.8 tonnes a year, worth about $6 billion. Because the production and sale of amphetamines is linked with outlaw bikie gangs, there is heavy police activity and much grandstanding about occasional successes and seizures, but the main effect of the creation of droughts, local or general, has been to increase demand for (and, usually fairly quickly, supply of) alternative drugs.

Heroin consumption had, until recently, been falling, less because of successful enforcement programs than because the focus of opium production has shifted from the Golden Triangle towards Afghanistan, not much of a supplier to our market. However the golden triangle is reviving, supply is again up, and while seizures are also dramatically up, it appears as if customs and police work is intercepting, at best, about 12 per cent of what is arriving. There are thought to be about 50,000 recent heroin users, having about 40 million hits a year. This amounts to about two tonnes, with a street value of about $2 billion.

The figures presented by Jiggens are not particularly controversial, and his estimates are based on official figures, including regular reports from about the illegal drug market from the Australian Crime Commission. But bodies such as the ACC, as well as others involved in the illegal drug enforcement industry, tend to focus on arrests or seizures as some sort of benchmarks of success, or, at least, of slow but steady progress in attacking the scourge of illegal drugs. To the contrary, however, each ''massive'', or

''enormous'', or ''market-busting seizure'' is usually but a proof of the size of the market, and a reminder that even sustained and expensive action is rarely making much of a dint on the market. And when it does, the short droughts that ensue merely cause a shift to other drugs.

What police and the justice system are doing, in short, is futile - a waste of time, and, in terms of its impact on the lives of others, a destructive waste of time.

Put bluntly, it makes no difference to drug consumption.

This futility comes at an enormous cost. There's the direct one - the simple expense to the taxpayer of maintaining an army of men and women soldiers in the war. These are police, customs, criminal intelligence and other investigators, as well as prison warders, court staff, judges, parole officers and counsellors. One can make estimates of the total cost of this, based on figures such as the proportion of offenders in jail for drug-related offences, proportions of court time and amount of police activity devoted to drugs. Right now that figure, Australia-wide, is pushing $1.5 billion a year - long before one throws in secondary costs of wasted lives, health impacts, and systemic official corruption the illegal market invariably brings in its wake.

Jiggens, launching a paper on the economics of illegal drugs at a gathering sponsored by Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform this week, told of a strange relationship between the size of the illegal market (about $17 billion a year) and the cost of drug law enforcement. At any time over the past 20 years, the size of the illegal market for cannabis - the drug of choice for law enforcement officials - has tended to be about four times that spent on law enforcement. More spending on police resulted in a bigger market, and vice versa.

''Ultimately I began to understand why,'' he says in his paper, which is available on the ffdlr.org.au website. ''For traders in the illicit drugs market, the major cost is not production, but drug-law enforcement. It is the combined weight of police, courts and prisons pressing down that creates the value of the market.

''A kilo of heroin can be bought in Burma for $2500; once you get it into Australia it can wholesale for $250,000. The massive increase in value is entirely due to the cost of drug-law enforcement. It is through the mechanism of price that the money spent on drug prohibition acts as a multiplier for the drug market.

''Pressing down hard on drugs does not make drugs less attractive, but it does make them more expensive. Cracking down on the trade causes a proportionate rise in price -that is, price varies with the regime of prohibition. As the price goes up, so do profits, which mean larger sums are available for corrupting officials. [The economist Milton] Friedman argued that as long as large sums of money are involved, it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic, or even to reduce seriously its scope.''

Overall, Jiggens estimates every increase in resources going to law enforcement, increases the size of the total illegal market by about 10 times. The total illegal drug market is about $17 billion: if Tony Abbott, or Andrew Scipione, in some burst of zeal, increased drug-law enforcement spending by $100 million tomorrow, the size of the market would quickly increase by about $1 billion. NSW Police Commissioner Scipione, or the AFP's Tony Negus, maybe even Abbott, would stand beside some fresh seizure and declare they were ''winning'' the war against drugs, and deliver us a meaningless moral lecture. But they are wasting their time and our money.

Perhaps the shift by the Australian Crime Commission into headline- hunting over the use of drugs in sport reflects this futility and fatuity.

''Drug prohibition has been a monumental social policy failure,'' Jiggens says. '''We spend $1.5 billion policing and prosecuting 85,000 offences, locking up 3000 Australians under the delusionary belief we are keeping drugs off the street.

''In the real world, Australia is swimming in a sea of drugs. Instead of reducing drug use, prohibition has glamorised and promoted it.

''Politicians were warned of the dangers of corruption that would flow from drug prohibition, yet an Ocker Nostra - a corrupt milieu of police, customs officers and criminals - has been allowed to flourish, feeding off a series of multibillion-dollar industries … worth about 1 per cent of GDP''.

Fifteen years ago, it seemed public policy might swing to reflect reality, rather than hope and some sort of Nixonian belief that tough and loud law enforcement could deal with supply and demand. There were premiers sick of the wrecked lives and wrecked institutions, interested in answers. For a second, it even looked as if even prime minister John Howard might consider alternatives.

For a moment, but Howard was stiffened back into moral absolutism and prohibitionist mode by Major Brian Watters, of the Salvation Army, one firmly given to a zero-tolerance perspective, one which sees the use of illegal (and even some legal) drugs as immoral and criminal behaviour, rather than a health issue.

Watters, propped up by Daily Telegraph-style moral panic and hysteria, was firmly against harm-minimisation theories. He promoted abstinence as the only solution. Suddenly Howard was tough on drugs again. Police budgets soared, hundreds of thousands of Australians turned on to drugs.

Howard has been out of the game for six years, but while many in the Rudd or Gillard governments completely understand - sometimes from experience - the futility of the tough approach, few have had the guts to say so, and policy has little changed. Most politicians, Labor or Liberal, are terrified of being accused of being ''soft'' on drugs, just as they are terrified of being accused of being soft on terrorism, or boat people.

Political inaction on drugs is as much the moral issue of our time as climate change. Under the Coalition, of course, there'll be no softness on hard drugs. Policy will be determined by faith, Alan Jones and focus groups.

Meanwhile, it rather seems that the Eastman inquiry is in contact with representatives of the Italian organised crime unit - perhaps for some advice on suggestions that the murder of Colin Winchester was a Mafia hit job in retaliation for the assistant commissioner's sting on Calabrian drug lords over a cannabis crop at Bungendore. That there was such a connection was firmly believed 24 years ago by Italian investigators, and our own cops working on organised crime. But inquiries were squashed not having produced a definite suspect as other inquiries focused on Eastman.

By coincidence, the Italians are here just as there has been a flurry of activity in relation to the murder of Donald Mackay, whose 1977 disappearance at Griffith was to prove so powerful in creating the image of an all-powerful mafia, protected by all powerful cops, then especially, but not exclusively of the NSW variety. This image was to prove helpful in building police budgets - even NSW ones - over the years, but did little to promote liaison with Italian mafia specialists, with the AFP closing its Rome liaison post in 1992.

It has not been difficult to confirm that the Italians have been in town, but the inquiry says that it made no request for funding for their presence. The ACC said that it was simply ongoing AFP-ACC liaison with Italy, unrelated to the inquiry.