Denis Moriarty | With federal wellbeing budget coming we should decrimalise drugs before the oncoming bus hits us

That's both a sign of vast slow forces moving deliberately over decades and a screaming warning about things that Australia needs to act on today.

In both Australia and the United States, life expectancy has increased by three months a year almost every year since 1890, regular as clockwork, with Australia maintaining a comfortable lead over the US of between four and seven years. Better public health, better OH&S, better medical science, better nutrition and education - it was what Western democracies did, and it certainly wasn't news.

On the other hand, China has been closing the gap for 60 years - pushing up life expectancy rapidly (by 14 months per year) from 1960 to 1980, and gradually (a mere six months per year) since then. In terms of lives affected, it's been the biggest good-news story in the world every day since 1960. Until recently, China was expected to catch up with the West by the end of the decade.

And then, in the US, something went wrong; and this may finally be news. Average US life expectancy started falling in 2014 and then got worse, dropping by 22 months in 2019-20 and another six months in 2020-21. By comparison, Australia went up by its usual three months in 2019-20 and dropped in 2020-21 by an entire week.

Yes, certainly, a lot of that was COVID. The US handled the pandemic appallingly. That will move the needle. The 1919 flu pandemic is just about the only other event that you can pick out on the long-term graph; wars and depressions, which you'd expect to show up, are in demographic terms just too localised to feature.

But it wasn't all COVID. Some of it was despair.

Death rates, and how they're distributed across the nation, are about the only measures of national wellbeing that can't be faked or argued away.

They say more about a country than its labels or its budgets or its media. And the American figures are an ambulance siren. As I said, you can't see wars on the graph, or depressions. You can see fentanyl.

With COVID or without, the US has 80,000 opioid overdose deaths a year, up from under 10,000 in 2000. That moves the needle, too.

Locally, the feds on the Melbourne docks recently confiscated 11kg of pure powdered fentanyl hidden inside a piece of machinery sent from Canada. That's quite a bump from their previous best, which was 30 grams.

We have been warned. We have to act. On the symptomatic side, we have to get a drug policy that makes sense. In the longer term, we have to offer all Australians a life worth living fully.

We have been told, over and over, that our prohibitions haven't worked and have done damage. Our anti-tobacco campaigns have shown that persuasion can work (it's sad they have not been followed with similar efforts against gambling and pokies). Other nations (such as Portugal) have shown that there are other more effective ways to deal with dangerous drugs.

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We should decriminalise soft drugs immediately and hard drugs once we've invested vastly more in drug and mental health treatment facilities. We should stop demonising users and start offering them better alternatives. We should stop treating addicts like sinners and start treating them like smokers.

Deaths of despair in the US - suicides, overdoses, shootings - cluster in the poor, among minorities, and among Trump voters. Australia needs to learn from its last pandemic: unless you reach everyone, the virus will break out and kill at its leisure. Inequality is an accident waiting to happen.

We have to encourage community, friendship, sociability, public participation, everything that brings us together to care for each other. We have to value that, and support it, and pay for that support in our budgets.

I'm looking forward to the federal government's first ever wellbeing budget - bring it on, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Charities Minister Andrew Leigh.

We can either learn from the "don't walk" sign or we can learn from the oncoming truck.