Page 1917 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2022
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most vulnerable people in our community and will set an extremely important precedent across the country for treating substance dependency as a health issue.
I thank Minister Stephen-Smith for presenting the government’s response to the drugs of dependence inquiry. I also thank her for the work that she and the Health Directorate have done to date on the development of the government’s response to the personal use amendment bill.
I would like to take the opportunity to put on the record a series of important points about what a sensible, evidence-based approach to drug decriminalisation would look like. I do so having spent almost 12 months as a member of the select committee formed to examine the bill and the policy, funding and service environment in which it sits. I do so as someone who has had an ongoing, strong stakeholder relationship with the drug and alcohol sector since I was first elected. I also do so as someone with a lived experience of caring for a loved one who has had a problematic relationship with drugs.
In that vein, I would like to acknowledge Mr Bill Bush from Family and Friends of Drug Law Reform, who joins us in the gallery today. Thank you, Bill, for your ongoing advocacy and fight for sensible drug policy. You, Marion and the rest of the family and friends group are a constant motivation for me and my whole team.
Over the course of my time as the ACT Greens spokesperson for drug harm reduction, I have spent a lot of time reading, listening to and talking with people with significant lived experience, policy expertise and academic knowledge of drug use. We know that people with lived experience of drug use and substance dependence are best placed to understand the very real difference that decriminalisation will make. Decriminalisation is set to most impact those with compounding experiences of stigma and marginalisation—experiences at the intersection of poverty, mental health, social isolation, housing instability and discrimination. This reform must be made in primary collaboration with those that it will directly impact.
This is a very complex and politically charged area of policy development. In all of the noise that surrounds this issue, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the people that this impacts, and the overwhelming evidence base that a health and human rights approach to drug use significantly improves the lives of these people, their families and friends, and our broader community.
The Canberra Alliance for Harm Minimisation and Advocacy, in their submission to the drugs of dependence inquiry, told us:
This bill is of extreme importance to ACT society because it is focused on reducing the harms from both … the harms that drugs cause to people and the harms that criminalisation of drugs cause to people. It must be understood that these 2 harms are intricately linked, with the criminalisation of drugs shutting down support and timely treatment of people and causing long term social exclusion in areas such as employment.
Again and again throughout the inquiry we were told by people with lived experience, community lawyers that advocate for them, the drug treatment sector that provides
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