Page 2286 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 August 2022
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Again, I thank the minister, the Health Directorate, Pill Testing Australia, Directions Health Services and CAHMA for their incredibly diligent implementation of this lifesaving service, and I will do all that I can to support its success.
We were thrilled when, in 2020, Labor agreed to support our calls for this service to be made permanent. You will remember that the summer which preceded 2020, Madam Speaker, was one of many horrors, including a series of avoidable drug-related deaths of young people, such as Alex Ross-King, who overdosed on MDMA while she preloaded to avoid police detection before entering a music festival in New South Wales.
A review of drug overdose deaths undertaken by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre later that year revealed that overdosing on party drugs at music festivals accounts for only four per cent of drug-related deaths. The vast majority of deaths by overdose, according to NDARC, occur in private places——people’s homes, mostly. They occur because people who need support, people who need access to treatment for problematic substance use, cannot access that support for fear of punitive responses.
People in these situations are often ashamed of circumstances they find themselves in, and they are fearful, rightly or wrongly, of the police and of the criminal justice system more broadly. While it is important to provide a service to check drugs for lethal and harmful substances before they are consumed, we need to build a social and political environment around this service which enables its use. Proper evidence-based decriminalisation will do just that.
According to the Canberra Alliance for Harm Minimisation and Advocacy, by every measurement applied, there has been no increase in cannabis use in the ACT since the decriminalisation of cannabis in 2020. This must be repeated, particularly for those on my right: by every measurement applied, there has been no increase in cannabis use in the ACT since the decriminalisation of cannabis in 2020.
However, CAHMA’s preliminary data from its national minimum dataset shows that in the first year after this legal change there was a fourfold increase in the number of people presenting for help with cannabis use as their primary drug of concern—a fourfold increase.
The data indicates that legality is not a major contributing factor to an individual’s choice as to whether or not to take illicit substances. Therefore legal condemnation of any substance will not decrease its usage. That is proven. It only serves to impose punishment, impose discrimination and impose stigma. However, it also shows that decriminalisation creates an environment in which the people who need support are more willing to access it. It is as simple and as bold as that.
I came to this policy position sceptical about whether decriminalisation was the right path for dealing with the harms of drug use. But through this process, by listening to people, by asking questions and by undertaking deep personal reflection of my own life’s experience, I have come to strongly believe that harm reduction, including decriminalisation, will not only be effective in reducing the damage caused by drugs
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