Page 2295 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 August 2022
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position—that that is an inappropriate delegation of power. I have not had a chance to go through the Greens amendments in detail, but they seem to take this approach even further, in terms of the limits, than what the minister describes as trafficable quantities. Even the minister wants some quantities. I think Mr Pettersson wanted it to be 15 hits of heroin. With respect to the minister, we do not know what will be proposed, because that will be done by regulation, and the Greens want even more.
Moving to the principle of the debate, as we have said, we are opposed to these laws. To be clear, we are not talking here about cannabis and pill testing. We have had that debate. I retain my concerns. This is a very different debate. We are not talking about cannabis or small amounts of MDMA and testing. We are talking about decriminalising heroin and meth. They are a very different category. We are talking about some of the most insidious, soul-destroying substances ever to be pushed on our children or to have blighted our communities across the globe!
Make no mistake; these drugs destroy lives—not just those of the users, their families and friends but the entire community. The personal toll that these drugs take on users is obvious. It is deadly and it is utterly destructive, and I think that is acknowledged. But the harm that they cause to society can be equally appalling. Whether it is through domestic violence, violent public rampages or drug-driving, the use of these drugs often takes a terrible toll on other people, and those others are often the frontline workers such as police, ambulance officers, those in Eds, nurses, and innocent road users. In fact, the Australian Federal Police Commissioner has warned of narco-tourism, as has been seen in other jurisdictions across the world—jurisdictions that are now reversing their policies in many cases.
But the evidence is chilling. In a report for the National Library of Medicine, author Joseph Califano, from the National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, spoke of these international results. These are often quoted, with respect to what is happening overseas. Switzerland’s needle park, touted as a way to restrict a few hundred heroin users to a small area, turned into a grotesque tourist attraction of 20,000 addicts and had to be closed before it infected the entire city of Zurich. Italy, where personal possession of a few doses of drugs like heroin has generally been exempt from criminal sanction, has one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in Europe, with more than 60 per cent of AIDS cases there attributable to intravenous drug use. The Netherlands introduced laws for coffee shops and other laws, which are now being wound back. By contrast, Sweden offers an example of a successful restrictive drug policy. Faced with rising drug use in the 90s, the government tightened drug control, stepped up police action, mounted a national action plan and created a national drug coordinator. The result is that drug use is a third of the European average.
We hear much about the Portuguese model, but what is not often talked about is how much Portugal has wound back those reforms. In 2008 the Supreme Court of Justice re-established the crime of drug use. In 2014 the Constitutional Court validated it. According to the report 20 years of Portuguese drug policy—developments, challenges and the quest for human rights, this has meant—and I quote:
Despite having decriminalized the use of all illegal drugs, Portugal has an
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