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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (5 November) . . Page.. 3611 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

the speakers in Melbourne said, that is the argument for why we should be saying, "Know about drugs", not "Say no to drugs", so that young people are not powerless if they are exposed to drug dealers. Mr Howard says:

Drugs should be despised by young people ...

For heaven's sake, alcohol is a drug. Is Mr Howard going to say that every citizen in Australia should despise alcohol? He is not saying that. Of course he is not. The community says that alcohol has the potential to be dangerous and people need to be aware of that.

The thing that worries me most about this statement is the sentence:

"Tough on Drugs" provides moral leadership against drugs ...

That is it in a nutshell. For John Howard, it is a moral issue. He does not seem to understand that it is a health issue and a social issue that needs a complicated response and understanding. I think we should be getting tough on poorly researched, populist policy initiatives such as Mr Howard's proposal, which will be a waste of taxpayers' money and will not save lives. Let us get tough on policy initiatives which will support the existence of a huge and uncontrolled black market. For heaven's sake, we cannot even keep drugs out of prisons, which are discrete buildings with walls and barbed wire and guards. How on earth are we going to stop drugs coming into Australia? Of course we have to spend some money and resources on policing and enforcement, but you cannot possibly see it as the whole response to this issue. Certainly, the "say no" campaign has been shown not to work.

It is interesting to look at the Netherlands, which has a very strong emphasis on minimising harm through separating the illicit drug markets. They have coffee shops for marijuana and cannabis products, which are totally separated from other drugs. They look at drugs with acceptable risks and drugs with unacceptable risks. They have broken them into two sections. Cannabis products are an acceptable risk and the rest are not. What is very interesting about the Netherlands is that they lost 40 people to drug overdoses in 1995. In Australia we lost 634 people. In the Netherlands the involvement of young people in hard drugs has decreased significantly since they have had this separation of the illicit drugs in place. In other words, when you separate the coffee shops with the cannabis products totally from the harder drugs and the riskier drugs, you see a decrease in the association between riskier drugs and young people. It is a success story. It is not about zero tolerance. It is a thoughtful response to the issue of drug taking.

It is dishonest to lump all drugs together. Young people will never take that message seriously, and they never have. I remember that when I was a young person they tried to do that. Anyone who was young in the 1970s knew that there were various degrees of risk associated with various drugs, and it was a nonsense to hear authorities saying that all drugs were equally bad. It is dishonest. When we get these grand statements about drugs in our society, we get task forces, we have strategies and we have big rhetoric about

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