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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 9 Hansard (1 September) . . Page.. 2671 ..
MR RUGENDYKE (continuing):
The fall-out from the decriminalisation of cannabis has been wide-ranging. This is about education, this is about health, and this is about law enforcement. There is major haemorrhaging in all three of these areas in our fight against drugs as a direct result of our relaxed cannabis laws. The most disheartening aspect of this whole mess for me is that this situation has been allowed to fester for seven years. It disappoints me enormously as a parent, as a politician and as a Canberran that the problems have been totally ignored. The situation has been allowed to steer out of control.
Mr Speaker, I am regularly contacted by parents with the common theme that cannabis is changing their children's lives. Dr John Anderson, a Sydney brain specialist, has at least two new cases from Canberra walking through his doors every week with psychotic conditions directly attributable to cannabis addiction. He receives more cases per capita from the ACT than he does from New South Wales, that is, 100 new families per year from Canberra have to resort to making the trek to Sydney to get help. That is clear evidence that we have a huge problem in Canberra.
When I sat down to write this presentation, I could have done a cut and paste of a speech delivered by our Chief Minister, Kate Carnell, in the Assembly on 9 September 1992. Mr Speaker, I shall quote from Mrs Carnell's speech during the debate that resulted in cannabis being decriminalised in the ACT. The quote comes from page 2079 of Hansard:
The main point which must be emphasised is that marijuana is, or potentially is, a dangerous drug. The toxicity of this substance has been seriously underestimated by those supporting the amendment. They appear to be acting on the perception that cannabis is relatively harmless. Why else would they be prepared to embrace measures that could potentially encourage cannabis use? In summary, not only have members in support of this Bill underestimated the toxicity and the addictive properties of cannabis; they also have badly underestimated the signal that this will send out to encourage the use of cannabis, particularly among young people. The Liberal Party has not underestimated these effects ...
How prophetic, Mrs Carnell! Based on those comments, I would expect wholehearted support for my amendments from Mrs Carnell and her Liberal colleagues. If Mrs Carnell says she has changed her mind since uttering those words, I will not buy it and the public will not buy it because the warnings Mrs Carnell gave in this speech have, sadly, come to fruition. That is why it astonishes me somewhat that the Liberal Party, which launched a failed attempt to insert a sunset provision into the relaxed cannabis laws on that fateful day in September 1992, have never seen fit to review or evaluate the system since coming to power. There has been no monitoring of it and there have been no attempts to ensure that the decriminalisation of cannabis is working. All that has happened is that the attention has moved to a softening of the heroin laws and marijuana has been forgotten.
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