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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3692 ..

put out its drugs strategy. I have not yet been able to read all of it in detail but, as far as I can tell at this stage, the strategy maintains the harm minimisation approach.

The minister in his presentation speech has used language that I would expect to hear in another place. He said that the bill would promote the war on drugs. Waging a war on drugs has seen more than 5.6 million Americans having experienced prison. Spending more money on prisons than schools came out of Nixon’s election campaign in the 1960s. Is the minister concerned to ensure that the ACT prison is full of ACT prisoners from the day it opens?

This Assembly and this government need to be clear on the objectives that drug laws should serve. The overriding principle is that these laws should promote the health and wellbeing of the community. In particular, the laws should minimise the access, particularly by young people, to harmful drugs, promote the recovery and social reintegration of those who have become dependent or are otherwise harmed by drugs, and not add to the harms of users or the rest of the community.

You will note, Mr Speaker, that these objectives are socially conservative. I am seeking to articulate what I understand to be objectives shared by both sides of the Assembly. I am not here advocating implementation of the libertarian principle that people should be permitted to engage in behaviour that harms them but not others.

Let’s look at how this bill measures up to the objectives I have just read out. The first one related to minimising the access to harmful drugs. We are not stopping drugs getting to our children. In fact, the minister told us the reverse. He said:

… the trade in illicit drugs has increased dramatically and grows ever larger, reaching deep into the Australian population with incalculable costs in human suffering and scarce resources.

He tells us that, magically, this is going to change with the passage of the legislation, saying, “This bill has the potential to dramatically improve the overall effectiveness of the war on drugs.” I call on the minister to explain the rational grounds for his optimism. For years this territory and the whole of Australia have applied some of the toughest penalties of the criminal law to drug offences. Those laws may not have been as uniform as the ones now proposed, but there is no gainsaying their severity. Why haven’t they been successful?

I put it to you that one measure of their success is a big factor in their failure: law enforcement seeks to make drugs less available by raising their price. In the words of two respected American researchers, professors Jonathan Caulkins and Peter Reuter, cannabis is quite literally worth its weight in gold and cocaine and heroin are even more expensive.

Whatever dampening effect the high price has on demand is countered by the dynamic at the level of users. Addicted users are desperate for the commodity. Unlike the generality of crimes, they have no more interest in complaining to police about their purchase than the supplier. At this grassroots level, users sell to users and peers distribute to peers. There is thus an insistent demand. Users are prepared to pay an exorbitant price. Big time criminals are only too willing to meet that demand.

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