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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3694 ..

addiction is important, but attention to it should not be at the expense of other aspects of the health and welfare of either the users or those around them. The criminal law as embodied in this bill gives no recognition to this need.

The third point is that laws should not add to the harms of users or the rest of the community. Let me quote from the report of the committee that drafted the uniform criminal code on serious drug offences. (Extension of time granted.) The report states:

… in the years since the 1980 Williams Royal Commission, it has become increasingly apparent that significant elements in the harm which results from the habitual use of illicit drugs are a consequence of criminal prohibitions and their effects on the lives of users. Quite apart from the risks of arrest and punishment, there are risks to health or life in consuming illicit drugs of unknown concentration and uncertain composition. The circumstances in which illicit drugs are consumed and the widespread practice of multiple drug use add to those risks. Medical intervention in emergencies resulting from adverse drug reactions may be delayed or denied because associates fear the criminal consequences of exposing their own involvement. The illicit consumer’s expenditure of money, time and effort on securing supplies may lead to the neglect of other necessities. It will often impose substantial costs on the community, and the user, if the purchase of supplies is funded from property crime. Further social costs result from the stigmatisation of habitual users as criminals and their alienation from patterns of conformity in employment, social and family life. Risks are inherent, of course, in habitual use of most, if not all, recreational drugs. But criminal prohibitions amplify those risks. They amplify, for example, the risk of death from overdose.

I should have thought that this catalogue of harms would have caused the government to review very carefully legislation such as it is now proposing. I am concerned that, rather than doing that, the government appears to regard these consequences as a virtue of its proposal. I draw this conclusion because that is what the committee, on which the ACT was represented, did. It added:

The greater the risks, the greater the deterrent effect, both on those who are habitual users and those who might otherwise be tempted by the lifestyle. Mark Moore, a leading American authority on drug law policy, refers to the “effective cost” of heroin use—the effective cost of use is an amalgam of all those factors which make the life of the habitual user dangerous, arduous, frightening and expensive. To the extent to which criminal law prohibitions have as their object an increase in the effective cost of heroin use, they counter the requirements of humanity with the logic of pure deterrence.

That is wrong. It is as if, in proposing this legislation, the right side of the brain of this government was not talking to the left. I thought it wanted to make drugs less available. It has provided no evidence that the bill will do that and there is much evidence that it will not. I had thought that the government wished to promote the recovery and social reintegration of those harmed by drugs. It has said that it supports harm minimisation, yet it supports this bill based on the principle of deterrence designed to make the life of the habitual user dangerous, arduous, frightening and expensive. That is inhumane and irrational.

Professor Collins and Dr Lapsley estimated that government outlays on police, criminal courts and prisons attributable to the abuse of illicit drugs were $1,427 million in 1998,

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