Page 921 - Week 03 - Thursday, 10 April 2014
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a summary of the research methodology and summarises its key findings. This publication finds that while the current legal threshold system helps to convict and sanction drug traffickers, it may be placing Australian drug users at risk of unjustified criminal charge or sanction. Too often, in relation to drugs, lawmakers and the community simply react to specific events. While that is understandable, it is not the best-practice approach to developing policy.
These reforms and this new regulation are therefore evidence based. They are well considered, well tested and respond to the realities of drug use in our city. I commend the regulation to the Assembly. I present a copy of the following paper:
Criminal Code (Controlled Drugs) Legislation Amendment Regulation 2014—Ministerial statement, 10 April 2014.
I move:
That the Assembly takes note of the paper.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.30): I rise to make a brief statement in response to the regulation that the Attorney-General has just tabled.
As the attorney explained, the regulation adds a list of over 40 new substances to the schedule of controlled substances in the ACT criminal code. This controlled substance schedule is essentially a list of banned drugs, the kind of things that you are not allowed to possess, manufacture or sell. I think that today, if most of us looked at this list, we would be surprised both by the large number of banned substances and by the unfamiliarity of the substances. There are names of drugs you would expect to be on the list, such as cannabis and heroin, but there is also a growing number of synthetic chemicals filling this schedule with names that would be unfamiliar to most of us.
This unusual picture is the result of a serious and emerging problem that is currently challenging policymakers, health professionals and law enforcement in local and international jurisdictions. The root of the problem is the issue of synthetic drugs. Particularly challenging is the rate at which these synthetic drugs are emerging and changing, with new drugs and new varieties practically every week.
The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre reports this year that the use of emerging synthetic drugs is on the rise among drug users. We know that these synthetic drugs can be very dangerous. In Australia in the last 18 months we have seen the tragic deaths of five people linked to synthetic drugs. It is clear that we have to do something about the problem. But is it the right approach to be in constant reaction mode—to try and ban a new suite of drugs every year, every six months or even every month? The experts in the field say that this is not the right approach. We simply cannot keep up with an industry that is producing a new variation of a drug approximately every week.
As the Attorney-General tables this regulation today to ban the latest list of synthetics, the manufacturers and the black market are already tweaking the chemical compounds of their synthetic drugs, ensuring they can avoid the banned lists. Yet we have no way of knowing what the health impact will be on the people taking these new variants. Young people will keep buying them, using them and risking their lives.
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