Page 2189 - Week 06 - Thursday, 6 June 2019
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One of the other things which is most important, and which was touched on a little bit—and it was probably remiss of us as a committee that we did not delve into this as much, but we did have a very limited time span—was that, time and again, the Chief Minister, proponents for drug law reform and people who opposed drug law reform came along and said, “Cannabis is a dangerous drug, but—” Sometimes they said, “So don’t do anything about it,” and at other times they said, “But we may as well do something about it.”
As legislators it behoves us to look at the issues before we make decisions about opening up the cannabis market and saying to people, “It’s all right.” The educative power of the law will say to people, “It’s all right.” It will be all right for 18-year-olds and older to use small amounts of cannabis and have small amounts of cannabis. That tells the 14, 15 and 16-year-olds that, in a little while, it will be all right, so it is probably all right now.
The cumulative research—which has not been debunked, although people like to ignore it—is that cannabis is a dangerous drug. Research going back to the 19th century indicates that cannabis is a dangerous drug. It causes psychosis, and psychosis, as we know, often leads to dangerous and violent crimes.
One of the things that is most startling, from the research that I have done, is that in some US states where cannabis has been legalised we have seen a combined increase in murders of 35 per cent against a 20 per cent across-the-board national trend, and a combined increase in serious assaults of 25 per cent when the national trend in the United States over the same period was 10 per cent. We do not know the reasons for that, but I think it behoves us to look into the reasons for those upticks in violent crime before we legislate in this space here.
The other problem we have is that there is an unknown interaction between ACT law and commonwealth law which has not been fully explored in this committee. Quite frankly, the only way that we can probably fully explore it is through a test case. At one stage during its deliberations the standing committee considered a recommendation that this legislation should not be commenced until this matter was clearly defined. I was happy to support that recommendation, but the proposer eventually walked away from that, because I think she thought it would undermine the overall intent of the report.
It is a very important issue, and until we understand the implications, we might be telling people in the ACT, “Yes, you can possess small amounts; you can have it for your own use.” If we do not tell them that if we vacate the field in the ACT they could still be charged under commonwealth law, we are remiss. We are essentially entrapping people. This is a very important issue which should be resolved before this legislation is passed.
On the basis of all of those levels of uncertainty—the fact that this bill is not fit for purpose, that there are a multitude of amendments from both sides, from the government and the crossbenches, about this—even if we pass the bill with all of
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