Drugs Policy

DRUG POLICYPage: 106

The Hon. PENNY SHARPE (Parliamentary Secretary) [12.05 a.m.]:

I am honoured by the rewards and acknowledgment of work done by
myself on behalf of family drug support. I would give it back in a
second for ten minutes with Damien.

Those are the words of a courageous and compassionate man, Tony Trimingham, at the launch of his book, Not My Family, Never My Child.

Tony lost his son, Damien, to a heroin overdose in 1997 and through
Family Drug Support, has been the very human and public face of the
hurt, grief and waste of human life caused by drug misuse in our
community.

It has now been 10 years since the United Nations declared,
"A drug free world-we can do it." That pronouncement was made at a
special meeting of the United Nations General Assembly convened in New
York to review progress on tackling the illegal drug market. Ten years
later, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs met again, this
time in Vienna, to review the United Nations Declaration of 1998.

Evidence over the past 10 years has shown the war on drugs to be a
public policy failure. Instead of the eradication of drugs, an illicit
drug market has developed that generates more than $US300 billion a
year, supporting crime syndicates across the globe. The war on drugs
has also had other unintended consequences, including high rates of
incarceration of drug users, particularly in the United States of
America, and the spread of HIV-AIDS among injecting drug users,
particularly in Russia which now has the fastest-growing HIV epidemic
anywhere in the world. Yet perhaps the most disturbing issue has been
the emergence of the narco-States destabilising South America-all as a
result of drug use in the United States. In the lead-up to the Vienna
meeting, former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Columbia published an
article in which they argued that:

Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalisation of consumption simply haven't worked.

It is their States that have suffered because of the war on drugs. They
believe that a cooperative approach is needed between countries of
supply and those countries that are the main consumers of illegal
drugs. They want a radical rethinking of drug policies that would
change the status of drug addicts from drug buyers to patients. What
came out of the Vienna meeting was a new political declaration, which
the United Nations says for the first time stresses health as the basis
for international drugs policy and recognises the need for support
services, including treatment, care and rehabilitation of drug users,
as well as security responses. At the Vienna meeting, Australia
outlined the Australian approach based on the three pillars of supply,
demand and harm-reduction strategies.

Those harm-reduction strategies have seen a decrease in the
numbers of people dying from overdoses. Through programs like peer
education, needle exchanges and the safe injecting room, we have
managed to tackle head-on the problem of HIV transmission among
injecting drug users. There are no easy answers to dealing with drug
misuse in our families, our communities, our nations and across the
globe. In New South Wales, it was the Drug Summit 10 years ago that set
the agenda for how New South Wales has tackled drug misuse. The New
South Wales pillars are prevention, education, treatment and law
enforcement. More than $675 million has been spent on Drug Summit
initiatives since the summit. Importantly, the Government supported the
establishment of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings
Cross. The challenge for legislators is to look at the evidence and be
prepared to embrace policies that are not always popular but we know
that they work. At the launch of Tony Trimingham's book, Dr Alex Wodak,
Director, Alcohol and Drug Service, St Vincent's Hospital, reflected
that:

The drug policy debate is played out in the political arena. In
drug policy, interventions that are popular are generally ineffective
while interventions that are effective are generally unpopular.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, summed it up
admirably recently when he said 'we all know what to do, but we don't
know how to get re-elected once we have done it'.

Bob Carr also reflected recently:

when dealing with drugs, governments are confronted with finding a
solution that can best be described as the least worst option. There
are no good options.

Last week I attended the tenth anniversary of the Tolerance or "T" room
at the Wayside Chapel. The importance of a tolerant, compassionate and
life-preserving approach to drug policy was aptly described by the
Reverend Graham Long from the Wayside Chapel, who wrote:

It was 10 years ago this month that the previous pastor here got
sick of organising to pick up dead bodies in our alley ways. In an act
of civil disobedience he began the Tolerance Room, for which he got
arrested but that lead the government to "trial" the safe injecting
room at Kings Cross. Ten years later ... deaths on the street have gone
from around 120 per year to around 12 per year. Ambulance calls to
overdoses has decreased by 88%. We used to pick up 130 to 150 used
needles out the front of Wayside each morning and these days if we get
one or two, we think we are having a bad day ... The opinion of medical
and political leaders these days around the world is shifting very much
toward the concept of helping rather than punishing people with
addictions. The way out of addiction is not fear of prosecution only
but the supportive engagement with a human being alongside who sees the
dignity and beauty that has been forgotten. It makes a world of
difference if, rather than thinking of "that addict", we think of "my
son or my daughter with a problem". 

Our aim as legislators must be to keep people alive so that when they
can they are able to access the services they need to recover from drug
addiction.