2015-11-12
Motion for the Law Reform, Road and Community Safety Committee to inquire into, consider and report, no later than 3March 2017 on the effectiveness of laws and procedures relating to illicit and synthetic drugs and prescription medication.
Speech by Colleen Hartland: The Greens will be supporting this motion and we welcome it. Before I get to the formal part of my response I would like to talk about my personal experience. I live in Footscray, and 15 years ago Footscray was at the height of the street heroin dealing problem, to such a degree that you would walk through Footscray on any day and various dealers would occupy the footpath, dealing and chasing. Anyone walking through Footscray would be offered heroin. I remember going to a community meeting, this was when the Bracks government was looking at the issue of supervised injecting rooms. At that stage I knew nothing about these issues, but what I did know was that people were scoring at the Footscray railway station, coming into my street and sometimes shooting up on my verandah. I was terrified of coming home one night and finding someone dead on my verandah. I kept thinking, ‘This is someone’s son, someone’s daughter, someone’s brother, someone’s sister. Someone loves this person, and they should not have to die this way’. People will remember that at that time the Herald Sun was printing the heroin toll in the way it usually printed the road toll, and it rose in significant numbers. Unfortunately courage was lost and we did not get a supervised injecting room in Footscray, but we did get Health Works, which has made a massive difference to the way local drug users are treated. It has also made a massive difference to the local community in terms of basic issues such as syringe litter in the streets, which is obviously one of the things that frightens people a great deal.
It was during that period that my eyes were really opened to the fact that we needed a different approach to drug use and drug treatment. I have never used party drugs, I have never smoked cannabis, I have never smoked tobacco and I barely drink, which makes me an excellent drugs spokesperson. But I have seen the damage done and I have seen people’s lives destroyed by them. But that does not mean that I think a law and order approach is an appropriate way to deal with these issues. The approach to illicit drug use and abuse of prescription drugs in Victoria is outdated, not evidence based and creates an unnecessary burden on the criminal justice and healthcare systems. We need a substantial rethink of how we reduce the harms of drugs.
In 2014 drugs and alcohol caused 384 deaths—these were traumatic deaths; these were people’s families. We have to remember that the bulk of these deaths were alcohol related and acknowledge that alcohol causes countless harms to people’s health, for which many people require hospitalisation. It adds significantly to the pressure on our hospital system, particularly in emergency departments. If you talk to any doctor or nurse who works in an emergency department on a Friday or Saturday night, they say that alcohol is a major problem, as well as other illicit drugs. In comparison, the road toll in 2014 was 248, so as you can see that deaths caused by drugs and alcohol are much higher.
We have a situation here in Victoria where people who are seeking help for their drug use sometimes have to wait months to get it. Having worked in community health centres and with people with mental health and drug-related issues, I know that if someone comes in and says, ‘I want to get help’, they need to get help pretty much immediately while they have the will, rather than us saying to them, ‘Sorry, you are going to have to go away and wait for three months’. During that time, those people will still be using and sometimes committing crimes to feed their habits. There are good and effective treatment programs out there, but not nearly enough of them. We need to make sure that health care is readily accessible to the people who need it.
Instead of prioritising harm minimisation by investing in the required health care and support, successive governments have taken a law and order approach to this issue, which research shows has failed to reduce deaths and drug use. In Australia we have one of the highest rates of illegal drug use per capita in the world, and the Victorian overdose death toll has now risen for the fifth consecutive year. Further, the law and order approach can lead to further social harms when people requiring health care and support are locked up. That hinders their recovery and they are left with a criminal record that limits their job prospects. We should also look at the economics of this. The average stay in prison for one year is about $120 000; a year in rehabilitation, where a person has a chance to turn their life around, costs about $40 000. That is a huge difference, and there is the likelihood that a person will not reoffend or go back to prison, so we also need to look at the economics of why treatment is better than prison.We need to re-examine the evidence from Australia and overseas and look seriously at ways to reduce the harm of drug use and how we can support people to break their addiction. We must reduce the health and social impacts of drug use, and it is with that in mind that the Greens will obviously support the motion.
In recent months, my federal colleague Senator Richard Di Natale has publically made it clear that the Greens want a reconsideration of the approach to drugs and an examination of how Australia might take a similar approach to that of Portugal. I note that in recent weeks Ireland has adopted a similar approach to Portugal, and I commend it for that. While still criminalising drug dealing, Portugal treats individual drug use as a health issue, not a criminal one. This change in approach occurred over a decade ago when Portugal had some of the highest rates of heroin use in Europe. Since that time we have seen drug use in Portugal go down, not up. Our current laws do not act as a deterrent to use; they act as a deterrent to seek treatment. Decriminalising drug use changes the culture. As we have seen with the Portugal model, it leads to people being more honest about their use, allowing health professionals to explore why they are taking drugs in the first place and giving people advice and support that can help them to avoid the worst impacts, such as dependency, their contracting blood-borne viruses, overdosing and other health impacts. This helps users to reduce their use, get their life back on track and break their habit. The Portugal experience also shows us that it is not just about changing laws; it is about taking the money saved from no longer incarcerating people and investing it into treatment, rehabilitation, education, social support—such as housing and employment services—and prevention. We must move on from this currently outdated and ineffective war on drugs. In the last six months a number of very senior police officers have said that we cannot arrest our way out of this. We need to get smarter about how we are spending our money.
The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre reports that Australian governments, both state and federal, spent approximately $1.7 billion in 2009–10 on illicit drugs; 66 per cent of this went on law enforcement, 21 per cent on treatment, 9 per cent on prevention and 2 per cent on harm minimisation. That is 0.8 per cent of all government spending, and yet there has been little consideration of whether it is effective. In Victoria in 2009–10, spending on drug-related public prosecutions and legal aid was $258 million. Add this to the cost of incarcerating drug users if they are convicted and you can see why the law and order approach is so expensive and ineffective. Our priorities are all wrong when it comes to expenditure on drugs, and I hope these things can be examined as part of an inquiry, if this referral is successful. I will take up a point made by Mr O’Donohue when he said that this would be a very broad-reaching referral. That is because the problem with drugs is very broad reaching. It has a number of facets, and we should not be examining one part of it; all of it is interlinked. If the opposition were concerned about this referral, it might have tried to amend it. The Greens welcome an examination of roadside drug testing. Concerns have been raised about the accuracy of these tests and other issues. We welcome an examination of this so that the community can have more confidence in the system and drug-affected people are not on our roads. Ms Patten made the very important point that it is often the legal drugs that people are taking that impair their driving, so we should be examining for those as well to make sure that impaired people are not behind the steering wheel. We also welcome an examination of drug detection activities, including the use of passive alert detection dogs at events. We have all heard the horror stories of young people bringing drugs to an event to share with their friends and once they see the dogs and the police they consume large amounts of these drugs, which causes incredible harm.
We also need to examine the issue of synthetic drugs. For too long our approach to synthetic cannabinoids has been to ban them item by item in legislation only to have the producers tweak the recipe and reintroduce them onto the market. Clearly this approach has not been working. We need to reduce the potential harm of these untested products. We need to look at the New Zealand approach, both in terms of its strengths and weaknesses, and to rethink how we can approach this in Victoria. In the previous Parliament every few months it felt like we were dealing with another piece of legislation concerning another drug that had just had its chemical composition changed and its name changed, and we were never getting anywhere. I quite clearly remember the last time we debated such a piece of legislation. I said that in the future the Greens would not vote in support of such legislation until the government came up with a much better way of dealing with the issue.
There are many good elements in this referral, and I want to make a few general points at this stage. Prescription drugs are also a very big part of the problem. When it comes to overdoses, in 2014 they contributed to 82 per cent of all overdose deaths. I understand that this is a big referral, but at some stage we need to have another referral to deal with the issue of prescription drugs, not just have an emphasis on illicit drugs. The Greens think prescription medication deserves much greater attention.
Alcohol abuse also remains a significant issue in Victoria. Australians have a very bizarre attitude to alcohol, that it is not a harmful drug. Yet with my past experience working with alcoholics I know it is a significant problem. Australians have a significant problem in the way they deal with alcohol. We also need to examine the issue of packaged liquor licence density and retailing hours, especially in disadvantaged areas. Generally we need drug law reform. I am hoping that if this motion were to pass, that sensible and good work could be done so that we come up with a report that would guide the government towards a position where, rather than lock people up in prison, we treat them in the community, return them to their homes, allow them to have new lives. For all of those reasons, the Greens will support this motion.
With the Greens support this inquiry was established.