The Attorney-General of NSW, Mark Speakman, just suggested a $400 fine for personal drug use. You can be fined twice before being taken to court or joining a health treatment program. It appears to me like a stupid and rushed suggestion, a much-delayed reaction to the big ‘Special Commission Of Inquiry Into The Drug Ice’, which handed down 109 recommendations in 2020, over two years ago.
The Inquiry cost $10.85 million and again we see that the NSW government is stuck on the path of penalties and imprisonment. There are millions of illicit drug users in this State, most of them are over twenty-five and are functioning members of society. It appears to me that our politicians believe we are all just misguided and we should all start drinking the legal, most destructive drug for body and society – alcohol. As most will remember, Gladys Berejiklian closed the door on pill testing at no cost to the taxpayer, and sent more police to festivals, which didn’t stop the deaths, and brought the criminal strip searches of minors by police to the public’s attention.
Fifty-one years since the beginning of the war on drugs, billions of dollars wasted, millions of lives destroyed and we’re letting these politicians keep on doing it? Look at Portugal and other countries and how they’ve changed successfully. We needed a second drug summit years ago, but in the end it’s the police commissioner who decides what the main focus should be. How crazy that you can now grow your own cannabis in the ACT legally. As the Nimbin Hemp Embassy has been saying for over thirty years, the law is the crime!
Michael Kirby, Dr Alex Wodak, Dr Annie Madden AO and others will be discussing this on 23 June in Sydney, check out drugpolicy.org.au and watch it live. Let’s start saving lives and stop criminalising!
Chibo Mertineit, Lillian Rock
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