As calls for a date to be set for the promised NSW Drug Summit continue many locals questioned the costs involved in the recent cannabis busts taking place that saw loads of marijuana plants being loaded onto police vehicles at the Mullumbimby High School oval yesterday.
While the police media spokesperson was unable to say how many personnel or vehicles were involved in the raids they were accompanied by a police helicopter that flight path information indicates flew down the coast from Coolangatta Airport. It appears the helicopter went straight to known growing sites with hovering near Lennox Head, Talofa, Bangalow, and Cabarita. Other locals who were witnessing the activity estimated that there were approximately six land cruisers and 30 police officers involved in the raids assisted by the helicopter.
The locals called for police money to be spent more effectively on important police activities from domestic violence, theft and missing people rather than on ‘some plants growing out of the ground that will likely be legalised soon and can be prescribed for headaches’.
‘This is part of the cannabis eradication program that the police do all the time,’ a police spokesperson told The Echo.
‘If cannabis is located at a house or a few houses they wait until they have enough to conduct a burn so that they are efficient. It was local police involved in the cannabis eradication program.’
Decriminalisation supported
However, according to the 14th National Drug Strategy Household Survey, the majority of Australians do not support punitive action against people who use cannabis and support a health based response to the use of other drugs.
‘The majority of those surveyed believe that our first response to people who use all illicit drugs (excluding cannabis) should be referral to a treatment or education program; for cannabis, it was a caution or warning or no action at all,’ explained Alice Salomon, Uniting’s Head of Media and Advocacy.
‘The survey results strongly align with what we believed was already happening out there in the community. Today, more and more people believe that drug use and dependency should be treated by a health professional and not by a police officer or a court. These results tell us very clearly that the decriminalisation of drugs for personal use is broadly supported by Australians.’
The majority of Australians also support the ability for people to test their drugs at events like festivals and supervised drug-taking spaces.
‘Support for drug checking (64 per cent) and supervised drug consumption facilities (53 per cent), like Uniting’s Kings Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) continues to grow with over half of respondents supporting both of these measures,’ said Alice.
‘The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) recently became the first Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise illicit drugs in small quantities. In NSW the EDDI – the Early Drug Detection Initiative – has come into effect. Formerly proposed by the Coalition government and recently adopted by the current government, this scheme is a bipartisan recognition that the 23,000 people arrested every year for drug use or possession in NSW (19,000 of whom go to court) would do better interacting with a health service, and in turn also free up police and court resources.
‘All of this reinforces again why we need the long-promised five-day Parliamentary Drug Summit in NSW. The sooner we get a date for this much-anticipated event, that mirrors the format of the successful 1999 summit, the sooner we can get closer to the critical reforms that must follow this first important step,’ Alice said.
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