The NSW Minns Labor government has failed in its response to the NSW Drug Summit 2024 report, delivered 3 April, 2025. It is a weak response to the overwhelming scientific evidence that the best approach, to both drug use and drug abuse, is to make them both health issues outside the criminal justice system.
NSW has now had multiple inquiries and recommendations, including from the multi-million dollar Ice Inquiry and the NSW Coroners report, that have clearly stated that action needs to be taken to decriminalise drug use, stop strip searches at festivals for possession, treat drug-driving like drink-driving, address the question of drivers using medicinal cannabis, and provide the whole of NSW with more than one single safe-injection room located (somewhat inconveniently for regional communities) in Kings Cross.
As former chief constable of Cambridgeshire police (UK) and international drugs policy advisor, Tom Lloyd told the British Home Affairs Select Committee drug conference in 2015, ‘If you don’t have a drug problem then the last thing you need is a conviction; if you do have a drug problem then the last thing you need is a conviction.’
The most recent NSW Drug Summit gave NSW Labor the opportunity to define itself as a forward-thinking government that cared about the lives of its citizens, and was prepared to demonstrate that by making changes for the better. Instead, like Queensland’s conservative government (which stripped the state of pill-testing facilities prior to multiple deaths from the synthetic opioid nitazene), they have chosen not to drive forward with a positive, science-based and community supported policy and programs. Sure, a slogan policy like ‘just say no to drugs’ might be less politically risky, but that’s proven ineffective – and can’t even the most conservative voters be persuaded by the merits of a harm-reduction strategy, despite their moral distaste for drug-taking compared to drinking alcohol?
The result is that more lives will be lost in NSW to drug overdoses. More people in rural and regional areas like the Northern Rivers will continue to be impacted by the lack of action on driving and the use of medicinal cannabis which means they either remain in pain, take other stronger prescription drugs, or risk losing their licence and jobs.
Providing health advice to people, in clinics or in safe-injecting rooms is cheaper and far more effective in harm-reduction than expensive strip-search operations at festivals using scarce police resources.
The response has been criticised across the state by organisations who work in the field and those who participated in the Drug Summit.
As former local magistrate and now Dean of Law at SCU, Professor David Heilpern points out (on page 8), ‘All in all, a dark day for public safety, and a dismal day for faith in the system. Naively, I actually believed that a bipartisan drug summit might achieve results. Instead, it has set back the process at least 20 years’.
Aslan Shand, editor
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