Time to break our addiction to failed ideology of prohibition
MPs can help save lives if they vote to change drug policy this week, says Greg Barns
THIS week Tasmania’s legislators have an opportunity to say they value saving lives. The chance to do this comes in the form of a motion being moved in the Legislative Council by one of its most eminent and intelligent members, Ruth Forrest, supporting pill testing.
One would have thought that other MPs would be clamouring over themselves to support Ms Forrest, but sadly when it comes to drugs policy an addiction to a failed ideology of prohibition means rational evidence-based policies such as pill testing at music festivals is yet to see the light of day.
Already in the course of this current Parliament, politics and pig-headedness by Labor and the Liberals, with the notable exception of the one true liberal, Speaker Sue Hickey, has seen a Greens bill for saving lives through pill testing voted down.
Ms Forrest is giving the Parliament another chance to focus on the fact that use of pills at music festivals is not a police issue, but a health issue.
What Ms Forrest is reminding MPs of in her motion this week is that “pill testing is supported by national bodies including the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, the Rural Doctors Association of Australia, the Australian Medical Association, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the National Australian Pharmacy Students’ Association, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, the Ambulance Union State Council, the Public Health Association of Australia, Family Drug Support Australia, and the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and at the local level, by Tasmanian community organisations including the Youth Network of Tasmania, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and Community Legal Centres Tasmania.”
To this can be added the national progressive lawyers group, the Australian Lawyers Alliance (disclaimer: this writer is a spokesman for the alliance nationally). And of course the former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer. There are not many public health issues backed by such a wide array of groups and professional organisations. But there is good reason for doing so.
In January this year two of Australia’s leading addiction and drug treatment doctors, the University of Melbourne’s Martin Lloyd-Jones and Paul Komesaroff from Monash University, set out in compelling terms why pill testing must become a reality in Australia. Writing on The Conversation on January 8 they argued that for many years: “Experts in the field of drug policy in Australia have known existing policies are failing. Crude messages (calls for total abstinence: ‘just say no to drugs’) and even cruder enforcement strategies (harsher penalties, criminalisation of drug users) have had no impact on the use of drugs or the extent of their harmful effects on the community. Whether we like it or not, drug use is common in our society, especially among young people. In 2016 43 per cent of people aged 14 and older reported they had used an illicit drug at some point in their lifetime. And 28
per cent of people in their twenties said they had used illicit drugs in the past year,” they noted.
They also rightly observe that listening only to the police about drugs is in contrast to the way Australia once led on public safety.
“The rigid and inflexible attitudes of current policymakers contrast dramatically with the innovative approaches to public health policy for which Australia was once renowned. Since the 1970s many highly successful campaigns have improved road safety, increased immunisation rates in children and helped prevent the spread of blood-borne virus infections,” Dr Lloyd-Jones and Professor Komesaroff write.
Remember the irrational fulminating from some politicians at the height of the AIDS crisis, telling people to abstain from having sex and opposing the installation of condom vending machines? Fortunately that opposition was ignored, eventually.
How many more deaths at music festivals will it take for the same sort of attitude evident today to be ignored?
One would have thought the sanctity of life, a core natural law belief, would dictate that conservative members of the Tasmanian Parliament supported pill testing. Or the supposed conservative belief in pragmatic and sensible centrist approaches to issues.
When it comes to Labor, its previous opposition to the Greens bill was shameful. One of its MPs essentially admitted to this columnist it opposed the bill for political reasons. But last week frontbencher Alison Standen told the media Labor supported evidencebased drug policies.
If she was being genuine, then she and her colleagues simply have to ask the exerts in this field and they will satisfy themselves that the evidence is well and truly on the side of pill testing.
And can politicians please stop listening to Tasmania Police on pill testing? They are not health experts. They live in cloud cuckoo land when it comes to drugs although privately every police officer you speak with thinks the current “just say no” approach to drugs is a huge failure.