Why has NSW ruled out what health experts say is the ‘best way forward’ on drugs?
While the New South Wales government’s second drug summit was still under way, Josh Macey decided to duck out to hear what the state’s minister for health was about to tell journalists.
Macey, 40, had been addicted to drugs and experienced homelessness for almost half his life before he quit several years ago. He says during his years as an addict his life was saved multiple times by a bold move the government took after the state’s first drug summit 25 years ago – introducing Australia’s first safe injecting room.
He was hoping that after the state’s second drug summit this week, it might consider another bold move that had been called for by experts throughout: decriminalisation.
But as he watched Ryan Park’s response to questions from journalists, he heard the minister rule it out before the summit was even over.
“We’ve made it clear that we don’t have a mandate for decriminalisation,” Park told reporters.
Macey says he was shattered when he heard it. “I could have probably fixed my life years and years before I did if what I was doing was not illegal.
“I was hoping others might get that chance.”
The drug summit, which held hearings in Griffith and Lismore in November before concluding in Sydney this week, invited experts from various fields to inform the government on how it should deal with drug-related harms. The summit’s co-chairs – former NSW health minister Carmel Tebbutt, and former state Liberal leader John Brogden – will deliver a report next year with recommendations from the summit.
Robert Stirling, the CEO of the Network of Alcohol and Other Drug Agencies (Nada), said the health minister’s announcement ruling out decriminalisation mid-summit was “extremely disappointing and changed the tone” of the final day of the summit.
“Because there was a sense that we were told that they were going to be open. What we got later on the first day was that something was being put off the table. And so I think there was a sense of disappointment that they weren’t being true to their process.”
Park’s statement ruling out decriminalisation came after a number of experts had called for it. Dr Annie Madden, the executive director of Harm Reduction Australia, told the summit: “It is only reasonable that we give decriminalisation a proper chance to do what decades of prohibition has failed to do.”
Madden had spoken at the 1999 drug summit and was the only active drug user to do so.
Prof Dan Howard told the summit the government did have a mandate for decriminalisation, which came from the consensus among all peak expert bodies and prior reports including his own, the 2020 special commission of inquiry into the drug “ice”.
“I must be candid and say that it galls me that we are being asked to revisit so many of the same issues yet again when the work has already been done.
“Implicit in holding such a summit is that you will act according to what you learn from it as the best way forward.
“Here we have a golden moment in time that this summit offers, and if we miss it now, we won’t see anything like it for years … drug users will continue to be stigmatised and inappropriately harmed by the blunt instrument of the criminal law.”
A number of participants were also upset about the lack of diversity at the summit.
Associate professor at the University of Sydney and Bardi Aboriginal man Michael Doyle, who was part of an equity panel, told the audience he felt Indigenous perspectives were not properly included in the summit.
“We feel that it wasn’t done in the way whereby we felt safe in order to express directly what we wanted to express,” he said, adding that some of the recommendations had lost their intended meaning.
Doyle called for an Indigenous-focused summit, covering drug policy and other issues including incarceration and child removal, “so that we can speak directly to the government, not through a filter that has been applied through this summit”.
“We have to be part of the conversation if we are 40% of the prison population.”
Macey says if drugs had been decriminalised while he was addicted he would have sought help sooner but he felt shame.
“I’ve never had trouble getting drugs, so I don’t see how that could get worse,” he says. “It would see us stop wasting funds on the law side.”
“Those few times when I did ring rehabilitation centres and didn’t get a bed, if the funding had gone towards them instead of the law side, I would have got the help I was trying to get when I was ready for it.”
Macey thinks the summit will achieve change, but characterised that change as “Band-Aids on problems”.
“I feel like the best we might get might be a few more injecting centres and maybe pill testing at events, and that would be good,” he says.
“They got radical with the injecting centre,” he adds, referring to an outcome of the state’s first drug summit 25 years ago. “They need to get really radical again.”
