Professor Alex Stevens:

I would love to comment. I wrote a book a few years ago called Drugs, Crime and Public Health and the final chapter is about what I call progressive decriminalisation, which sings exactly the same tune as the Senator in that these are social problems. We are not going to solve the drug problem just by how we tinker with drug laws. We need to change the context in which people make decisions about their drugs and develop problems with drugs. Another chapter of my book proves the point that the Senator has made that drug use is widespread across society but it is the marginalised and vulnerable communities who suffer the most both from problematic drug use and drug-related death, but also from the overpolicing of drug offences.

Progressive decriminalisation involves not just changing the law but providing youth services and good quality informal education in youth settings to young people. It also involves reducing poverty and homelessness, which drive problematic drug use. Alongside that, it involves gradually lessening the damage we are doing to people by criminalising them. That starts, and I think it can start immediately, by decriminalising the possession of drugs. As I have said, there is very little evidence that that would be harmful and there is lots of evidence that it would reduce the harms of criminalisation. That is what it does. Then we could take evidence-based steps towards more regulated and less punitive forms of distributing drugs.

There are philosophical issues about the freedoms of individuals and, indeed, companies to benefit and profit from these substances but I would also like to see us developing more evidence to inform these discussions. A lot of these discussions take place in the absence of evidence, partly because it has been illegal to carry out experiments on different ways of regulating substances. I am perhaps a little more concerned than my colleagues on this panel about, for example, the possibility of diverting substances which are lethal in overdose, like opioids and cocaine. There was reference, for example, to the possibility of people shopping around and getting large quantities by accumulating their supply. There are systems that you can put in place. For example, the Uruguayan licensed user model is a way that you can limit the amount of drugs that any one person can do. With modern technology it is quite easy to put those sorts of controls in place. I would like to see us starting with decriminalisation of possession and then a range of carefully designed controlled experiments about how best to regulate the supply in order to reduce the harms of the illicit market while not expanding diversion of potentially lethal substances. That would be done in the context of improving social policy, reducing poverty and improving the education that people get. To my mind, that is almost more important than changing the drug law.