Ms Niamh Eastwood:

I agree with everything Professor Stevens said. I thank the Senator for her intervention and agree that it has to apply to all substances. It comes down to what kind of drug policy we want. What do we want to achieve with our drug policy? What we should want to achieve is a reduction in harm. We know that the greatest level of harm exists, in terms of health, in overdose deaths so by not decriminalising opioids, crack cocaine, and cocaine, we are failing in our approach to reduce that specific harm. It is not necessarily the case that decriminalisation reduces deaths but that it creates an environment where people can come forward and get the treatment they need. It is criminalisation that pushes people away from that support.

When we look at diversion, there is some evidence from US diversion schemes that there is a reluctance among people to participate. If it becomes one of those "if you opt in, you opt out" schemes and you continue with the criminal justice path, people will not participate because they do not trust the schemes given they are associated with policing. There are also questions to be asked as to whether people should be diverted into health interventions. If nine out of ten people who use drugs have no problem with their drug use, according to UN data, are we unnecessarily burdening treatment services that are stretched as a result of the current public health crisis that we are facing around opioid and other drug harms? For example, Portugal has a dissuasion committee but it is worth noting that almost two thirds of cases that are brought before that committee are suspended, which means that the person does not get any intervention. There is no penalty associated with the act.

The real crux of this is around police discretion within diversion schemes. Most schemes will operate on police discretion and often it is the communities that have been most harmed by criminalisation, that have been subjected to over-policing, and where we see the inequitable application of the law, that continue to be criminalised. While there is not too much evidence on drug diversion schemes themselves, there is research from New South Wales that looked at a broader youth diversion scheme, which found that indigenous youths were two times more likely to receive a court summons than be diverted. We see that discretion is recreating the harms that we see with criminalisation or is re-embedding those harms. At the same time, data that-----