This article was originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 2, 2010. Original article can be found here.
Sting calls for legalisation of marijuana
Sting has called for the legalisation of marijuana.
The Fields of Gold singer insists America should spend the money it uses jailing users of the drug on tackling poverty and global warming.
Sting, 58, wrote on his blog how he feels marijuana users are imprisoned for a crime that doesn’t hurt anyone.
He said: “The ‘War on Drugs’ has failed – but it’s worse than that. It is actively harming our society. Violent crime is thriving in the shadows to which the drug trade has been consigned.
“People who genuinely need help can’t get it. Neither can people who need medical marijuana to treat terrible diseases.
We are spending billions, filling up our prisons with non-violent offenders and sacrificing our liberties.”
Sting – real name Gordon Sumner – called for people to support the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), an activist group who campaign for those jailed for non-violent drugs offences to be released from prison.
He continued: “For years, the ‘Drug War’ has been used as a pretext to lock people in prison for exorbitant lengths of time – people whose ‘crimes’ never hurt another human being, people who already lived at the margins of society, whose voices were the faintest and whose power was the least.
“Meanwhile, resources to fight genuine crime – violent crime – have been significantly diminished.”
The comments immediately elicited an angry response from anti-drugs groups.
A spokesperson for DARE, which teaches schoolchildren about the dangers of drug use wrote: “He should stick to singing and not meddle in matters he doesn’t understand.
“We do not need pop stars coming out and making irresponsible statements like that.”
Bang Showbiz
Poll: Do you agree with him?
- Results:
- Yes 87%
- No 13%
Total votes: 6783.
(Poll closed 4 Apr, 2010)
July 6, 2010
Drugs law at odds with rights charter: judges
March 26, 2010
A DECLARATION by Victoria’s highest court that drug law is inconsistent with the human rights charter will force the state government to justify the limits placed on people’s rights.
But Attorney-General Rob Hulls says the government is not obliged to change the law.
The Court of Appeal ruled last week the human rights of a woman convicted of drug trafficking were breached because she had to prove an amphetamine stash found in her flat did not belong to her.
The court said this breached the presumption of innocence outlined in the charter.
Yesterday the court declared that a section of the Drugs Act, which deems drugs found at a person’s home to be in their possession, cannot be interpreted consistently with the charter.
Vera Momcilovic, 43, was convicted of amphetamine trafficking and jailed for a minimum of 18 months. She claimed drugs and money found in her flat belonged to her boyfriend and she did not know about it.
Court of Appeal president Justice Chris Maxwell and Justices David Ashley and Marcia Neave ruled Ms Momcilovic was properly convicted but suspended the rest of her sentence.
The judges said presuming a person’s guilt unless they can prove to the contrary ”is not so much an infringement of the presumption of innocence as a wholesale subversion of it”.
Rachel Nicolson, of law firm Allens Arthur Robinson, said in future the government would have to provide evidence why a law was able to limit human rights. ”Departments are going to have to understand they need to think whether there is a proper policy method and proper evidence for limiting rights,” she said.
Mr Hulls said: ”The charter simply requires Parliament to respond to the court’s declaration but places no obligation on the government to change the law.”
He said the provision dealt with in the Momcilovic case would be considered as part of a review of the Crimes Act and the law on illicit drugs.
Phil Lynch, of the Human Rights Law Resource Centre, said the declaration meant ”people need to consider human rights in the first instance and not as an afterthought”.
SELMA MILOVANOVIC
This article was published in The Age. The original story can be found here: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/drugs-law-at-odds-with-rights-charter-judges-20100326-r084.html
July 6, 2010
In May 2009, ADLRF member Bill Bush wrote a piece about the need for an examination of drug policy. Here is the text from the article, including parts that were edited at publication for space.
This article first appeared in the Canberra Times on May 15, 2009 (p. 13):
Drug policy needs a deeper focus to halt snowballing risks
Urgent change is crucial to stop increasing budget wastage and greater harm in society, Bill Bush writes.
At least one advantage of hard times should be to cause governments to carefully examine their budgetary priorities. In good times there is never enough to go around; in bad times the capacity is reduced while need increases. In spite of the ACT Government’s preparedness to run a deficit of 5 per cent of expenditure, the ACT Council of Social Service lamented that the budget “fails to address the increasing pressure on community organisations as a result of the financial crisis” because “the community sector needs to be resourced to meet the already increasing demand for emergency relief, homelessness services and family counselling”.
There are reasonable grounds to take seriously the prospect that substantial budgetary savings are possible in these domains that will experience increased demand. The fly in the ointment is that this would involve looking at drug policy, which no political party, Liberals, Greens or Labor, wants to know about.
The grounds are simple. From research on risk and protective factors and the social determinants of health we know that by and large it is the same disadvantaged population that manifests most severely multiple problems, including substance dependence. The services required to address these problems are big budgetary items. There is strong evidence that recasting drug policy offers a cost-effective way of short-circuiting the cycle of disadvantage and regulatory theory tells us that existing drug policy uses the most inefficient means of regulation.
It is known that an aggregation of family, environmental or personal risk factors is predictive of further problems. The neglected child is likely to: have problems at school, mix with a dysfunctional peer group, get caught up in delinquency, start using drugs early, develop mental health problems and so on.
We are seeing the snowball of risk factors (and diminished protective ones) augmented down generations. The drug-dependent parent who has had a stint in prison is likely to bequeath her own risk factors in amplified form to her children.
The challenge is to stop the snowball growing. Services to address problems of this population are scattered in numerous government agencies. Most of the expenditure of the Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services, with 5 per cent of the ACT budget, is devoted to services for this group. It starts by providing an early intervention and prevention program for children from birth to age five and their families and extends to youth services and the very expensive child protection service. Special education programs, counselling and interventions to deal with children with behavioural problems are funded by the Department of Education and Training. The same disadvantaged population is a heavy drawer upon these services. The Department of Health attempts to meet their needs in mental health, maternal and child health, drug and alcohol and corrections health services. The same population has disproportionately high needs for acute services such as those arising from hepatitis C [contracted from injecting drug use that is widespread among prisoners]. The lion’s share of Housing ACT’s allocation goes to the same population. The police and corrections services funded by the Department of Justice and Community Safety are the sharp end of these government services.
The standard response is to pour more and more resources into individual services but we are always chasing our tail: in the best times, unmet need outstrips what government is prepared to spend. Skyrocketing child protection costs of recent years are a prime example. Early intervention to address underlying causes is another common call. More often than not it means looking for something that is irrelevant [even if it can be found]. Reflection on the growing snowball of problems of the disadvantaged population shows why. The original cause may be buried in the middle a generation ago.
Intervening early in the life (or before birth) of a child [is early intervention for the child but not for] the parent whose problems have to be serviced if the child is to have a chance.
We need to look instead for a circuit breaker: an affordable intervention that will reduce [significant] risk factors and make existing interventions on other risk factors more effective.
There is strong evidence that drug policy is such an intervention. The threat of a harmful criminal sanction is at the heart of existing drug policy. In the words of a United States authority, criminal law is designed to “make the life of the habitual user dangerous, arduous, frightening and expensive.” It is one thing to impose such stress to deter theft or violence. It is quite another to impose it to force someone with a roaring addiction to stop using.
The ubiquity of substance dependence in the target [problem-rich] population means that the intervention of criminal law is inefficient and that the intervention compounds the risk factors. To quote another US writer “stress gets in the way of our capacity to make good choices, and even to perceive our full options for choices”. Expensive measures of harm minimisation are then needed to ameliorate stresses imposed by the measure taken to tackle the problem.
A conservative guess of the contribution in this sense of illicit drug policy to the ACT budget is $385m or 10.6 per cent of expenditure. Not all of this could be saved. A further conservative guess of what could is 4.8 per cent – the size of the deficit. Moreover, studies suggest a potential for substantial quick savings in law enforcement and corrections budgets.
This is because overseas studies of maintenance interventions show sustained reductions in the region of 80 per cent achieved in a matter of months among severely dependent illicit drug users – those who make up the bulk of our prison population.
Regulation theory suggests another reason why we should consider drug policy. The theory looks at the optimum means to abate or control risk to society and promote the public good. Good regulation involves a spread of measures throughout a regulatory pyramid. Most regulation should be invested in the broad lower levels of the pyramid involving voluntary or persuasive measures rather than the narrow tip of command and control regulation. Only when persuasion fails should more resource intensive and intrusive regulation be considered. With drug policy the pyramid is reversed.
Existing drug policy is not effective in its principal goal of reducing the availability of illicit drugs. In 1951 Australians consumed 5.25 kg of heroin per million – all of it legal. By the end of the century Australians were consuming about 35 kg per million – all of it illegal. In the past few years there has been a boom in the availability of stimulants.
In short, there are more than enough budgetary reasons for political parties to agree at least to look at the issue. The matter is one of mainstream concern. The Australian Crime Commission believes that up to $12 billion in illicit drug money is flowing out of Australia annually and the turnover of the world’s illicit drug industry is on a par with world trade in oil or gas.
July 5, 2010
In May 2009, Ban Ki Moon gave this statement on HIV, which includes the following important statement:
“In addition to criminalizing HIV transmission, many countries impose criminal sanctions for same-sex sex, commercial sex and drug injection. Such laws constitute major barriers to reaching key populations with HIV services. Those behaviours should be decriminalized, and people addicted to drugs should receive health services for the treatment of their addiction’.
For example, in Eastern Europe, people who inject drugs represent more than 80 per cent of all people living with HIV but account for less than 25 per cent of those receiving antiretroviral treatment.”
Click here for the full report.
July 5, 2010
Framing addiction less as enemy than as illness
Quietly, free of headlines and fanfare, the Obama White House is toning down the bellicose “war-on-drugs” position that has defined U.S. narcotics policy for the last 25 years.
Appearing in Vienna last week for the 53rd annual United Nations meeting on global drug policy, administration officials shifted from attacking drug use as a crime to be penalized and moved toward a strategy of tackling addiction as an illness to be treated, a number of health and human rights advocates who attended the event said.
Drug reformers for years have promoted so-called “harm reduction” measures as a more effective and humane way to treat drug addiction and the diseases that often accompany it — an approach that runs counter to the punitive attitude epitomized by the Reagan administration’s “war on drugs.” And while the Obama White House — behind Gil Kerlikowske, the White House drug czar, and his deputy, Thomas McLellan — remains officially opposed to the hot-button harm reduction language, officials have also conceded that the current strategy isn’t working, advocates say. That sharp break from past administrations has left reformers hopeful that the Obama White House will mark a new era in the nation’s fight against drug abuse — one that prioritizes treatment and prevention above rap sheets and prison time.
“There was virtually no reference to a criminal justice approach,” Allan Clear, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, an advocacy group, said of the U.S. delegation in Vienna. “I’m just so used to being appalled by their behavior … It was very encouraging.”
Deborah Peterson Small, executive director of Break the Chains, another group advocating for drug-policy reforms, agreed, noting a brand new willingness among White House officials to embrace certain elements of the harm reduction strategy. When she spoke about treatment reforms to U.S. drug officials in Vienna in 2008, Small said, the entire delegation walked out on her. “This year it was completely different,” she said. “We finally had a sense that they were listening.”
The comments mark quite a departure from those that drug reformers were making a year ago at the same U.N. event, where the Obama administration killed international efforts to include harm reduction language as part of a U.N. document that will guide the next decade’s global drug policy. Harm reduction refers to things like drug-substitute treatments and clean-needle exchanges — programs being tried (with promising results) in a number of countries to battle the spread of HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and other drug-related illnesses. The White House has argued that the broad harm reduction language is “ambiguous” and could include controversial programs the administration doesn’t support, including drug legalization, drug consumption rooms and heroin prescription initiatives.
But there are clear signs that the attitude is changing — and the policies are beginning to follow suit.
With Obama’s vocal support, for example, Congress last year repealed the 21-year-old ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs. And last week in Vienna, not only did the United States endorse a new U.N. resolution promoting access to controlled medicines for legitimate medical purposes (commonly considered to include drug dependency treatments, like methadone for heroin addiction), but it co-sponsored a separate declaration designed to tackle the treatment gap plaguing HIV patients. The latter resolution, while it doesn’t mention harm reduction specifically, references a U.N. technical guide promoting certain harm reduction measures, like needle exchange and opioid substitution therapy. Rebecca Schleifer, advocate for the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch, said this week that the HIV document represents “the most vocal support” the White House has ever given for HIV-treatment efforts focusing on human rights.
Opponents of needle exchange and other harm reduction measures argue that the human rights groups have misinterpreted the signals coming from the White House in Vienna. “If you read Kerlikowske’s statement,” said Lana Beck, spokeswoman for the Drug Free America Foundation, “clearly there’s nothing there to indicate any change.”
That part is true. The remarks prepared for Kerlikowske — officially the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP — reiterated the administration’s opposition to the broader harm reduction language, arguing that the term “creates unnecessary confusion” and might be misused to “promote drug use.” Still, drug reformers were quick to point out that the drug czar declined to include those passages when he addressed the crowd in Vienna — more evidence, they say, that the U.S. is consciously toning down its traditional war-on-drugs rhetoric.
“Traditional advocates of harm reduction recognized that the United States was a different animal [this year],” Clear said.
The ONDCP did not return calls for comment.
For health and human rights advocates, there remains a long way to go. Like any number of emotionally charged issues, drug policy is often dictated more by entrenched ideology than evidence-based rationality. And on Capitol Hill, there remains a strong sense that drug users are criminals to be punished, not patients to be treated. For proof, look no further than the debate over needle exchange. Although a long list of public health organizations — including the National Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the American Public Health Association — had endorsed needle exchange as an effective way to reduce HIV/AIDS without increasing drug abuse, the politics of Washington kept the ban in place for more than two decades prior to last year’s repeal.
Not that some lawmakers aren’t trying to reform the punitive mindset surrounding drug use. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), for example, has long-criticized the criminal justice system for packing the nation’s prisons with non-violent drug users. A description of his reform proposal notes that the the war on drugs hasn’t diminished drug use, it hasn’t brought the multi-billion dollar drug industry under control, and it targets minority offenders disproportionately. The system, he says, is “broken, unfair, [and] locking up the wrong people.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Webb proposal in January, leaving supporters hopeful that Democratic leaders will bring the bill to the chamber floor later this year.
Meanwhile, health and human rights advocates have vowed to continue their push for health-centered drug reforms, encouraged by the tone of a White House that seems set to place a greater emphasis on treatment, health and human rights.
“That would put us on par with most other countries — like Iran,” Small quipped, “instead of being the leading jailer in the world.”
This article originally appeared in the Colorado Independent, accessed 23 March 2010.
March 23, 2010
