GUEST BLOG: Willie Jackson – Drug reform
News that the Government have asked Police to treat drug use as a medical rather than a criminal matter will have an enormous impact on our community. We know young people, Māori and Pacifica face more prosecutions by Police when it comes to drug use, the new policy asks Police to consider alternatives to jail like treatment and addiction services because those programs have more chance of working than locking people up and throwing away the keys.
We refuse to allow synthetic dealers to keep rotting our communities with their filth, but punishing addicts is cruel and pointless.
When you are in Government you can either continue doing things that don’t work but make the angry happy, or you can challenge counter productive policy and push for change.
I am pleased to be in a Government that continues to do the latter rather than gutlessly cave into the easy.
Willie Jackson is the Minister for Employment
How about going the whole hog and following the Portuguese model of decriminalisation of all drugs for personal use, Willie? At the time Portugal’s plan was proposed in 2001, many learned people and institutions predicted the sky would fall in if they went through with it. 18 years later it is very clear that this hasn’t been the case.
By taking personal drug use entirely out of the criminal justice system and treating it as a health issue, Portugal has achieved far better outcomes for both drug users and society as a whole.
Aren’t meth and synthetic cannabis harmful and corrosive elements to New Zealand society? Yes they are, but so was heroin to Portuguese society. It was causing so much harm while criminalised they were prepared to take the radical step of full decriminalisation combined with a health care-centred treatment approach. In doing so they dramatically reduced rates of HIV and other blood-borne diseases among intravenous drug users and current rates of heroin use in Portugal have fallen to be amongst the lowest in Western Europe.
Another really positive step would be to allow for completely legal drug testing stations to work at festivals and other events. Far from “encouraging drug use” these places genuinely save lives and they should be allowed to operate with the full support of both the government and law enforcement.