The only way to get criminals out the very lucrative illicit drug trade is to decriminalize it! The war on drugs has been raging for the best part of a century with no end in sight and has taken more lives than two world wars.

And overloaded our prison with folk who were not hardened criminals upon entry but most certainly were when they exited! Addiction is a medical problem not a criminal problem and needs to be treated in a medical environment!

We applied commonsense to the sex worker trade and allowed those who chose that to be free to ply their trade. And in the process ended much police corruption and criminal behaviour. Ditto abortion!

The same commonsense behaviour must be applied to illicit drugs! And for similar reasons. Leaving police resources to focus on actual criminal behaviour and real crime!

For laws to operate, they must be enforceable. We didn't criminalize tobacco nor alcohol But, we did criminalize the use of heroin and other opioids, even though they were totally benign and had no long-term health issues. In fact, some cancer patients claimed that pure heroin was far more efficacious than morphine and dramatically extended survival rates!

Taking certain classes of firearms from law abiding gun owners did nothing more than increase the trade in illegal firearms. And did not make gun fearing Pollies or anti-gun activists any safer, arguably, just the opposite!

Extreme right-wing politician have always touted law and order issues and their policy paradigm and have gotten away with it, because joe public was simply too ignorant to understand how hollow those policies were or how unenforceable they were or how much official corruption they engendered!
Alan B.

If drug addiction is to remain a criminal offence, then it must also apply to all addiction, and ought include gambling addiction nicotine addiction and alcohol dependency.

If all dependency/addiction also included large government revenue streams, then that would pay for the medical rehab addicts need to get off their addictions. And the legalization of illicit drugs would take all the reasons drug barons get kids on drug addiction as customers for life.

It would also take much drug related criminal behaviour away, given drug related crime to obtain drug money would no longer prevail.

Nor would family unity be rent asunder and valuable real estate loss be required to pay for rehab or extended addiction! Often resulting in financial ruination and or bankruptcy for folk who did nothing wrong!

Making addiction to some addictive substance and not all is an injustice for those addicted to illicit substances or other addictions that don't include government revenue is massive injustice that cannot continue!
Alan B.

This one is a Ho Ho .

The current approach needs little changing. One positive change would be giving the Police authority to resell confiscated drugs back onto the black market, copying methods used in similar Banana republics: That’s a move with beneficial outcomes to the beleaguered taxpayer.

Thirty percent of the Australian economy is estimated to be illegal and under the radar, of which the illegal trade in drugs adds significantly. There’s plenty of money in them there hills, and the directions of its profits are well established and defended.

Trading in illegal drugs is also the survival method of the poor; r3moving that source of income will only more cripple the poor, with the inevitable consequences falling onto the shoulders of taxpayers in obvious ways.

And poor o’l Al B talking to madness again instead of “of” it, sadly believes decriminalisation of prostitution was a good thing, well sorry Al, no it wasn’t!

Dan.

A non-military National Service would rid the young of their parents' mentality & make them want to give drugs a miss !
People would be surprised how discipline, self-respect etc would hit drug use over the head !

No medical aid for drug abusers would also thin out the moron gene pool !

Drug addiction starts with the very young innocents and gifts of free feel-good C.R.A.P. And once addicted, a customer for life, and even a loyal soldier for the crime lord.

If the criminal element got no return from their illicit trade!? That trade would dry up and there'd be no point getting kids addicted!

Getting innocent and trusting kids addicted, something victim blaming Dan and Satan's servants agree with! And education is the answer as things stand.

Leaving things as they are is not an answer as is any more lives sacrificed on the altar of the illicit drug trade!

Decriminalizing prostitution also resulted in corrupt cops losing their (meal ticket) hold on fallen women and the cash they earned by turning a blind eye or even pimping for "their" girls! But one can only assume, deadbeat Dan and co., wanted this source of illegal income to continue for corrupt cops? Given that was the actual outcome.

Decriminalizing abortion didn't increase the abortion rate but did result in far fewer deaths at the hands of backyard butchers!

Simply put, unenforceable laws tie up police resources and our courts. With no change to the status quo and criminal incomes or fewer addicts!

Devil's advocates need to be sidelined and their mad hatter opinions ignored. Drug users are not the problem, but drug lords are. If this illicit trade was to dry up, Taliban and co., would lose all the income they use to prosecute their wars and fund their terrorist activities.
Alan B.

Well said, Alan, couldn’t agree more.

Poor o’l Al B,

Not only but also. Revolving doors at police stations for drug offenders, great idea not Al.
This sysjcurrently in use in San Francisco. Half a million SF inhabitants fled the mayhem of the city, and moved to predominantly Republican States such as Texas for safety, while the flotsam and jetsam from across the US moved in!

This is a stark example of why people like yourself that play to madness such as laissez faire drug control should not be heeded.

Parts of the city are cordoned off as anarchism rules, and life for local businesses is so grim they have threatened a tax strike until law and order returns the city to some semblance of civilised society.

Ruling society from the bottom up fails at the point of drug addiction.
The kindest place for drug addicts is in jail when caught breaking the law. The kindest place.

Dan.

The difference is that the proposed law would be Australia wide unlike the case cited, San Francisco.
There would be no sudden influx as one can’t very well travel to Australia in a beaten up old car.
When hunting one has to be very observant when in “plantation” country and avoid cannabis plots as one may run into the cultivators, who don’t like hunters, because hunters who do stumble onto a patch, may be under police observation and then they’d have to explain why they didn’t report the matter; then they’d lose their firearms licence as ‘not being fit and proper persons’.
No one wants to lose their licence so prudent hunters take a few bearings and report the matter.

A homily of platitudes goes in the wrong direction to solving the social catastrophe of drug use and addiction.

Unless the slide of the West into the garbage of irrelevance is halted in positive moral directions, situations of the drug trade and drug use will continue to escalate; (viz SF).

Man is a spiritual being. His God has been replaced by the work of those with good intentions, exactly like poor o’l Al B, who castigate the importance of religion towards a stable and meaningful direction for society. Religious observances were once a core value to Western culture as a stabilising form.

Spiritual man is a dead dodo of woke new culture. I’m happy to see a spark of recognition among NSW politicians resisting the call for soft approaches towards drug control.

Dan

Drug users are not the problem, but drug lords are.
Alan B,
One's as guilty as the other ! No excuse for either, the real fault lies with those do-gooders who object to common, natural discipline ! The anti-National Service crowd is probably the most guilty !

So Canberra as usual have got the wrong angle. Then the Lillians of this world want to copy them.

God help us.

Good article. I agree.

However, why start at the far end of obviously harmful drugs where even the sale and purchase of useful common medicines is restricted?

It would be ridiculous to allow the importation, sale, purchase and use of cannabis, heroine and amphetamines while it is still illegal for adults to do the same with antibiotics and certain herbal medicines without a doctor's prescription.

There are definite merits in decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of drugs. However, the prosecution of drug dealers and firing of people who use drugs at work should be kept.

Those good people who cite San Fransisco as a model of a drug policy that's gone wrong, are essentially right on the money. Yet at the same time I don't believe, nor do any of my former colleagues, that police can arrest their way out of this insidious drug mess we are currently in.

My last deployment before I retired, was the the Armed Hold-up Squad. In fact I had scant interaction with the 'druggies' the CIB Drug Squad were affectionately called. But the popular notion of masses of police flooding the streets, public places and the by-ways, as suggested by some politicians merely demonstrated how little some knew of the current drug surge sweeping Sydney and the 'burbs.

Many significant drug deals take place in the isolation of private dwellings, making it inordinately harder for police to interdict drug enforcement. Search Warrants et al? Including finding a jurist prepared to sign the application without lengthy alterations made thereto. Often in the 'Robbers' we'd get wind of 'F/As in possession', say on a Friday afternoon, and trying to find a magistrate present, to sign the damn warrant, was somewhat of a joke.

Therefore, through some petty bureaucratic blunder, we would get to their source (guns) all too late in the proceedings. Thus returning to the Station empty handed, with a stupid look on our collective faces. Retirement was a far better option for a coppers mental health. Rather than aspiring to a career's self-actualisation as suggested by Mr Maslow.

Drug-caused attrition & no medical aid for abusers will sort things far quicker & effective than any useless expensive program that only serves to fill the pockets of 'experts' !.