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Inform your opinion: Is it time to change our drug laws?
It is hard to believe in 2024 we are still guided by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 (MoDA), written 50 years ago. So much has changed in society, but our drug laws have not. We accept and promote the use of some psychoactive drugs (alcohol, nicotine and caffeine) but arrest people for preferring other drugs.
Many decades ago, we rightly ended the criminalisation of homosexuality, attempted suicide and sex work, we ended laws that controlled and mistreated women, indigenous people, and mentally unwell people. Through activism and social progression, such laws thankfully no longer exist.
However, our drug laws remain unevolved and resistant to research and evidence. Further, our drug laws are ineffective, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) data shows drug laws have failed to have any significant impact on supply or demand over the past 50 years.
New Zealand researchers (Crossin et al, 2023) identified many prohibited drugs as less harmful than legally approved counterparts. However, making the “wrong” choice about which drugs you prefer can have grave consequences. The 1975 Act gives the court powers to impose a life sentence to anyone supplying a magic mushroom, or 14 years imprisonment for sharing an ecstasy tablet with a friend.
Drugs do carry risk, but it is important we separate harms caused by prohibition from harms caused by drugs. Too often we conflate them. For example, if a person dies of an overdose, we fail to acknowledge overdose is almost always fuelled by prohibition. Prohibition denies quality controls, so the customer has no idea what the drug is, what it’s mixed with or what the purity or strength is, increasing the risk of overdose.
Due to the risk of arrest, the customer must use secretly, often alone, putting themselves more at risk. If complications arise, people are reluctant to call an ambulance for fear of arrest; when they do it’s often too late. Meanwhile, a harm reduction initiative, the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Sydney, where people can go to use their drugs, has supervised 1.28 million injections without a single fatal overdose. Context is everything.
In 2011, the lack of science to support prohibitive drug laws and their failure to be fit for purpose was highlighted by a Law Commission report. After a three-year inquiry, the commission recommended the MoDA 1975 be rescinded and replaced with new legislation managed by the Ministry of Health.
That recommendation was more than a decade ago. Something needs to be done, but what? There is broad support towards immediate decriminalisation of personal possession of all psychoactive drugs.
Addiction or problematic use are health and social care concerns, not law enforcement matters. Portugal has decriminalised personal possession and use of drugs since 2001 and despite this, levels of all drug use in Portugal have remained stable and not dissimilar to neighbouring countries. Since the 1970s, the Netherlands has effectively decriminalised the sale and use of cannabis in coffee shops.
Again, despite the liberalisation of drug laws, a study by Reinarman et al (2004) found no difference in age, frequency or extent of cannabis use in Amsterdam compared to people in San Francisco, where cannabis was strictly prohibited. The decades of drug law liberalisation in Portugal and the Netherlands strongly suggest that neither drug law enforcement nor liberalisation have any significant impact on levels of drug use. However, policy does have a significant impact on the outcomes of people who use drugs.
Our current drug law protects the market dominance of state-approved drugs and hands over the market for unapproved drugs to gangs. People who use unapproved drugs are forced to engage with criminals. With huge profits at stake, disputes in these criminal businesses are managed by guns, knives, threats and violence - there is no consumer protection, legal recourse or complaints procedure.
If a young person is caught with unapproved drugs, a criminal conviction seriously damages their life opportunities for employment, housing, insurance, relationships and travel, often posing far greater risk than the drug they possessed. Decriminalisation of drug possession is an easy, positive step to enact to address this. It’s a step that should have been taken two decades ago.
However, a serious and hugely important concern about decriminalisation is that it’s a half measure - supply remains illegal, unregulated, unpredictable and untaxed. Decriminalisation continues to put people at risk of overdose, fuels crime, violence and leaves supply in the hands of gangs and cartels. Half measures, as recently witnessed in Oregon, leave many other issues unresolved. Therefore, the drug supply must be responsibly legally regulated, rather than controlled by criminals operating a dangerous underground market.
A new Psychoactive Drugs Act should be introduced to regulate the commercial supply of all psychoactive substances, alongside legalising all adult personal possession. Legalisation doesn’t introduce drugs - they are already here, so we must decide whether we want to continue having an underground supply controlled by gangs or whether we prefer a quality-controlled, regulated and taxed supply, managed by the government.
It’s irresponsible to keep burying our heads in the sand, we must learn to manage all drugs responsibly - something we have failed to do so far.
Lachlan Akers and Julian Buchanan are members of the Harm Reduction Coalition Aotearoa.
