Yahoo Finance Mother of overdose victim urges NSW to adopt warning system for drug offences
The mother of a 19-year-old who died from a drug overdose at a music festival has urged the New South Wales premier to change the state’s laws by allowing police to let people off with warnings when caught with small amounts of drugs.
Jennie Ross-King’s daughter Alex died in January 2019 after she took an unusually high amount of MDMA before arriving at a festival because she was afraid of being caught with the drugs by police.
Her death was one of six examined in a landmark inquest before the NSW deputy coroner Harriet Grahame last year. It helped lead to Grahame’s finding that high-visibility policing tactics such as drug dogs and “large scale” strip-searching at music festivals “increases rather than decreases” the risks associated with drugs.
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On Thursday, Ross-King told the Guardian that a proposal being considered by the NSW government to change drug laws in the state by introducing a warning system for people caught in possession of a small amount of drugs was “absolutely” a good idea.
“Before Alex went into the festival one of her friends said ‘I’ll take them in for you’,” Ross-King told the Guardian.
“But she said to him, ‘no we’re going to Bali next week, you can’t get caught’. That’s what she said. If they got caught, they wouldn’t be able to go to Bali. There’s literally more of a fear of getting caught and having it on your record than dying. It doesn’t make sense, of course it doesn’t, but that is the reality.
“I don’t agree with people doing drugs, I’m not a pro-drug person, but the thing is I’m a realist. Lots of people take illicit drugs and have done for hundreds of years and are going to do so into the future.
“The current way we address these matters, making them criminal, it actually gives the subject a stigma and a taboo that doesn’t allow people to talk about it. That’s the problem I had with Alex.”
First reported by the Seven Network on Wednesday, the proposal before cabinet is a form of depenalisation which would introduce a warning system for people found with small quantities of drugs.
If a person was found in possession of a small quantity of drugs they would first be let off with a warning, before facing fines if they were caught a second or third time in a 12-month period. If it occurred a fourth time in the same period, they could face criminal charges.
The proposal, which was first reported as “decriminalisation”, prompted an immediate backlash from some members of the government. On Thursday the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, said the government had a “black and white” opposition to the decriminalisation, while the deputy premier, John Barilaro, told Sydney radio station 2GB the government was “not going soft on crime”.
On the other side of the aisle, federal Labor senator Kristina Keneally said she was “not yet convinced that what I see is the right way forward”.
“I would strongly urge the cabinet to slow down and listen to some experts,” Keneally told 2GB.
Ross-King, who since her daughter’s death has begun pushing health officials to improve drug education for young people, said she laughed when she saw Keneally’s comments.
“I sort of went, ‘Um, what? The experts have been saying this for a long time,’” she said.
She told the Guardian it frustrated her when politicians, including the premier, invoked the scourge of drugs on families when explaining their opposition to reform.
“It annoys me when they say they know the effect it has on people, because they don’t,” she said.
“They haven’t had a loved one pass away or be affected by illicit drugs. I would love to sit down with Mr Barilaro or Mr Elliott or Ms Kenneally or whoever, and ask them the question, ‘when you sit down with your children to have the conversation about drugs what do you say to them?’
“‘You tell me what you said. What information or knowledge do you have that I don’t that means this can happen to me but not you?’
“That’s where the stigmatisation comes into it. Because with decriminalisation, it opens up the ability to have the conversation and reduce the harms if someone’s child doesn’t listen and chooses to experiment.”
The proposal is part of the yet-to-be-released response to the government’s own special commission into drug use, which in February issued a scathing final report on the impact of criminalising drug users, labelling it a “profound flaw” in the NSW criminal justice system. The commission found the criminalisation of drug use had caused “disproportionate harm” to users, and was “not effective” in curbing drug use.
It followed a similar recommendation from Grahame after a separate inquiry into the deaths of six people from opioids.
The government is still yet to formally respond the ice inquiry, besides ruling out measures such as pill testing. The reluctance to make major changes to the state’s drug laws has been a consistent part of NSW politics for almost two decades since the then-premier Bob Carr established a drug summit in an effort to tackle the heroin epidemic in 1999.
The summit was successful in pushing a major rethink on drug policy in the state, and led to the introduction of a number of significant harm-reduction measures.
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Among them was the establishment of Australia’s first medically supervised injecting room in Kings Cross, the cannabis cautioning scheme and the NSW drug court.
But, experts have long warned that progress on reform in the state has dramatically stalled. On Thursday the former Australian federal police commissioner Mick Palmer said “tough on crime” rhetoric had simply not worked.
“I have seen first-hand what it means to be ‘tough on drugs’,” he said.
“Most police officers do not want to destroy people’s lives for simply using drugs, but that is the inevitable outcome of laws that are designed to punish people rather than protecting them.
“To tackle drug use will take real political courage. I urge the NSW government to find theirs, or use of harmful drugs will continue to grow.”
