NAP statement to the Australian National Council on Drugs

Darwin, June 9, 2005

The end of Harm Reduction in Australia?

Members of the Darwin-based drug law-reform group, the Network Against Prohibition (NAP), are alarmed that Australia is seen to be leading the way in harm reduction and that our model should be followed around the globe.

The reality is that harm reduction in Australia is facing a concerted attack, and has been for a number of years. The conservative political climate on a federal and state/territory level has resulted in an increase in attacks on the human rights of illicit drug users and on communities perceived by police as communities with high rates of drug use ie, the indigenous community, young people, migrants and non-heterosexuals.

Increasingly, the Australian Government looks to Washington for leadership in the War on Drugs, basing its strategies on a stale and moralistic drug policy that failed before it even began.

The following are the recent attacks on the human rights of illicit drug users in Australia:

• Sniffer dogs in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory - now residents of major cities and even remote communities can’t walk their streets without fear of being harassed by a sniffer-dog team;

• Drug House laws in the Northern Territory – this legislation allows the police to put a 1.2 metre high, fluorescent green sign, outside your home declaring it a ‘drug premises’;

• Drug Courts - these remove a drug user’s fundamental right to being innocent until proven guilty and the right to silence, setting them up for failure in inadequate treatment programs;

• A massive increase in jail population - over the past ten years the Australian jail population has increased by 50 per cent for men and 100 per cent for women. More indigenous people are incarcerated in NT prisons than ever before. In fact, the NT has the same incarceration rates as Texas.

• User groups under attack - drug user groups, which were once the beacon of harm reduction in Australia, now struggle to survive as funding disappears.

Internationally, harm reduction has a long way to go. The Australian Government continues to support regimes within our region that have draconian drug policies. Our armed forces and police participate in regular exercises and information-sharing with:

• Singapore, who have the highest per capita execution rate on the planet, and who are currently holding young Melbourne man Nguyen Tuong Van on death row for a non-violent drug offence, and

• Thailand, whose government and police have waged a murderous campaign against drug users. More than three thousand people were murdered in government-sponsored killings in 2003 alone. (2003 was the same year that the Australian Federal Police established an outpost in the northern Thai city, Chiang Mai.

Even if Australia’s armed forces won’t work with them, nothing will stop Australian businesses from putting their snout in the trough. Many businesses have invested in Vietnam, a country with twenty thousand alleged drug users in concentration camps, including Tran Van Thanh, another Australian on death row in Hanoi, for a non-violent drug offence. Australian business is also in China, who ‘round up’ then hold drug users, before executing them on the annual International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Trafficking.

The NAP calls on the Australian National Council on Drugs to issue a statement demanding that the Australian Government:

• End drug prohibition and zero-tolerance policing tactics in Australia;

• Implement a moratorium on the building of prisons;

• Release all existing prisoners serving time for non-violent drug or drug related offences;

• Expand and diversify needle and syringe programs;

• Implement the full range of pharmacotherapies for dependent drug users; and

• End all military involvement with countries that persecute their own communities and children under the pretence of the War on Drugs.

To download a Microsoft Word version of this document click here.

For more information contact the NAP on 0415 16 2525, via email hq (at) napnt.org or see: http://www.napnt.org