Russell Brown is a freelance journalist based in Auckland.
OPINION: The Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 haunts the NZ Drug Foundation’s biennial parliamentary symposium like a body buried in the Beehive’s foundations.
Exorcisms have been tried. The Law Commission review in 2010 found the law “fails to respond appropriately to the health and addiction issues which often underpin illicit drug use”. Then-prime minister John Key and his justice minister, Simon Power, responded to its proposals for change by dismissing them.
In 2018, He Ara Oranga: Report of the Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction fairly rang with pleas for drug decriminalisation – and endorsed the Law Commission’s call for the repeal and replacement of the act. Governments have fiddled around the edges, yet there is no sign that any has the stomach to follow the expert advice and write a modern law on drugs.
Such was the stench seeping from the walls as delegates took their seats for this month’s symposium. Past events have been themed on the potential for reform, but this year’s banner, “Addressing unmet health needs and reducing drug harm”, was more about making do. MPs who have averted their gaze for decades are not likely to spring into action in an election year.
Many of those who attended were the same mental health and addiction workers who informed He Ara Oranga and who still face the same problems getting help to people who need it. Others (there is quite a large overlap) were there on the basis of what the sector calls “lived experience”. There were police officers, scientists and current and former gang members.
A handful were from other countries. “I’m a nice guy,” declared Arild Knutsen of Norway’s Association for Humane Drug Policies. “I’m a drug user. I deserve a dignity in life that everyone else can take for granted.” Kirsten Horsburgh, the former mental health nurse who heads the Scottish Drugs Forum, wept as she showed photographs of the filthy alleys where addicts are forced to shoot up in Glasgow. “Sorry,” she said. “Jet lag.”
Suzanne Cookson, of ADHD New Zealand, told the room that under current laws it was easier for many people to get meth than methylphenidate (Ritalin). She related the story of one man who had been diagnosed with ADHD in prison but lost access to his medication on release, when the doctor he went to dismissed him as a “drug-seeker”. The Auckland City Mission’s Jacqui Dillon explained how her clients miss access to services they need, from mental-health care to dentistry, because they’re not “clean”, in both senses of the word.
MPs from the cross-party group on mental health and addictions all acknowledged the problem, but, said the group’s de facto leader, ChlÖe Swarbrick, had yet to touch on reforming drug policy. That, said National’s Matt Doocey, was “a pretty big and hairy” issue. “It doesn’t have to be,” said Swarbrick.
Later in the day, Wendy Allison arrived. She was there to celebrate being made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit as the founder of Know Your Stuff, the organisation that began checking illicit drugs at festivals in a legal limbo and did so until the Misuse of Drugs Act was amended – another patch on a decaying structure.
Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro, before honouring Allison and Living Sober founder Lotta Dann, gave a speech calling for harm reduction over prohibition. There was no place, she said, for “zero-tolerance” policies.
It might have seemed an unusually political speech for a governor-general to make. But Dame Cindy’s husband, as she noted, is Dr Richard Davies, who has worked since 2014 providing mental-health and addiction care to Auckland City Mission whānau.
It was less a speech from the throne than a message from the frontline. Perhaps one day they really will get the stench out of those walls.
