Promoting such health messages is part of the ‘harm minimisation’ approach. This pragmatic approach accepts that drug use will continue to be a part of society and that eradicating drugs by trying to stamp out supply is not feasible. Instead, the focus is on identifying the specific ways that drug misuse can harm individuals and society and then responding with strategies to reduce those dangers.
New Zealand’s National Drug Policy is based on this concept. The National Drug Policy is a regularly updated framework that was developed by the government in the 1990s to encourage action plans and community programmes to reduce the problems that drugs cause.
The National Drug Policy’s stated aim is “to prevent or delay the uptake of drugs, reduce drug-related harm, make families and communities safer and reduce the cost of drug abuse to individuals, society and government.”
Unfortunately, this dynamic up-to-date policy framework exists around a piece of legislation – the Misuse of Drugs Act – that has become dusty and irrelevant, with its limited goal of reducing supply.
The competing philosophies of the drug policy framework and the legislation create tension and confusion. The law’s strict focus on eradication of supply undermines health measures that would accept continued drug use. These could involve providing basic information on avoiding drug-related harm, or setting up needle exchange schemes and other harm reduction services.
The answer is not to throw out the criminal justice approach altogether. Nobody engaged in serious dialogue about the future of drug policy advocates creating an unregulated drug market in which traffickers and sellers go unpunished. However, it is important to broaden the legislation’s ambit. Genuine, effective attempts to reduce supply should be viewed as one tool that can be used to reduce the cost of drugs to society.
Drug use is different from drug production and supply. Too often, we lump everything together. Drug use is primarily a health issue and should be addressed through health-based responses. Drug production and trafficking, on the other hand, should usually remain the domain of a drug control system.
After years of viewing drug use through a criminal justice lens, it can seem jarring to consider the ‘rights’ of people who use drugs. However, international agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the World Health Organization’s Constitution make it clear that everybody has a fundamental right to decent standards of health. In the midst of a ‘war on drugs’ approach, this right is often denied to people who use drugs.
As Hungarian civil libertarian and researcher Judit Fridli points out, “Drug users are vulnerable people. They suffer from inadequate medical assistance. They experience discrimination, invasion of privacy, Police harassment and social marginalisation. They have to endure the arbitrary deprivation of rights.”
In many ways, incarcerating non-violent minor drug offenders has added to the damage harmful drug use causes, both to people who use drugs and to their families and communities.
Incarcerating users instead of providing appropriate healthcare might temporarily shut away the problem from society, but it means that we do not identify the underlying factors that cause somebody to use drugs in the first place or come up with a suitable long-term solution to an individual’s drug use. Overlooking drug users’ rights ends up costing society.
Research into different health-based responses to drug use has identified a number of initiatives that work effectively. Well-designed prevention programmes can support children to make healthy choices. Comprehensive harm reduction services can reduce the health, social and economic damage associated with using illegal substances.
These programmes work best in an environment of support and openness that is very difficult to foster when drugs are seen purely as a criminal justice issue. The fear of legal sanctions strongly deters people who use drugs from seeking help and stigmatises them. That means we miss out on opportunities to help people to give up drugs or to switch to safer forms of drug use.
New Zealand is not alone in trying to update the way it deals with drugs. Policy reformers have suggested changes in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada in an effort to introduce a harm minimisation approach to drug control law.
In Canada, the Health Officers’ Council of British Columbia believes “The balance point for determining public health policies for currently illegal drugs would be that which minimises the prevalence of harmful use and negative health impacts, and also minimises any indirect or collateral harms to society from regulatory sanctions.”
And in the United Kingdom, Tom Wood, Scotland’s ‘Drug Tsar’, told a newspaper in 2006, “I spent much of my Police career fighting the drugs war and there was no one keener than me to fight it. But latterly I have become more and more convinced that it was never a war we could win. We can never as a nation be drug-free. No nation can, so we must accept that. So the message has to be more sophisticated than ‘just say no’ because that simple message doesn’t work.”
There is an obvious analogy with efforts to reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted infections. Research has shown that campaigns to promote chastity are usually ineffective, so a better approach is for campaigns to focus on encouraging safer behaviour.
Drug law focused on reducing the harm around drugs would help those communities that are particularly vulnerable to drug misuse, rather than exacerbating social exclusion by relying on incarceration to deal with people who use drugs. Law that is based on public health analysis would aim to reduce inequality. It would also recognise that, to reduce or stop drug misuse, recovery must be supported by the provision of social services, such as housing and employment.
A new Misuse of Drugs Act based on the principle of harm minimisation would make its top priority efforts to reduce the damage caused by drug use. It would recognise that many of the harms we currently experience from drugs are related to their legal status.
A health-based law would respect human rights, including the right of people to equal access to health services. It would reduce the barriers that currently stop people from seeking help for drug-related problems and make it easier for them to access services such as needle exchanges and other harm reduction programmes, treatment or emergency care for overdoses.
Such laws would complement other national public health laws and strategies, including the National Drug Policy framework.
Sociologists and researchers have provided us with a wealth of information about what would work better than our current law. The next step is to put these lessons to good use.
We have spent 30 years trying ineffectively to stamp out supply under the mistaken belief that drugs should be dealt with solely as a criminal justice matter. It is time to take heed of more than three decades of experience. Our drug law must be adaptable for the future instead of rooted in the past and, most importantly, supportive of drug and health policies.