Right: a medically-supervised injecting facility in an Australian city; such a "safe injecting room" was unthinkable a few decades ago. Today, attitudes are changing and serious debate around actual decriminalisation is taking place.
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Arguments in favour of the decriminalisation low-level, personal drug use
1. The health and social effects of drug use can be dealt with more effectively through decriminalisation
It has been claimed that criminalising drug use makes it more difficult for drug users to address the social and health problems that result from their habit. Decriminalisation, it is argued, would remove the fear of prosecution and enable drug-users to be better assisted with the various difficulties they face.
Former Western Australian premier Geoff Gallop, has stated, 'I think it's most important that we look at the interest of those people in our community that do use drugs and we don't surround them with the criminal law so that their ability to cope with any issues that result from their use... is dealt with properly.'
Dr Gallop has further stated, 'In Portugal they decriminalised the use of drugs and required those who were caught in possession of drugs to take up therapy or to take up treatment or to find some way that they could live their lives better...I think that whole approach of decriminalising the use of drugs creates a much better framework for dealing with them.
In an opinion piece published in The Age on May 24, Richard Di Natale, a Greens senator from Victoria and his party's health spokesman stated, 'Rather than acting as a deterrent, the focus on criminalising individual users diverts scarce resources away from prevention, treatment and harm-reduction strategies such as needle and syringe exchanges.'
Federal Foreign Affairs Minister and former premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, has made similar comments about the effect of liberalising drug laws. 'As premier I sponsored a medically supervised injecting room so that people who are hooked on this wretched, addictive white powder ... would have a chance. While they were there, you could persuade them to give the stuff up and to enter treatment to get off it.'
A report commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Health estimated that by the year 2000 heroine injection programs had prevented 25,000 HIV and 21,000 hepatitis C infections, and would, by 2010, have saved the lives of 4,500 people who would otherwise have died from AIDS, and a further 90 who would have died from hepatitis C. The programs proved to be a good investment in financial terms alone. These programs cost less than $150 million but in the long run saved taxpayers more than $7 billion.
It has further been noted that the illegal market creates added dangers of overdose due to variation in potency and additives intended to increase the apparent quantities for sale. Illegal drug dealers also target children. An American study found that by 2003, fully 14 per cent of those being admitted to drug-abuse treatment facilities had first used drugs when 12 years old or even younger.
2. Drug use currently continues despite its illegality
There is a widespread belief that the war against drugs cannot be won and that the persistence of illicit drug use within the Australian community and in jurisdictions worldwide is proof of the failure of a law-based, punitive approach.
Michael Woolridge, a former federal health minister in the Howard government, has stated, 'The key message is that we have 40 years of experience of a law and order approach to drugs and it has failed.'
Professor Peter Baume, a former minister in the Fraser government, has stated, 'At the moment you're getting corruption, diversion of money. Prohibition isn't working; the Americans dismissed prohibition of alcohol because it didn't work. Why do they think prohibition of illicit drugs will work any better?'
A similar point was made by Dr Ken Crispin, the recently retired Supreme Court judge of the Australian Capital Territory in a 2010 address to launch Drug Action Week in the Australian Capital Territory. Dr Crispin stated, 'The war on drugs has proven a spectacular failure. The number of drug users has simply exploded and, despite occasional seizures, drugs are so plentiful that the prices have plummeted. In real terms, cocaine now costs about one-sixth of what it did in 1980 and heroin costs about one-tenth.'
In an opinion piece published in The Age on May 24, Richard Di Natale, a Greens senator from Victoria and his party's health spokesman stated, 'Current drug laws are ineffective, with drug production and consumption increasing all the time and street drugs becoming purer and cheaper than ever before. Criminalising individual users only serves to make criminals of ordinary people and make a potentially harmful product far more dangerous.'
3. Making drug use illegal is a misuse of police resources
It has been claimed that private drug users do not warrant the level of police resources currently directed at them and that these police would be better deployed trying to deal with more serious anti-social behaviour.
The point has been made by former New South Wales premier and current federal Foreign Affairs minister, Bob Carr. Mr Carr has stated, 'A bit of modest decriminalisation, de facto decriminalisation at the edges, simply freeing up police to be doing the things they ought to be doing, would be a sensible way of going about it.'
Mr Carr further stated, 'We wouldn't have armies of police patrolling outside nightclubs and pubs hoping to snatch someone who's got an ecstasy tablet in his or her pocket or purse. And we wouldn't be having police chasing individual users of marijuana.'
Mr Carr has further said, referring to his period as premier of New South Wales, 'I was very frustrated, from time to time, when I heard about police with sniffer dogs at railway stations hoping to catch people with small quantities of marijuana or raiding nightclubs hoping to get people with ecstasy,'
4. Making drug use illegal fosters crime
It has been claimed that making a wide range of drugs illegal simply serves to put their production and distribution in the hands of criminals. This has many disadvantages.
Otherwise law-abiding people with a drug habit deal with criminals in order to get their supply. Legal prohibition therefore technically criminalises a large group within the community who normally respect the law. It also gives the criminal underworld an enormous source of income. Money from the sale of drugs serves to fund many other illegal activities. Illegal drug production is unregulated which means there is no quality control on the drugs produced and distributed. Competition between different groups of drug distributors readily degenerates into violence and murder. The cost of maintaining some illegal drug habits also encourages users to become involved in other crimes, including theft and prostitution. Finally, the sale of illegal drugs is untaxed which not only increases the suppliers' profits; it deprives governments of a source of income to address some of the health and social problems caused by drug use.
Professor Peter Baume, a former minister in the Fraser government, has stated, 'We're putting a lot of tax-free money into the hands of criminals and we're forcing our kids to deal with criminals.'
Conversely it has been suggested that decriminalising drug use would immediately ruin the drug lords. This point has been made by Julian Savulescu, Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University and Bennett Foddy, Junior research fellow at University of Oxford in an opinion piece published in The Conversation on April 5, 2012. The authors stated, 'paradoxically, the worst thing you could do to the drug lords ... is not to wage a war on them, but to decriminalise cocaine and marijuana. They would be out of business in one day. Supplies could be monitored, controlled and regulated, the harm to users and third parties significantly reduced.'
5. Profits from illegal drugs fund repressive and/or terrorist states
Narco-states are regions and countries where governmental action is directly influenced -- either through corruption or violence -- by drug traffickers, drug producers or the drug trade itself. This is not a term such states apply to themselves; it is a classification applied by other jurisdictions to those regions that allow their territories to be used for the cultivation and or distribution of drugs illegal to other countries.
Narco-states are said to be one of the worst side-effects of the laws against many drugs. For example, some small countries, like Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, have been taken over by the suppliers of illegal drugs to serve as distribution points for Latin American cocaine. Such developments have fuelled corruption and oppression in the countries concerned.
It has also been claimed that the profits from illegal drugs have been used to fund groups that promote terrorism. Not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world, the extreme profits of the drug trade have played a role in funding terrorist networks and so threaten advanced countries.
The security of those living in these countries is at risk both from the violent excesses of drug distributors and from the anti-drug, counter-terrorist operations being conducted in their countries.
John Gray, a commentator for British The Observer, 'It is hard to see how the countries where most drug users live can be secure while counter-terrorist operations are mixed up with the ritual combat of the anti-drugs crusade.'
Opponents of criminalising drug use claim that were drugs made legal is would dramatically reduce the illegal production and distribution networks upon which narco-states are founded.