By Michael McGowan and Angus Thomson
The NSW drug summit in Sydney had become increasingly tense and rancorous as the final day wrapped up on Thursday.
On stage, the usually measured architect of the landmark Ice Inquiry, Professor Dan Howard SC, received a standing ovation after he gave a tub-thumping speech urging Labor to “bite the bullet” and decriminalise drug possession.
Annie Madden, executive director of Harm Reduction Australia, proved a persuasive voice at the 1999 drug summit.Credit: Justin McManus
In the breakout rooms, where participants discussed policies away from the media’s prying eyes, some delegates said the atmosphere had become increasingly hostile as the day went on.
Annie Madden, head of Harm Reduction Australia, who had expressed hope for significant reform heading into the summit, said of an afternoon session she had been a part of: “I am not exaggerating when I say the room was in revolt. People wanted to walk out.”
“I’m not just disappointed. I’m actually angry, really angry, and I’m devastated,” she said.
By the end of the day, after summit participants had come up on stage to read out the priority reform areas voted on by the various policy groups, summit co-chair Carmel Tebbutt felt compelled to acknowledge the “frustration” of some participants. “I know some of it was tough,” she said.
Tebbutt conceded there was “a lot of frustration, there is a lot of anger, and there is a sense that people have been saying this for a long time”.
Indeed, some working groups had not taken a vote. Michael Doyle, a First Nations drug and alcohol researcher from the University of Sydney, joined other delegates on stage to argue the summit had failed to adequately listen to the voices of diverse communities.
“We feel that we haven’t been included in the way we should’ve been in the summit,” he said.
“It wasn’t done in a way whereby we felt safe to express directly what we wanted to express. If we are 40 per cent of the prison population or thereabouts, we need to be part of the conversation.”
In a fiery end to the summit, Indigenous health researcher Michael Doyle said it had failed to listen to voices from diverse communities. Credit: NSW Health
In some policy groups, such as the one focused on law reform, decriminalisation was identified as the top priority by delegates. Drug-checking and an end to strip-searching and drug detection dogs were also identified.
The determination to pursue decriminalisation was an unexpected turn for a summit which Matt Noffs, CEO of drug addiction treatment service the Noffs Foundation, had predicted would be “boring but better than nothing”.
Noffs was reflecting a view widely held in the drug and alcohol sector. After it spent years promising to hold a summit, some advocates believed Labor had lost its nerve and was unlikely to pursue significant reform.
The government might commit to a pill-testing trial and changes to cannabis laws, he thought, but more ambitious reform was not likely.
Yet as the summit unfolded, discussion instead became dominated by decriminalisation as delegates grew angry at what felt like a summit going through the motions.
Watching from the sidelines, it has been difficult to make sense of the government’s strategy.
By publicly ruling out decriminalisation before it even began, Premier Chris Minns and Health Minister Ryan Park were guaranteeing the ire of most summit delegates.
Not only that, the subsequent decision to invite the Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler to share the problems faced in Oregon after personal drug possession was decriminalised helped set the summit up as being about that issue.
You could argue Minns was heading off criticism of being soft on drugs. But if that’s the case, the government seems to have been bracing for a backlash that wasn’t there. Changing drug laws has historically been a vexed issue in NSW, but there has been very little pushback – publicly at least – in the lead up to the summit. Conservative outlets such as the Daily Telegraph didn’t even bother to show up.
That would probably have changed if the government had been seen to be laying the groundwork for decriminalisation, of course, and there is an argument some delegates would have campaigned hard to make full decriminalisation of drug possession the dominant issue of the summit regardless of what Minns said in the build-up.
However, the reality is many delegates had other goals and there was some frustration that the summit had been dominated by a policy the government was never likely to pursue.
The panel co-chairs will present findings to the government next year.
Pill-testing, changes to roadside drug-testing, and an overhaul of the beleaguered drug-diversion program to allow more people to avoid charges if caught with small amounts of illegal drugs are all possible recommendations, and it is hard to see how they could avoid pointing to decriminalisation as a key ask of summit delegates.
While that is off the table for now, there is undeniably appetite among senior cabinet figures within the government to take considerable action.
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