Expectations are growing that a reversal of Labor’s rejection of a safe injecting room in Richmond might be announced any day, with senior ministers who are in favour of the idea growing in confidence. Government sources say emergency and health services have already recorded the number of lives lost to drugs in the council area so far in 2017 at 34 “and climbing”. […]

The ABC understands the high death rate is placing enormous pressure on the top levels of Government to change its position — with a potential trial of an injecting room under active consideration. […]

A tenet of his opposition to testing pills at music festivals seems to be that the information provided to people about their drugs might not always be 100 per cent accurate. It is seemingly better to have no information if you can’t provide complete, perfectly accurate information all the time. In science, that would mean a return to the Dark…

Former police commissioner Karl O’Callaghan says decriminalisation of small quantities of certain illicit substances could be the answer to WA’s drug problem. Mr O’Callaghan made the remarks during his first segment as a social commentator on Gareth Parker’s 6PR Morning Program, during which he also said the City of Perth needed a new substantive Lord Mayor and confirmed he had…

While the Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy in the World in 2016, published on Oct. 16, noted that human rights violations such as extrajudicial killings and the climate of impunity were already present during previous administrations, “the killings in the ‘war on drugs’ as well as the possible reintroduction of the death penalty were the focus of the…

The government’s controversial plan to drug test welfare recipients is under fire yet again, with the United Nations’ rapporteur on human rights calling the policy a “cheap shot” that will “stigmatise” the country’s poorest and most vulnerable. […]

“It’s a setback, it’s a delay,” Harm Minimisation Australia President Gino Vumbaca tells AJP. “Canberra has a unique situation where some major areas of land are owned by the Federal Government by the National Capital Authority, which is not an independent authority. “My understanding is that the promoter was put under enormous pressure, he hadn’t had the festival – which was…

This is a time where we should be crying over Spilt Milk, given it means that a festival that will be occurring in our town is less safe than it could have been and our young people are at greater risk than they needed to be. We need to be honest and recognise that this is a time where fear,…

Dr David Caldicott is an emergency room doctor in Canberra who has been campaigning for pill testing and harm reduction in Australia more than a decade. Here he gives his account of how the much-lauded pill testing pilot at Canberra’s Spilt Milk music festival got cancelled. […]