Dr David Caldicott, an emergency medicine specialist, said the increase in arrests and seizures related to drugs like heroin and hallucinogens did not mirror trends seen in hospitals. He said drugs policy in Australia had three key pillars – reducing supply, reducing demand and reducing harm. While it was important to reduce supply, two-thirds of the money spent on drugs…

Strip searches are meant to only be used by officers if they suspect, on reasonable grounds, that it’s necessary “for the purpose of the search” and there are “serious and urgent” circumstances that make it necessary. But the law provides no other criteria to guide police. In a non-policing context, having to perform such non-consensual acts would constitute a serious…

Seattle is undertaking what feels like the beginning of a historic course correction, with other cities discussing how to follow. This could be far more consequential than the legalization of pot: By some estimates, nearly half of Americans have a family member or close friend enmeshed in addiction, and if the experiment in Seattle succeeds, we’ll have a chance to…

ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury said the news that majority of the people attending the pill testing tent were teenagers underlines the positive effect of pill testing. “These are people who don’t necessarily have a lot of information and pill testing does provide that opportunity to access that information,” Mr Rattenbury said. “It […]

The research, commissioned by Redfern Legal Centre, has revealed there has been an almost 20-fold increase in the number of searches in the past 12 years. The study found between 2014-2015, and 2017-2018, searches in the field found nothing between 62.6 and 65.6 per cent of the time. […]

A strip search is the most invasive form of personal search available to police without a court order,” Dr Sentas says. “Yet over the past decade we have seen the number of strip searches continue to rise. Our findings reveal such searches are doing little to tackle serious drug crime.” […]

“Saturation policing with sniffer dogs at music festivals and railway stations or forcing teenagers to remove their clothes in the back of police vans does not make the community safer,” said one of the report’s co-authors, the UNSW lecturer Vicki Sentas. “We need a serious discussion about how best to reform the law so that the police cannot abuse their…

We can’t possibly prevent all risk-taking harms but we can act to reduce the risk and minimise the harm. Just ‘saying no’ and believing that your kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren and kids of your friends wouldn’t or don’t take drugs is nave and denies the reality of youth culture. […]

To minimise the negative impacts of illicit drug use, Australia should legalise pill testing, regulate the growth and sale of marijuana, and decriminalise the personal possession of illicit drugs. […]

Independent MLC Ruth Forrest introduced the motion which, in an effort to minimise harm related to drug use at Tasmanian festivals and events, asked the government commit to looking into the steps that would need to be taken to conduct a trial in 2019-20 festival season. “Pill testing provides targeted opportunities to educate and counsel a group of people that…