Festival goers have been banned from Olympic Park in Sydney for six months by police despite not committing any offence in what has been labelled a ‘serious abuse of police powers.’ NSW police followed through on their threat earlier in the week that at the Above & Beyond festival on Saturday they would ban revellers if a dog reacted positively, even…

Festivalgoers are being urged to report instances of being turned away from ‘Above & Beyond’ festival via a social media campaign run by the Greens party. “If NSW police go ahead with their plan to deny entry to people at ‘Above and Beyond’ even after a false positive, we’ll be seeing them back in court next week,” according to the Sniff…

The plan also attracted criticism from the former commissioner of the Australian Border Force, Roman Quaedvlieg, who spent more than three decades in drug enforcement. Mr Quaedvlieg dubbed the police move “extraordinary”. “Festival drugs are risky granted but a person can have minute drug traces from handling cash, infused into garment fabric etc,” he posted on Twitter earlier this week.…

Independent Victoria MP Fiona Patten was part of a delegation which visited Lisbon and studied what’s now known world wide as “The Portugal Model”. She insists – despite a tendency towards more conservative politics in Australia – this country is ready to take the same controversial step that Portugal did 17 years ago. […]

Since reforming its policy in 2001, Portugal’s annual overdose death rate has dropped to 0.35 per 100,000 people. In Australia our overdose death rate is more than twenty times higher than that, a figure that is rising every year. At the start of 2000 Portugal had 1600 annual cases of drug-related HIV. […]

NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong brushed off the defeat, insisting the police plan was an overreach of powers and claiming drug dogs get it wrong up to 75 per cent of the time. “If the NSW Police wanted people to be safe at festivals they would be advocates of pill testing, they would be stopping the war on drugs and they…

New South Wales Greens MP David Shoebridge says he will be taking the state police to court. The sought injunction is over a controversial drug dog policy announced earlier this week that would see people rejected from an event if a sniffer dog indicated they had drugs on them, even if that was not the case. […]

Manuel Cardoso, who is credited for his role in reforming the Portuguese system in 2001, told Fairfax Media that Australia should decriminalise all drugs and treat drug use and abuse as a public health issue rather than one of criminal justice. “Decriminalising is considered by the United Nations as a good practice, the International Narcotic Control Board consider that the…

Three people are taking NSW Police to court over a controversial plan to deny entry to a Sydney concert anyone who is singled out by a sniffer dog – regardless of whether drugs are actually found. In conjunction with The Greens’ Sniff Off campaign, three of the festival’s patrons said on Thursday they plan to seek an urgent injunction in…

From crime to health to business, Canada’s decision to legalize marijuana is a grand progressive experiment that promises to answer a host of questions, […]