Page 3739 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 27 August 2008
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that will definitely have an impact on drug-taking behaviour. That means it does not necessarily change the drug-taking behaviour; it just means it is done in a less safe way.
Particularly, I have looked at this very closely from the point of view of ice pipes. It is something that the Attorney-General and I have discussed on a number of occasions and sought advice on. It is much safer for people, who are going to use ice, to smoke it rather than inject it, from a whole range of levels, including, I guess, the possibility of transmission of blood-borne viruses and the toxicological impact of the drug in the system. If you smoke it, it has a milder effect than if you inject it directly into your system.
These are the tough issues, I think, that governments need to focus on and look through in terms of presenting arguments on safe drug-taking behaviour. We have to accept that people in the community will engage in illicit drug-taking behaviour. That is something that I do not think any of us here today will say we will be able to stamp out.
Therefore the question from a health point of view—and it differs very strongly, I must say, from a law enforcement point of view or a customs point of view—is: how do you ensure that there are safeguards, education and promotion of safe drug-taking behaviour in place, to make sure that we are addressing things such as hepatitis C, particularly, and HIV? These are the issues that I think any reasonable government needs to deal with.
I think the agreement by the Liberal Party today, to move to support a ban on drug-taking equipment, goes straight to the heart of the issue that they are not ready to govern. They are not ready if they think that banning this type of equipment will deal with community issues relating to illicit substance use, because all the advice to me is that, if you take this equipment away, people will make it; they will make it in a way that is dangerous; it will not change their drug-taking behaviour; and the chance of swapping needles, sharing needles and engaging in more dangerous drug-taking behaviour, is going to be the reality.
Today, we have got a statement from the Leader of the Opposition that that is okay; that it is okay to put at risk all the measures that we have put in place from a harm minimisation point of view and to acknowledge the reality that there are members of our community that, for one reason or another, take illicit drugs and smoke illicit drugs and inject illicit drugs. I think the issue of display is a good one. I think it is unfortunate that we are, at this point in this Assembly, in the last two days, having this discussion, because I think it had a lot of merit.
We have gone through this with tobacco recently. I think all the arguments that we have used about tobacco hold up when you apply them to the equipment that Mr Mulcahy seeks to ban. We have been talking about tobacco for probably the last two years. To be fair, I think you would have to undertake the same processes with industry—do a regulatory impact statement with them and have discussions about looking at how you implement a ban on display and the timetable for that. I just do not think there is time to do all that.
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