Call me a cynic; I don’t think illegality has stopped many people from using P.

If the 65 deaths (at least) caused by synthetic drugs in the past couple of years aren’t enough to turn people off lighting up, I really can’t see how the threat of an appointment at District Court One would possibly do anything to stop them. 

I just can’t see it. I just can’t see how someone who finds themselves in the social environment where they are exposed to seriously damaging drug use has ever thought ‘Oh I’d love to get in on this but last I checked, it’s a Class A drug and I’d be risking prosecution.’

The Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill is being debated at parliament at the moment and has been characterised by several submitters as effectively decriminalising personal drug use in New Zealand.

I actually don’t think that’s an unreasonable description. The bill would codify Police discretion for personal use. So if they catch someone using drugs, Police would be required to decide whether a health approach would be better for the drug user than a punitive approach. And there’s some really interesting language in the bill as it stands. “A prosecution should not be brought unless it is required in the public interest.”

Imagine you’re a police officer working off that. You’d have discretion to prosecute or not to prosecute, but quite obviously the law is pulling you a long way in one direction. The Law Society quite rightly notes that if someone is prosecuted by Police, a defence lawyer could probably turn up in court and quite easily argue the case wasn’t in the public interest. No one would ever be convicted of personal drug use crimes.

Ideologically, I’m all for the change. I think our drug laws of the last however-many decades have totally failed us. After all, if locking people up was an effective way of reducing drug harm, we wouldn’t have our devastating methamphetamine problem. We wouldn’t have dozens of young Kiwis, most of them from the most vulnerable circumstances, dying after using synthetic drugs.

I’ll tell you now, if 65 rich Pakeha kids had died within the space of 18 months, the law would have changed a whole lot faster than it has. And it’s important to note, this bill wouldn’t be the de facto decriminalisation of all drugs. Drug dealing would remain very much illegal.

But I do have concerns about the bill. My first is the nature of discretion. We have to get that exactly right. I want to be sure that if Police are given the explicit instruction to favour a health approach, some drug users aren’t deemed more worthy of discretion than others. We know Maori are grossly over-represented in our criminal justice system, and I’d want to be sure that in practice discretion doesn’t allow for any prosecutorial bias. 

But the most important part of this huge proposed change is the other prong. There’s no point in choosing a health-first approach if we don’t have the addiction and support services to actually help people. As it stands, our support services don’t have anywhere near the funding and resources they’d require to help all the Kiwis who need it.

We won’t know until the budget at the end of this month whether that situation is likely to improve.  

But to effectively support the Police, to reduce drug harm in our communities, and to stop Kiwis from dying, we have to do more than just put away the handcuffs.