In the 2015-16 financial year alone, more than $1.7 billion was spent on enforcement.
By John Buckley
December 8, 2022,
PHOTO BY LAUREN DECICCA / GETTY IMAGES
Over the last 12 years, more than 90 percent of the 700,000 cannabis-related offences across Australia have been for personal use or possession, a new study has found. Its authors hope the study’s findings can help pave the way for full legalisation.
Earlier this week, the Pennington Institute, a public health non-profit based in Melbourne, released a new technical study that analyses the space occupied by cannabis in the life of Australians across the country. Research looked into how the drug has become a driver of mass arrests, the social economic costs that have come with overloading the criminal justice system and, ultimately, just how far “out-of-step” Australia has drifted from other major economies on regulation.
“The pace of change across the world in the understanding of cannabis and its regulation and management has accelerated dramatically in recent years,” said John Ryan, chief executive of the Pennington Institute.
“Many jurisdictions are providing regulated access rather than simple prohibition with medicinal cannabis now mainstream in many countries. In Australia, a shift to diversion from the criminal justice system more than 20 years ago was led by the Howard government. More recently, significant reform to enable national medicinal cannabis access by the Abbott government.”
The days of former prime minister Tony Abbott have receded far into the rearview mirror for scores of the nation—and so have the conservative attitudes towards cannabis associated with his party’s politics. Ryan suggests this leaves the door open to federal leaders to forge a path towards full legalisation.
JOHN BUCKLEY07.28.22
In July this year, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released new data that showed attitudes towards cannabis legalisation have shifted exponentially over the last decade.
The results paint a striking portrait of Australia’s changing perceptions of cannabis, as well as other illicit substances. Most striking of all, perhaps, is how those attitudes have started to shift throughout some of the nation’s most conservative regions.
In the Queensland seat of Dickson, for instance, which is currently held by opposition leader Peter Dutton, the survey’s results suggested a community sentiment at odds with the law and order fanfare sold to the nation in parliament.
There, those who think cannabis should be legalised made up 40 percent of those surveyed in the electorate, nearly double the cohort who felt that way in 2010. Cannabis was looked upon with similar favorability in Barnaby Joyce’s electorate, New England, along with the seat of Maranoa, currently occupied by Nationals leader, David Littleproud.
Even still, all states and territories have some sort of ban in place on cannabis. In the Northern Territory and South Australia, low-level cannabis use is decriminalised, and is usually punished by fines instead of criminal penalties. In New South Wales, those caught with the drug get “two strikes” before facing tougher charges.
In the Australian Capital Territory, meanwhile, adults can grow up to two plants and carry small amounts for personal use, but cultivating massive crops with the intention of selling or distributing is still illegal.
As a result, arrests for personal—or “low-level”—cannabis offences plummeted after the ACT’s reforms came into effect at the end of January 2020. Around the country, though, the costs of enforcing widespread prohibition of the substance continue to cost millions.
According to the Pennington Institute, the cost of enforcement is enormous. The average cost for police, the courts, and various other agencies in terms of a cannabis charge is estimated at $1,918 per person. In the 2015-16 financial year alone, more than $1.7 billion was spent on enforcement.
The bulk of that went to prisons—many of them private businesses—which pocketed $1.1 billion, while $475 million was spent on policing weed, $62 million was spent on litigating the matters in court, and another $52 million on legal aid and prosecution.
The social costs, too, are glaringly steep.
Most jurisdictions have “diversion” programs in place for people that get caught with drugs that have a low “risk profile”, like weed, which often sees them escape a charge in place of a fine or treatment of some kind. Invariably, though, these diversion programs rarely benefit marginalised groups, whose futures lay in the hands of police discretion during fleeting, chance encounters.
JOHN BUCKLEY
05.10.22
The report also found that diversion is less likely for First Nations people and others from “socially disadvantaged groups”, which exceedingly sees them put at greater risk of harm from being criminalised by prohibition.
At the Pennington Institute, the view is that Australia’s broadly adopted prohibition model is at once ineffective and inefficient.
“It fails to control supply, leaves the market in the hands of criminals, and costs billions of dollars in enforcement, all while exposing people to the harms of criminalisation,” the authors said.
The sentiment is shared by a swarm of other leading public health experts and harm reduction advocates. Even still, Australia’s major parties appear immovable on considering reform.
As much was made clear as recently as September, when the Greens said they had received new legal advice from a constitutional law expert who suggested the federal government could legalise cannabis federally, in one clean sweep.
Nobody, it seemed, was interested.
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