Lessons from NZ PSA2013 and the Failed Cannabis Referendum (part three)
Following on from part one and two Núria Calzada continues her conversation with retired Professor Julian Buchanan in New Zealand, they explore Swiss heroin prescribing, working with the UNODC, the NZ Psychoactive Substances Act and the failed Cannabis Referendum. This interview was originally published in the Cañamo Magazine
Q. Interestingly, Swiss experts visited Dr Marks to learn about the approach they based their dispensing system on, and in recent years the UK has launched programs based on the Swiss system.
Yes, although there are important differences between the two models. On Merseyside we gave people a prescription and they picked up the heroin or methadone at the pharmacy. We did not supervise what they took whereas the Swiss model is a dispensing program and patients have to consume the opioids under supervision before they leave the building. The great thing about the Swiss is that heroin prescribing is a nationwide scheme.
In the 1980s we would sit down and talk over a tea or a coffee and ask how they were and what they needed. It wasn’t about being a vending machine for drugs giving them more and more doses. It was about agreeing and ensuring that risks were really being reduced. And in the same way that we did not do urine tests by observing them to make sure the urine was actually their urine, we also did not make sure that they injected the doses and did not resell them. It was a person-centred, low-threshold approach, based on a mutual respect.
Q. You were also a consultant for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the international drug policy body par excellence, where changes are so slow that even including the term harm reduction is mission impossible. What was your experience there?
In 2011 I received an invite to participate as an international expert witness in the UNODC Sustainable Livelihoods Committee together with a small group of global experts who had worked on drug problems in areas of deprivation and inequality. They wanted a report in order to provide socio-economic help to people who had drug problems.
It’s what we talked about before. For many people, drugs are the solution and if you want to these folk with their drug problem, you will first have to deal with the underlying problem, which is often related to poverty, inequality, abuse, education or unmet fundamental needs. So after a three day workshop at the UN in Vienna I spent the next six months writing the report Basic Socioeconomic Care as a Precondition for Effective Drug Dependence Treatment and HIV-Related AIDS Prevention. It was a great opportunity, but, like many other efforts, it had little or no impact.
The final report was sent to the committee and presented at the CND annual meeting, where every year there are lots of meetings, lots of reports, and it all ends with a watered-down commitment that is prohibitionist and propagandistic in tone. I was not much in favour of participating in the UNODC, but after this experience, even less so.
When I went to their headquarters in Vienna I saw a global map on the wall for “our quest for a drug-free world”. The concept itself is terrible! I can’t understand how anyone could want a world without psychoactive drugs. And then I saw in the courtyard a young recently planted tree with a plaque that said: “the tree of life for those who lost their lives due to drug overdoses”. It made me angry because precisely the reason why people die from overdoses is not because of the drugs, but because of the prohibitionist policies promoted by the UNODC, that mean people have no idea of what they are taking in terms of content or strength and are frightened to call help if they need it for fear of criminal charges. This is what we are up against: the failure to see the main cause of harm is not drugs, but drug laws.
Q. In 2011 you moved to New Zealand and in 2013 the Psychoactive Substances Act was passed, establishing the country as the first in the world to regulate new drugs. Not all that glitters is gold?
The Psychoactive Substances of 2013 was approved almost unanimously apart from one abstention. The right wing National Party who are staunchly prohibitionist supported the PSA2013, so you have to question how did a staunchly prohibitionist party vote in favour of what was hailed as world-leading sweeping reform. The answer is this was not a radical reform.
In fact, the Minister of Health described the PSA2013 as the “knockout blow to drugs”, as if drugs were in a boxing ring and this law was going to knock them to the ground and finish them off in one fell swoop. Until then, every time government detected a new substance they had to add it to the list on the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. However, once included, a slight modification to the chemical formula could easily side step the legal ban once a new substance was generated.
The PSA2013 put an end to the cat and mouse game, — it prohibited every new psychoactive substances ever to be invented unless it later became subsequently approved by government. No longer did they have to name it and add it to the MDA1975. All new psychoactive substances were now banned automatically from the outset — a prohibitionists master stroke.
The carrot that was dropped in front of the eyes of gullible reformers was the PSA2013 stated that while every new psychoactive substances are now automatically prohibited, they could be regulated if they could be proved safe enough. A process so excessively complicated, cumbersome and expensive that it was highly unlikely. In the meantime companies that sold ‘legal highs’ in local stores across the country had to recall their products because they became illegal overnight. Some companies tried in vain to get regulation approval to sell their psychoactive drugs.
In addition, the PSA2013 made possession of unapproved substances a crime and in the event of any suspicion of manufacturing substances, the police the PSA2013 gave police powers to enter the premises or vehicle without a court order.
The PSA2013 proved to be a disaster. Prior to the Act New Zealand had not had major many life threatening incidents with the consumption of legal highs, but in the following two years since the implementation of the PSA2013, seventy related deaths were recorded.
Q. So it’s very similar to the New Psychoactive Substances Act in the UK, which considers anything new as prohibited.
Yes, and in fact the UK law was based on the New Zealand law.
Q. In October 2020, the referendum for the use of cannabis took place. New Zealand in Māori is known as Aotearoa, which means ‘land of the great white cloud’. With this suggestive name, what could go wrong? And although the result was very close (50.7% against, 48.4% in favour), what went wrong?
In New Zealand drug policy and criminal justice laws are heavily influenced by USA. There is no formal agreement, but there are pressures operating informally and unhealthy relations have been established between the two countries. So like the USA we’ve adopted drug testing people on state benefits, three strikes laws, Drug Courts, roadside drug testing, a brain disease model of addiction and mass incarceration of people of colour.
Since arriving in New Zealand in 2011, the New Zealand Drug Foundation invited Kevin Sabet over a second time to help shape our drug policy, Sabet is a renowned anti-cannabis propagandist, and Director of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) in the United States. Judge Peggy Hora and her team were invited over from the USA to implement her model of Drug Abstinence Courts to be rolled out across New Zealand. In 2017, a new law was introduced to compulsory assess and treat people thought to have an drug addiction issue. Since my arrival people on state benefit seeking employment are now subject to drug testing with the threat of losing benefits if they repeatedly tested positive for banned substances. The government also introduced a scheme where private companies could test houses for traces of methamphetamine — if traces were found, not only where tenants evicted and made homeless, they were forced to pay the company for the alleged decontamination. In most of these cases they were poor people, Māori and Pacific people living in social housing. It was a sham.
So, what I am saying is to understand what went wrong in the Cannabis Referendum, we must first understand the context of New Zealand’s prohibitionist culture, where most of these shocking drug policy changes went unchallenged by the New Zealand Drug Foundation, the lead drug policy charity that’s heavily funded government and describes itself ‘at the forefront of major alcohol and other drug policy debates’.
Q. If it’s such a prohibitionist country, how the hell did they get a referendum to regulate cannabis?
Our political system is not a first past the post but a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system that tends to deliver a coalition government. When the Labour Party first came to power in 2017 they needed the Green Party who got 6% of the party to form a coalition. In the Green Party manifesto was the commitment to hold a cannabis referendum, and this was one of the concessions the Labour government had to concede. However, while the Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, supported having a referendum, she refused to show any support for cannabis legalization. So politically there was very limited support for the Yes vote. Whereas there was considerable support to oppose cannabis legalisation form Right wing Christian groups, the Church of Scientology and Kevin Sabet SAM who had by now established a NZ branch of SAM.
The other issue was the yes campaign promoted a restricted legalisation model that I’d describe as Prohibition 2.0. Let me explain, when we fight for the human rights of people who are being discriminated against, we should speak the truth clearly and directly, but too often reform campaigners don’t. Instead, they tend to use the language of the oppressor to gain their respect, confidence and trust. It’s such a dodgy approach!
So the YES campaign adopted slogans such as ‘we need to regulate cannabis to reduce the harm it can cause’; ‘we need to regulate cannabis to protect our children’; ‘we need to get cannabis under control’. The YES campaign tried to win support by adopting the prohibitionist narrative, but what this succeeded in doing was to re-affirm prohibitionist lies that cannabis as dangerous, out of control and a threat to our children. None of these statements are true. Instead the YES vote feeds into the dominant prohibitionist discourse of oppression, misinformation and propaganda.
The yes campaign put cannabis ‘in the dock’ and the Referendum determine whether it was guilty or innocent. But cannabis should never be put on trial, because, whether the referendum said yes or no, cannabis use was going to continue to be consumed at much the same levels. The Referendum was not going to have any significant impact on demand. Whereas, it is the prohibition of cannabis that should have been in the dock. The referendum should have been framed in terms of “do you agree or disagree with prohibiting cannabis?”. The focus of the debate should have been on the damage caused by the prohibition and what benefits if any, are achieved by prohibition.
In the final episode they discuss cannabis laws in New Zealand, drug checking and the global drift towards Prohibition 2.0 (continued here)
Follow him: @julianbuchanan / https://julianbuchanan.wordpress.com
