Here is a photo of Tasmania Police's Hobart HQ right in the middle of town.
Following on from the earlier post, ABC radio have had a story on loop all day saying how I have “criticised” Tasmania Police’s decision to utilise sniffer dogs at an upcoming music festival. I guess that I have, but I thought that what I offered was far more constructive than. I’d like to think that I have an excellent working relationship with the local constabulary. I certainly think that they do a good job more generally.
But the thing with the gigs and the sniffer dogs is that it just isn’t very effective. The ABC quoted Tasmanian Police as saying they have a “no tolerance” rule for all drug users at the festival, but that doesn’t fit with how they deal with drug users in a general sense.
Public policy is not a neat, simple business, and it generally doesn’t fit with black and white visions of how things work, so in this sense, I don’t envy the police when it comes to something like drug use. The law is the law and the police are there to enforce the law, so it should be simple, right?
Get the word out that the sniffer dogs will be out in force, and the kids don’t take the drugs. Simple! What didn’t anyone think of that before? The thing is though, the assumption that sniffer dogs will mean that people will simply choose to not use drugs isn’t supported by the evidence. People don’t just stop using drugs – especially at a music festival – it is more likely that what they do is they switch to something else that they feel will be less detectable by the hounds, or that they change the way that they use drugs.
“Already bought five Es for the weekend? Better drop ‘em all before we head off!”
“You were gonna take some weed for the gig? That stuff reeks, go the GHB, the dogs can’t smell that. Or maybe we get shitfaced on the grog when we’re there instead.”
The key point here is that more often than not, the ways in which that people change their behaviour are far more hazardous than their original intentions.
“So what?” seems to be the cry from a lot of circles. People pay their money and make their choices. Drugs are illegal and individuals need to recognise that.
The key problem here is that this approach of drug detection is at odds with the concept of ‘harm minimisation’, should strike a balance between activities aimed at reducing drug availability and use.
Some people are still saying “so what?” I know. The issue is that like organisations such as mine, and hospitals and clinics and police and anyone in Australia funded to respond to drug use have all signed on to the principles of harm minimisation.
It’s not about legalising, normalising or even condoning drug use, but recognising that drug use will never be entirely eradicated from society, and that interventions must recognise that and reduce the costs of ineffective policies. Harm minimisation principles have formed the basis of successive phases of Australia’s National Drug Strategy (NDS) for nearly over twenty-five years now.
The NDS covers a whole range of objectives aimed at improving the health, social and economic outcomes for individuals and communities. As such, law enforcement strategies like the use of drug detection dogs are expected to be consistent with and, where possible, complement broader Police support for the harm minimisation objectives in the NDS.
It’s not just a bunch of hippies smoking pot out in a commune saying this, the NSW Ombudsman has conducted the widest inquiry into this topic here in Australia, and it was clear current use of drug detection dogs in general drug detection does not represent a cost effective use of police resources, nor does the evidence suggests that this approach enhance the police’s ability to effectively target drug suppliers. Nor is there strong evidence to support other perceived benefits such as deterrence, a reduction in harmful drug use, decreases in drug-related crime, or indeed enhanced perceptions of safety.
The key point is that the use of drug detection dogs detracts from police implementation of harm minimisation across the broader spectrum. Harm minimisation involves many competing concerns, of which the detection of criminal behaviour is but one aspect. The data overwhelmingly shows that cannabis is the principal drug detected and that usually in small quantities, the risks associated with people shifting their patterns of use from cannabis to something else is far greater than the (very real) risk of drug use at a music festival.
Does that mean that anything goes? Of course not. There are a whole bunch of strategies that one could try to either educate the punters about safer ways to use, or how the risks of using outweigh the good time that you might have while off your nut. My beef is not with taking action, it’s with the kind of action taken.
As I told the folks at the ABC, it would be a very poor outcome that – in the admirable pursuit of reducing drug related harm ¬– this police strategy actually amplified those harms, because that is not supposed to be what we are doing.
AND I didn’t even resort to a civil liberties critique, so I can’t have been too critical.
Don’t take offence, Tasmania Police. I’m trying to help.
Comments
You need to strike while the iron’s hot!
I think life for most people is pretty dull, so drugs are appealing. I doubt the problem can be solved anytime soon (if ever).
cool to be on the radio though I'd have trouble listening to my own voice all the time
For whatever reason, there will always be some people that are drawn towards them. Now, we also know that in lots of different ways, for lots of different reason, they have the potential to do great harm. The trick is to get the balance between understanding that people will seek them, and understanding and limiting the harms that they do.
It's not really a solvable problem. I do think that we can minimise harms (health, social, familial, communal, financial etc) through some approaches better than others though. This is why the drug sniffer dogs is disappointing, because it is a simplistic response that (frankly), doesn't achieve much, and has the potential to influence some people to do some stupid things. And the police know that.
As for being on the radio, I studiously avoid it these days and rely on others to report back!