Ted Wheeler to address landmark Australian drug summit, warn against the ‘huge mistake’ of decriminalisation
A mayor with a front-row seat to the most liberal drug decriminalisation policy in the US will join experts and decision-makers at a landmark Australian forum.
Representatives from almost 300 organisations and dozens of politicians will gather on Wednesday for the Sydney leg of the NSW Drug Summit.
The forum aims to build consensus on how drug use and harms will be managed in the coming years and decades.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.While Australia addresses drug use through the lens of harm minimisation, reform advocates have urged NSW to go further with wider decriminalisation for personal use and improved support for rehabilitation services.
Ted Wheeler, mayor of Portland, Oregon, is expected to outline the risk of doing one without the other.
The mayor of Oregon’s largest city has said addiction rates and overdose rates skyrocketed in Portland after possession for personal use was decriminalised in 2020.
Rather than being sent to court or jail, people caught with a small amount of illicit drugs were fined up to $US100 ($A155).
The state backtracked in April.
“To decriminalise the use of drugs before you actually had the treatment services in place was obviously a huge mistake,” Mr Wheeler told the New York Times at the time.
The summit is also expected to hear about holistic approaches to rehabilitation including catering for families.
“There are clearly large numbers of children in NSW who are impacted by parental drug use,” the Association of Children’s Welfare Agencies said in a submission to the summit.
“However, there are very few services that can provide whole-of-family support and even fewer residential rehabilitation and withdrawal management services that can allow parents to bring their children.”
Input is also expected from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, law and order bodies, people with lived experience of drug use and those involved in the 1999 drug summit.
Data published by the summit suggests the number of people going through the justice system for drug use and drug possession incidents in NSW is declining - to about 22,800 in 2023.
About half were for cannabis, although one in three of those users were sent down diversionary pathways.
