Police dont make the law, they enforce it and do so within rights given to them by our government. I not defending the 5.0 but all this police bashing and i yet to see anyone mention the real ones that are behind these problems
Sorry Andy but the police are significant part of the problem as are the judiciary and the prison sector. So may people from these sectors in turn become politicans, usually after they've created themselves a public profile fighting the "scourge of drugs".
We spend a lot on law enforcement and there are now powerful vested interests who will see that drugs are kept illegal to ensure they continue to profit. And I'm not talking about the rank and file. The senior officers who earn several hundred thousand a year, who get benefits up the wazoo, who attend conferences and other junkets based on their experience/failure in enforcing illegal drug laws. And the money we spend is staggering. In NSW its about $3.2b for the police, $5b for the judiciary and prisons and a few hundred million on bits and pieces (ACC etc). That's $8.4b a year. In 2014 to 2015 NSW police arrested something like 115,000 on 225,000 charges. Around 50% of those arrests were in relation to drug matters. If you take 50% of the OPEX, about $4.2b, and then give it a multiple of say 4 states you get about $16.8b per year spent on enforcing illegal drug laws. (its probably more if you put in the federal police), A huge portion of the arrests are in relation to possession, as opposed to high level trafficking. Busts involving large quantities of drugs are rare compared to the tens of thousands of matters that don't rate a mention on the news.
Those police offices involved in drug matters get promoted over offices who work in other areas. Why, because its the low hanging fruit. Arresting a drug users, or even trafficker is far easier then tracking down a rapist or cold case. As a consequence the leadership of our federal and state agencies are loaded with officers who spent large amounts of time enforcing illegal drug laws. Policy, on what laws to enforce and what not to (and they do get a choice, a discretion) means they are focusing on illegal drug laws despite their utter inablity to actually achieve any sort of outcome.
With so many people in prison, with so many families broken up, aboriginal's dying in custody and with so many arrests and busts have they succeeded in stopping illegal drugs in say 2015? Did the police after spending so many billions of dollars on operations and arrests make even a dent in either supply or possession?
The police with the limitless access that a 282 Request for Information that the Telco Act gives means that finding drug users and traffickers has never been easier. Decades of never ending draconian legislation, political support to kill and maim their way to their objective and yet the police have failed. Utterly failed. I can get more drugs now then ever before. I can get on from a mix of private and street dealers in Sydney and for that matter almost any town or city in Australia. And if I don't want to leave my house I can simply mail order literally any type of drug made on this planet to my door. And the police have no way of combating that form of trafficking.
Now they can justify it all they want but they have failed. They have utterly failed. Its almost parasitic. They're sucking the life out of the public purse just so they can get up every morning and fail. Fuck if I had failed for 40 years to even put a dent in the supply of drugs, so comprehensively failed I would be thinking of putting my service revolver in my mouth and firing.
So in the last ten years we have spent over $160b on fighting illegal drugs. In that time $150b left the country, went to the Mafia, triads and Cartels. Thousands of people suffered fatal and non-fatal overdoses, and the supply of drugs was barely untroubled. Tens of thousands have died in the drug wars and we have lost billions indirect productivity.
That money could have been spent on two NBNs! Or several high speed railway networks. Think of the huge benefit we could have gotten from that. Instead it just went down the fucking loo into the pockets of cops, judges and prison offiers who end up doing failing over and over and over. The definition of madness is arresting the same people over and over, giving them lectures, letting judges look down their noises and tell everyone how the offender is rotten, and yet see them over and over again even after serving custodial sentences. If prison worked as a deterrent we would have no drugs in society and yet the huge fucking irony is that there are more drugs in prison then there are outside it.
So going back to the fucking police. They could put their foot down and stop enforcing a law that simply is illogical and an utter failure. They could insist like they often do via the police associations and other bodies that illegal drug laws should be appealed and that the matter dealt with as a health issue, managed within a similar framework as is the NSW Opioid Treatment Program (OTP) is run in.
Instead of limiting that program to methadone and suboxone, widening it to the drugs like heroin, meth and coke. Functionally non-violent drug users with stable housing and employment would get takeaways whilst dysfunctional violent drug users would require on site daily dosing until they stabilised, ceased being violent and improved their housing, employment and relationship outcomes. Conversely cannabis, LSD, MDMA, Peyote, Mushrooms and so could be distributed by heavily regulated non-for profit co-ops who could run dispensaries, clubs and cafes. All with legislated set margins. Requiring medically trained staff, trip sitters, free water and a system to track usage and avoid overdoses.
Billions in laundered money would appear in our economy. billions in property crime would stop. Our insurance premiums would markedly reduce, hundreds of fatal overdoses would stop and the early intervention programs to stop the next generation of abused kids could be implemented. High risk families offered supervised public housing. Moderately risk
And all this if the police took a stand and stop doing the wrong thing.
