I raise the question of the testing of pills at rave parties. I wrote to the then health minister, Lea Stevens, at the beginning of last year about this, seeking her approval for such pill testings to be done at rave parties in South Australia. I suspect that it was a cabinet decision rather than the Hon. Lea Stevens' own decision, but the argument she advanced to me in her response was that the government could not approve pill testing because the pills would be given back after testing. Quite clearly if you do not give pills back to those who offer them for testing there is no chance that they will offer them for testing in the first instance. So the refusal to test is counter-productive if we want to minimise harm.
International experience of pill testing shows that the large majority of potential users, when they are shown the results and find that the pill they have submitted does not contain what they thought they had bought, hand them back. They do not use them but throw them away. Pill testing, therefore, results in a reduction of usage. If we believe in reducing—
The Hon. A.M. Bressington: There is no evidence to support that at all.
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: That interjection probably does need to be included on the record, because there is plenty of evidence to show that pill testing does produce that positive result. In fact, I believe that we should have a controlled testing program in South Australia, with the government supervising it, so that we can get our own results and so that the sorts of claims that the Hon. Ms Bressington is making can be shown to be incorrect. If we believe in reducing harm, logic dictates that we should have pill testing at rave parties. The Rann government's 2002 Drug Summit recommended such testing.
The Hon. A.M. Bressington: And that wasn't stacked at all, was it?
The PRESIDENT: Order! The Hon. Ms Bressington will cease to interject.
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: I have an interesting little book here called The Outlaw Antidepressant, which is about ecstasy and rave culture.
The Hon. A.M. Bressington interjecting:
The PRESIDENT: Order! The Hon. Ms Bressington has had her opportunity and she will cease to interject.
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: I did not interject when she gave her information. Thank you, Mr President.
The Hon. A.M. Bressington interjecting:
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: Well, it deserved to be interjected on and I am now responding to it. This book was produced by a young woman who wanted to do this as her PhD thesis. Unfortunately, the university she was attending refused to allow her to do it on the basis that it was about illegal drug use. This is obviously a very erudite dissertation, but I will quote what she says, as follows:
Two points must be made here: firstly, this suppression of knowledge and understanding from the university merely supports the theories of Foucault and Bourdieu. Secondly, why is it acceptable to travel outside of one's culture and into another's for the sake of anthropological research and take drugs in the context of various rituals and yet be exempt from a similar bias? It is ethnocentric and one-eyed of Western academia to view drug-taking rituals in native cultures as acceptable for researchers to participate in yet a similar investigation into a Western subculture can't be done.
And herein lies the problem. We cannot get to the truth of so much of this if the research cannot be done. Samantha Lee Kelly went ahead and did this and has published it herself in order to get some of the truth out about ecstasy.
When the Hon. Ann Bressington wrote to me last year (when she did not have the title `honourable'), she said in her email to me:
When we (parents and other significant adults) tell them that drugs are harmful we expect that professionals will support that statement. What we get are some professionals who are prepared to test these pills that contain dangerous substances.
There is a huge illogicality in that. We cannot know that they contain dangerous substances unless they are tested.
The Hon. A.M. Bressington: MDMA is dangerous on its own.
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: This is good; I will get to that in a minute. If testing is permitted and the pills are shown to contain dangerous substances, the health professional can advise the potential user of that fact. With no testing, how can any professional say to that person that what they intend taking is dangerous, as Ann Bressington was asking of me at that stage? If it is an ecstasy tablet, can a health profession¿al, in all honesty, speak the truth if they say it is harmful? The drug 3 4-methylenedioxy-n-methylamphetamine, MDMA, or as it is more commonly known, ecstasy, was originally used as a psychotherapeutic drug. The US Drug Enforcement—
The Hon. A.M. Bressington interjecting:
The PRESIDENT: Order! The Hon. Ms Bressington will come to order. The Hon. Sandra Kanck has the call, and interjections are out of order.
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: She is a bit obstreperous! The US Drug Enforcement Administration put forward a proposal in 1984 to schedule MDMA but, before the hearings commenced, in 1985 the DEA invoked powers to place it on schedule 1 on an interim basis.
The Hon. A.M. Bressington: In 1984?
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: Yes, 1984. Schedule 1—
The Hon. A.M. Bressington interjecting:
The PRESIDENT: Order! I will not tolerate any more interjections from the Hon. Ms Bressington. In this council sometimes people will stand up and disagree with your point of view. That is democracy. You will allow the Hon. Sandra Kanck to continue her speech.
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: Thank you, Mr President. This schedule 1 that MDMA was placed on in 1985 is for `damaging and addictive drugs without medical use'. This scheduling onto the highest rating on the list was done before any hearings on the DEA's request that it be put on its list, and before any tests were done to find out whether it was, in fact, dangerous. In the same year, this listing by the DEA then resulted in the UN recommending that it be placed on schedule 1 of the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substan¿ces—again, without any actual scientific basis. It was like dominos falling; if the US did it, it must be bad and everyone should follow.
A coalition of doctors, scientists and therapists—one of whom is Professor Lester Grinspoon, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, so he is no slouch—then initiated legal proceedings in response to the DEA's action. The arguments that were given against MDMA cited studies of MDA on animals and ignored any evidence about MDMA on humans. Despite that intellectual dishonesty by the US government in those hearings, the court decision in 1986 was for MDMA to be placed in schedule 3, which allowed for research and limited usage while the hearings took place—and remember this happened back in 1985.
The judge's decision was then appealed against. That was ultimately overturned, and the emergency scheduling of MDMA was reinstated as schedule 1. This doctors group again appealed, and the Appeals Court ruled that there had been `improper interpretation of accepted medical use' and recommended reconsideration of the DEA's decision. It was deleted from schedule 1, but a month later, still with no scientific studies and still no hearing, it was reinstated.
We have been told that ecstasy is a dangerous substance. We do not have the evidence; the Australian government has followed down the path of doing this without the evidence. That original 1985 listing of ecstasy, or MDMA, on this schedule 1 is still being contested. So, more than 20 years later, the matter has not been resolved. Yet we are being asked to believe that this is a dangerous substance. We do not have evidence that it is a dangerous substance. In fact, I was saying to people last year, after the bushfires on Eyre Peninsula, with all the trauma that was associated with it, that one of the best things you could probably have done for the people on Eyre Peninsula who had gone through that trauma was to give them MDMA. However, one dare not advocate that, because we are all being tough on drugs, aren't we!
It seems to me that we have not learnt the lessons of alcohol prohibition. What happened when we had alcohol prohibition was that we had the sorts of alcohol that were very dangerous to people; people died as a consequence of drinking alcohol. People die as a consequence of taking drugs for exactly the same reasons—because they are illegal and because they do not know what is in the drugs—and we just keep on putting our head in the sand.
In the letter Ann Bressington sent to me last year, she said:
As a treatment provider of a very successful program in the northern suburbs I can only state that your intentions are absolutely counter-productive to the objectives of what most believe to be our harm minimisation policy.
Underneath that, she has three bold dot points, stating:
× To reduce the harm
× To reduce demand
× To reduce supply.
I wrote back and told her that I think we do need to do that. We need to get a message across to all people that all drugs—licit and illicit—are not the way to go. In her letter to me—and also in her Address in Reply speech—the member has extolled the virtues of the Swedish program. Sweden does have tougher drug laws than neighbouring states, but the consequence appears to be higher mortality rates amongst its drug users and, surprisingly, amongst the addicts undergoing compulsory treatment.
For some time, I have received unsolicited emails from a group called DACA, and I assume that other MPs have received them as well. When one goes a little further into the DACA web site, one comes across a very interesting article that states that Christians should reject injecting rooms. This, of course, raises some other interesting questions for me when we start dealing with issues that are essentially health issues as moral and religious issues. I have printed off about three pages from the section that states that Christians should reject injecting rooms. It says things like, `All Christian denominations condemn drug taking as evil because of its self-destruction and self-centred lifestyle.' Well, I do not know how many Christian denominations condemn the use of alcohol and tobacco. Having been brought up a Methodist, yes, there was one denomination that definitely did condemn them as evil. However, 95 per cent of drug taking is in the form of alcohol and tobacco, and most churches do not condemn them.
Some of the headings are quite frightening, such as `Drugs are evil'. Well, is alcohol evil? I do not know how many members in this place would say that alcohol is evil, and I do not know how many members in this place would say that tobacco is evil. Certainly, the Hon. Ann Bressington uses the latter of those two, and I doubt that she would be saying that it is evil.
An honourable member interjecting:
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: No; I'm reading off this, that is, that `Christians should reject injecting rooms.' It is a very disturbing document, particularly knowing that we as MPs receive this information from DACA in our emails, and it is not clear who this group is—
The Hon. J.M.A. Lensink interjecting:
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: Well, it is always interesting to know your enemy. I find some of the stuff that is in there very disturbing. I remind members who might think that all drugs are evil that Jesus partook of wine. He did not have any silly laws that said, `This drug is legal, and this one isn't legal.' He drank wine, and when he was asked on one occasion to produce more of it, he did so, on request.
The Hon. D.G.E. Hood: He didn't have ecstasy, though.
The Hon. SANDRA KANCK: But ecstasy is not a dangerous drug.
http://www.parliament.sa.gov.au/catalog/hansard/2006/lc/wh100506.lc.htm
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