Drug Use and Dependency
There is one organ in the body that controls behaviour - the brain. All drugs affect the brain and therefore, behaviour.
Approximately 80% of all crime is drug or alcohol related. The greatest increases in admissions to the mental health system are drug or alcohol related. Drugs play an increasing role in road accidents, youth suicides, sexual abuse and murders. Drug abuse destroys both the users and their families. United Future, therefore, is opposed to the further liberalisation of drug laws, and sees a need to educate to promote a better understanding of their harmful impact.
To combat the increasing problem of substance use and abuse, we need a balanced, comprehensive drug strategy, which focuses equally on prevention (deterrence), education and treatment.
Drugs and the Law
United Future will:
- Oppose the decriminalisation of cannabis and any liberalisation of other drug laws.
- Offer an educational treatment option as an alternative to a legal process when a person is apprehended for drug use.
- Introduce tougher penalties for all drug dealing, including cannabis, especially to young people less than 20 years old
- Ban advertising promoting drug use or accessories.
- Reassess classification of drugs to more effectively relate to health, behavioural and legal problems.
- Require prisoners to undergo full toxicology testing on admission to prison to establish the level of drug use and provide them with a clean start through targeted detection, deterrence, treatment and education programmes.
- Expand the establishment of drug-free wings as a step to making all prisons drug free, and encourage the establishment of prisons with appropriate incentives for prisoners to become and remain drug free.
- Fund the Department of Corrections to ensure it can continue to provide a comprehensive programme for the elimination of drug use within all prisons and youth correction facilities, and it should report progress annually on its achievements.
- Allow drug testing of youth involved in crime, or admitted to CYPS care.
- Allow police to test drivers for drug use in the same way that they presently test for alcohol use.
- Boost the Police funding for the drug recovery programme.
- Assess the level of drug use in violent crime, sexual abuse and road and industry accidents.
- Encourage worksite drug testing, as well as comprehensive employee assistance programmes as an incentive for reduced ACC levies, to ensure there are no barriers to implementing testing.
Drugs and Health
United Future will:
- Ensure residential treatment centres are available and properly funded in each region.
- Review the use and availability of methadone with the intention of reducing methadone reliance.
- Allow addicts to have automatic access to one six-month methadone programme in any two-year period, with additional independent assessment required beyond this.
- Introduce a full, mandatory testing regime for all other drugs.
- Place greater emphasis on co-ordination between alcohol and drug services and mental health services to ensure appropriate, accurate assessment with correctly directed treatment.
- Require the Ministry of Health to undertake research to establish the relative cost effectiveness of existing treatments, including day treatment, methadone and residential treatment programmes and other options, with the clear objective to cure drug dependency rather than just contain it.
- Research and establish the annual cost to our health system of drug use.
- Ensure the tax revenues from the sale of legal drugs - alcohol and tobacco - are used to properly and fully fund the necessary programmes to address drug abuse and start to reduce the terrible cost to both our health system and to our families.
- Investigate the role of alcohol and other drugs in youth suicide.
Drugs and Education
United Future will:
- Establish a Drug Education Authority to co-ordinate all aspects of policy relating to drugs. This includes establishing public information campaigns and monitoring their effectiveness; evaluating relevant scientific information and research findings; and ensuring all policy advice and information provided to the Government regarding drugs issues is scientifically accurate and sustainable. The effectiveness of the drink-driving message is a clear example of the power of education to change accepted social behaviour into something we now all recognise as dangerous and destructive.
- Include drug education in the intermediate and secondary school curricula.
- Promote student assistance programmes that offer peer support concerning drugs and other problems.
- Work with school principals and Boards of Trustees to actively combat drug use and dealing in our schools.
United Future Parliamentary Office: Bowen House, Lambton Quay, Wellington
Email: Phone: (04) 471 9890
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