Overview:
This Policy Proposal has been designed for Australia with the hard learned lessons from other jurisdictions in mind. Ensuring faux claims of perceived manageability are addressed. Not only has there been considerable consultation with health, legal and policy professionals, but with the voice of the vast silent majority of non-substance users being heard. Informing and being informed by this majority demographic who have been kept in the dark on this now heavily engineered and dangerous psychotropic toxin.
Australians deserve best practice safety, health and wellbeing policy.
Alcohol and Tobacco are still the greatest contributors of harm to the public health and safety arena. Adding another psychotropic toxin to the currents of trade will only amplify and add to these growing community harms.
Once a substance is trivialised, normalised, decriminalised, legalised then commercialised – harms will increase and the human cost in short and long-term harms, not least to the emerging generation will be incalculable.
All that will be achieved is the greater accessibility, availability and acceptability of a now addictive and demand sustaining substance. Add to
that, commercialisation – you now have another thriving addiction for profit industry decimating public and community health, with impunity. This is completely contrary to good public health, safety and productivity.
This document will demonstrate that the Penington Institute modelling of vast sums of money to be garnered by the Victorian Government from tax revenues and increased employment will be far outweighed by the health and social costs presented by cannabis legalisation, and that the Penington document is culpably silent on the very real demonstrable costs that far outweigh its touted benefits.
The ‘Perfect Permission’ model of legalised substances has not removed the criminal dealer from the market place, and will not do so in Australia. If the argument is applied that ‘enforcement will ensure the regulated market will not be undermined or black market cannabis continues’, then we could argue that could be done now, whilst the substance is still technically illegal. It is all about political will.
The question then becomes not whether a substance can be policed, but whether there is the political will to police it in the best interest of public health, safety and wellbeing.