Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset, I want to make it very clear that I strongly support drug law reform—our prohibitionist policies have not worked. Indeed, one of my very real concerns, shared by many who attended yesterday's drug summit in this place, is that prohibition fuels organised crime.

For the last four months I have been working with state MPs, local councillors, residents and business owners in Highgate to get action taken on Cloud 9, supposedly a smoking paraphernalia shop but a place that has been generating some very antisocial behaviour. It is hard not to believe that the prime business of this outfit is selling drugs—most probably synthetic cannabinoids. I have stood across the road; I have watched it in operation. Customers are in and out in a couple of minutes and I have never seen anyone exit the shop with a bong sized parcel. Residents and workers report this is also their experience. They say they see people popping the pills in their cars as soon as they leave. People are queuing up at 8 am in the morning, waiting nervously for the shop to open. You do not queue for bongs. And whilst most customers do not present a problem, quite a number are clearly strung-out and prone to aggression if they have to wait or find the shop closed.

You do not have to be Warren Buffett to see that even if the bongs were moving they would not be funding Beaufort Street rents. The highly popular Vietnamese grocer, Capital Trading, had to move out of the premises because the rents were too high. The gentleman who owns this business is expanding rapidly. He now has nine Cloud 9 premises around Perth. Clearly, this is a lucrative business thriving in plain sight of law enforcement officers. Residents are frequently calling police when they find customers passed out in the back lane or slumped over the wheels of their cars. In one case I witnessed, it took hours to get the police to attend a man who was in a car with no number plates, parked right on a busy corner, semicomatose with the doors wide open.

Police originally said, 'We are waiting for new comprehensive laws on synthetic drugs,' but it took a good four months after the laws were in operation, and a lot of resident activism, to get any action. After a one-day blip in trading after the raid, it is now business as usual. We will never be able to stop people using drugs, and we should be looking at regulating this trade. This would allow councils to insist on those operations being located in places where they do not cause grief to others, and, in particular, to not be located within 200 metres of a primary school. It would stop criminal operators becoming rich and powerful. Please, let us do something here.

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