Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great tragedy that we are now seeing more accidental drug deaths than we are seeing people die on the roads. In fact, the number of accidental drug deaths is now more than double the road toll, with Aboriginal people tragically overrepresented. We are now seeing more people die from prescription opiates than we are seeing people die from heroin. We need to recognise that the war on drugs is not a war on drugs; it's a war on people. It's time we started treating this as a health issue, not simply a law-and-order issue. We need to remove the criminal penalties associated with individuals who use drugs and make sure that they see a doctor, not a policeman or a judge, because they have a health issue. We need to ensure that we expand the role of harm reduction with needle and syringe exchange programs in prisons, with drug testing at festivals, by removing sniffer dogs, which cause more deaths than they save people, and by ensuring that we have real-time prescription monitoring for pharmaceutical opiates. We need to change what we are doing.