We are on the way to possession of small amounts of drugs not being a criminal offence. The ACT's Health Minister, Rachel Stephen-Smith, said that allowing people to have small amounts of illicit drugs, including ice, cocaine and heroin, was the "next logical step" in the government's agenda of lessening the harm that drugs do.
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She told the Assembly that a proposed bill represented a "coherent policy response to the ACT government's policy aim of harm minimisation".
Technically, decriminalisation is not the same as making drug use legal. Rather, it is to remove penalties, particularly periods in prison. If the law does change in the ACT, possessing for one's own use small amounts of the drug would be similar to a traffic offence. Both would incur a financial penalty but neither, technically, would be a crime.
The penalty for drug possession would be cut dramatically. At the moment, someone arrested in possession faces two years in prison or a fine of $8000 or both.
If the law changes, possession of an amount under the "personal possession limit" would incur a civil fine of around $160.
This means people who use drugs could avoid a criminal record if they paid the civil penalty within a prescribed period of time - just like with a speeding fine.
Possession of cannabis has already been decriminalised in the ACT. Its possession has been decriminalised in South Australia and the Northern Territory for nearly 30 years. There is now no controversy about this.
The rationale for decriminalisation is that "the war on drugs" has failed, and drug use should be treated as a health matter rather than as a criminal matter for the courts and prisons.
As the former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer noted, "drug law enforcement has had little impact on the Australian drug market". Proponents of the change of the law say that making drug-use a crime does not seem to have reduced it.
But decriminalisation does have additional costs.
It is a shifting of the burden from the judicial system to the health system, and experience overseas indicates that this extra cost to the health system may be significant.
Portugal is often talked about as the example to follow. When decriminalisation happened there 20 years ago, a range of drug treatment measures were introduced. There were clinics and assessment centres for people with drugs in their possession. Medical professionals with the right expertise had to be hired. All of this cost money.
It is fair to wonder if the ACT government has made a full assessment of what exactly would be needed to treat people with heroin addiction, for example.
There may be a false perception that somehow decriminalising the use of heroin would remove the problem of addiction. But heroin (unlike cannabis) is an extremely addictive drug that destroys lives. Its chemical properties and its destructive effects wouldn't be different when the law changed.
The rationale behind the proposed change is to remove the stigma of a criminal record, and so to make treatment easier.
According to a study published in the prestigious British Journal of Criminology, "The Portuguese decriminalisation did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding".
This may be true - but it doesn't happen without a lot of detailed policy. There are cost implications. We are yet to see evidence that the ACT government has made these detailed assessments.
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