On Friday 22 July 2011, Monash University’s Castan Centre for Human Rights Law Annual Conference was held in Melbourne. Dr Alex Wodak AM, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney addressed the topic “A Human Rights Approach to Drugs”. Following the speech Right Now’s Lidija Bujanovic spoke with Dr Wodak about drug policy, the failure of current drug policy and the need for reform both internationally and in Australia.
RN: What drove you to form your views on drugs policy and law reform?
AW: The start for me was when I was working in St Vincent’s Hospital in the early 1980s and we realized that about 3500 gay men had become infected with HIV within 10 minutes walk from the hospital. Here lived the largest concentration of gay men in the country and the same neighborhood has the largest population of injecting drug users in the country. I figured that if 3500 gay men had become infected, some of those men would be injecting drugs, some of those who injected drugs would share needles with non-gay men and women. And some of these non-gay injecting drug users who had HIV would then have sex with non-drug injecting men and women. So I could just see this cascade of HIV going out to the wider population. How could it be stopped?
The first needle syringe programme was started in Amsterdam. I knew we needed something like that here, that my arguments were very compelling and that the arguments against a needle syringe programme were very weak. Yet I couldn’t get permission to start a needle exchange programme. I wrote 13 submissions to the NSW Department of Health seeking permission to start a pilot and each submission was either rejected or ignored.
I went through purgatory: I knew I was right. Yet my colleagues and I ended up having to commit civil disobedience to make it happen. Here was a real need to prevent a health, social and economic catastrophe and I wanted to do something which clearly was logical.
I then started reading about the history of drug prohibition and realized the evidence of it working didn’t exist. My ideas crystallized over time through a long process of research. I started that needle exchange on 12 November 1986 and trying to convince people we must reform our drug laws is now a big part of my work. When I first started saying what I now say, 25 years ago, I was vilified for it. I’m still criticized for supporting drug law reform but most people these days tend to agree.
So how do you react when government claims its policy is evidence based?
Well, I challenge it, tooth and nail, line by line. I point out what they’re saying is nonsense and what they say privately is different to what they say publically. It’s interesting when you look at the kinds of comments made in private or in confidential documents that somehow emerge into public view, compared to comments made during election campaigns. It is a very difficult issue for politicians to openly and honestly deliberate about.
I point out what [the government is] saying is nonsense and what they say privately is different to what they say publically.
Does the current system hinder the realization of certain human rights? In your presentation you mention freedom of association, to health care, equality rights…
The list goes on and on and I’m not really well placed to give an analysis of the exact infringements of rights due to drug laws. Whenever I looked as a layman at the different definitions I felt that most of the criteria used to define human were significantly breached. These are major and significant breaches. For the first time ever in 2009 or 2010 there was international consideration of the human rights of injecting drug users in the UN.
