The Australian Sex Party will launch its drug policies for the Victorian state election on Thursday 25th Nov at 4pm outside the State Library on Swanston st. The party chose the time and venue to coincide with the international ‘4.20’ drug protest rally - an event organised entirely on social media networks.

Sex Party President and candidate for the Northern Metro Region, Fiona Patten and Sex Party candidate for Burwood, Eamon Cole-Flynn will address the meeting. Mr Cole-Flynn is the son of former Victorian Shadow Attorney General and long-standing member for North Melbourne, Neil Cole.

Ms Patten said that Tuesday’s record cannabis seizures were proof that prohibition did not work and that the war on drugs in Victoria was an unwinnable war against an invisible enemy. “Senior judges like Ken Crispin QC have stated categorically that drug use has exploded as a direct result of this combative war waged by the state against people who use drugs”, she said. ”Drugs like heroin and cocaine are now cheaper and more easily available than they were before this phoney war was started. Around the world the inescapable evidence is that those countries who prosecute personal possession of drugs the most, have the highest rates of usage”.

By comparison she said the use of tobacco was declining because it was legal and could therefore be incorporated into government heath care programs and advertising.

“The Sex Party wants the Victorian government to adopt the drug policies of countries like Portugal and Switzerland where the administration of drugs is taken out of the criminal justice portfolio and placed into the health one”, she said. “Since Portugal decriminalised personal possession of drugs in 2001, drug usage rates have not increased at all but amazingly, sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and deaths due to drug use have plummeted”. Drug use in people 14 -19 had also declined. (UK Institute of Criminology, 2010).

She said that 82% of drug arrests in Australia were for personal possession and that 70% of people in Australian jails were there for some kind of drug related crime. The most recent cost estimate of running the war on drugs in Australia (police, courts etc) is $3.8 billion. Collins, D.J. and H.M. Lapsley (2008) The Costs of Tobacco, Alcohol and Illicit Drug Abuse to Australian Society in 2004/5.

Ms Patten said Victoria should be the first state in Australia to legislate for ‘medical marijuana’. In the US there are now 14 states which offer government approved cannabis for pain relief and other medicinal uses. California’s medical marijuana industry raised $100 million in tax revenues for the state’s government in 2008. “Victoria could afford a decent public transport system on cannabis revenues”, she said.

She called on the Premier John Brumby to immediately introduce safe injecting rooms following the success of the ‘10 year trial’ in NSW, where tens of thousands of lives had been saved. The Burnett Institute has found that two thirds of all drug injecting in Melbourne occurs in a public place and that for every $1 spent on safe injecting rooms the community saves $27 in health and policing costs.