Dear Minister,
I understand you went to Nimbin and met with the Nimbin Community Drug Action Team on Monday 12 March 2001. Not everyday a NSW Government Minister goes to Nimbin and it's more special still when it's the Minister for Keeping Labor Elected and Dealing with All Things Difficult.
I understand that for over an hour you sat forward on your chair, listened attentively to, and asked insightful questions of, a bunch of Nimbin drug law reform activists and community workers including the school principal and local police officers.
Recognition of cannabis cafes as a means of regulating the village's cannabis trade was prominent on the agenda. At the end you invited a follow up written submission.
Councillor Diana Roberts asked whether, if time were put into preparing such a submission, you would take it seriously and support the Nimbin community in its initiatives to deal with its own drug problems in its own way.
I understand that you made no firm commitment but said you would think about it.
As well you might!
There are probably many things for which the Carr Labor government deserves praise. But drug policy is certainly not one of them.
As drug law reform, time has revealed the deceit of the 1999 NSW Drug Summit. After the euphoria for reform died away you rewrote the recommendations and implemented them to strengthen your Drug War stance.
You were swift to implement extra ways to enforce prohibition such as new police powers and sniffer dogs. (Yes, Byron Bay folk, thank Della and the Drug Summit from those recent sniffer dog, cannabis busts - 55 in one night!) But timid and tardy when it came to implementing anything aimed at addressing the suffering caused by drug abuse and bad laws. Where now the injecting room(s)?
When it comes to drug policy and drug law reform, I stand with many people on the bottom looking up when I say I trust neither you nor your Government. I do not trust your Opposition either.
In fact I hold you both and all personally culpable for perpetuating the suffering and social dysfunction, which your complicity in prosecuting the US Drug War in NSW has been responsible. Every NSW drug death, every NSW drug law jailed boyyou!
When I think of you, contempt arises because in a time of plague, rising poverty and social breakdown, you cut back on health and welfare services for the poor and align yourself with the interests of the rich, the multinational drug corporations, the merchants of fear and violence, the corrupt and the criminal.
At a time when the people of NSW look for initiative and leadership, you display cynicism, deceit and cowardice and kowtow to the media barons, the shock jocks and their opinion polls.
At a time when the people call out for truth and new vision, you foster fear, beat up law and order campaigns, arm the police with new weapons and powers, invent new laws, strip away our civil liberties, fill up the jails and start building new ones.
If I were St Peter receiving the NSW ALP Right at the Pearly Gates, I would do the sums and have to judge that your record in office made you Enemy No.1 of the people of NSW.
Let me urge you to heed the wisdom and insight of the streetwise, compassion soaked community workers of Nimbin. Quite apart from being good for the future of your government, it may be good medicine for your soul too.
Why should we trust you or any government when every inch has been revealed as abetting greed, media manipulation and moral cowardice?
Do we really need to?
With your respect and support Nimbin could certainly achieve more to ease the suffering of its poor, abused and abusing. But at what cost to integrity one must ask at once? Association with the NSW ALP Right is not exactly a place of honour.
Local solutions to local problems, we say. The rich and their managerial elites have hijacked government. The future, post globalism, is all about taking responsibility at a local level. Not waiting for laws to change but ignoring them as irrelevant and doing best we can with the good will and resources at hand.
What might you do to earn more trust and respect and save your soul?
Off the top of my head I suggest this:
End the Drug War and wind back the booming incarceration industry that it, and your Government's past law and order campaigns, has created. The NSW prisoner population is growing at 8% annually and New South Wales presently has 4,000 more prisoners than Victoria, a state of similar population and economic base.
Prove to us it is not your intention that, under the cover of drug prohibition, NSW become a penal colony again with a foreign owned, job creation Gulag in every town and suburb.
Prove to us that the social justice and working class origins of the ALP have not been completely betrayed by the Carr government and stop jailing the sons of the poor and the dispossessed.
Stop investing in incarceration and cultivating a culture of violence. It is the communities and families of the poor who must live with the violence and misery of men angry or broken by your prison system.
Re-legalise cannabis so that its utility as a source of medicine, fibre, food, fuel and oil may once again serve humanity and help the poor.
Release the drug war prisoners and wipe the records clean of all those who have been criminalised by the injustice of the drug prohibition era.
And while you are at it, show us you care for the Earth and future generations too. Ban cyanide heap leach gold mining in NSW forever.
May your visit to Nimbin be enlightening. May your political career become a source of inspiration to others. May you be happy.
Graeme Dunstan
Rainbow Region Elder
Peacebus.com
17 May 2001
