CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Political commentators right across the country are currently freaking out about the ACT’s decision to officially decriminalise low-level possession within territory limits.
This controversial approach to drug reform is known as the ‘Hamsterdam’ model – a reallocation of law enforcement priorities that allows police to focus on immediate issues like domestic violence and malicious crime, instead of wasting their time pulling over every car with a cannon exhaust and strip searching junkies.
However, many critics argue that by not ruining peoples lives for carrying certain drugs, the ACT Government will turn Canberra into a ‘drug fantasyland’.
Concerns have been raised that not only will this cause a major shift in the community’s understanding of addiction, but it may also make a vast number of police officers and crime reporters effectively irrelevant.
Without the taskforces that only exist to kick in doors and sentence at-risk young men to a lifetime cycle of incarceration, Opponents to the Hamsterdam model say this unorthodox approach to policing drugs might result in a more health focused strategy – which will inevitably humanise those community members caught up in the cycle of drugs – who have historically been treated like the absolute scum of the earth that need to die and go to hell.
This comes two years after the ACT decriminalised low-level cannabis possession, a ‘radical’ decision at the time that is yet to result in the apocalypse that was predicted by the wowsers who still think smoking dope turns people into depraved serial killers.
However, ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr has today defended his government’s decision.
Speaking to the media today, Barr produced a brown paper bag and a bottle of beer.
“Somewhere back in the dawn of time this district had itself a civic dilemma of epic proportions.” he began, as he presented the bottle of beer to the media.
“The city council had just passed a law that forbid alcoholic consumption in public places, on the streets and on the corners. But the corner is, and it was, and it always will be the poor man’s lounge”
“It’s where a man wants to be on a hot summer’s night. It’s cheaper than a bar, catch a nice breeze, watch the girls go by. But the law’s the law and the cops rollin’ by, what were they gonna do? If they arrested every dude out there for tipping back a VB there’d be no other time for any other kind of police work.”
“And if they looked the other way? They’d open themselves to all kinds of flaunting, all kinds of disrespect. Now, this is before my time when it happened but, somewheres back in the 50’s or 60’s, there was a small moment of goddamn genius by some nameless smokehound who comes out the cut-rate one day and on his way to the corner, he slips that just-bought longneck of Tooheys Old into a paper bag.”
Andrew Barr then slid the bottle of beer into the paper bag.
“A great moment of civic compromise; that small wrinkled-ass paper bag allowed the corner boys to have their drink in peace and gave us permission to go and do police work”
“The kind of police work that’s actually worth the effort, that’s worth actually taking a bullet for.”
“There’s never been a paper bag for drugs…until now.”
