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A glass pipe for smoking P found in a methamphetamine manufacturing lab following a police raid on January 17, 2018 in Auckland (Image: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
A glass pipe for smoking P found in a methamphetamine manufacturing lab following a police raid on January 17, 2018 in Auckland (Image: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

SocietyJune 7, 2018

Stop blaming banned drugs for the devastation caused by prohibition

A glass pipe for smoking P found in a methamphetamine manufacturing lab following a police raid on January 17, 2018 in Auckland (Image: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
A glass pipe for smoking P found in a methamphetamine manufacturing lab following a police raid on January 17, 2018 in Auckland (Image: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

New Zealand was poised for drug reform in 2007, but reform never came. Why do we still adhere to drug prohibition, which will be remembered as one of the most arbitrary, barbaric and brutal systems of oppression in human history?

‘Drug’ Prohibition is an archaic system of control conceived in the 1950s that’s had a devastating global impact upon individuals, families, communities and countries.

Back in the 1950s offensive ideas and practices towards indigenous people, people of colour, women, homosexuals, people with mental illness or learning disabilities were sadly not uncommon. Indeed, abuse was legitimised and normalised at a structural, cultural and interpersonal level. Now almost 70 years later, such bigotry has successfully been exposed and challenged, and such attitudes are for the most part no longer socially acceptable or state approved.

By contrast, the oppressive attitudes in the 1950s directed towards people who used ‘drugs’ became enshrined in the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and little has changed since. We have been duped into using state approved drugs (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco and sugar) within our daily routines and rituals and to embrace them as ‘non-drugs’. These hidden drugs have monopolised and saturated the market, while all substances banned by the government (that we are encouraged to call ‘drugs’) are demonised, presented as unquestionably dangerous.

This sharp distinction between state-approved and state-banned drugs has no scientific or pharmacological foundation to support it. What we commonly referred to as ‘drugs’ or ‘narcotics’ are simply a list of substances, arbitrarily prohibited for political reasons. It’s an untenable 1950s social construct lacking any research evidence to support it. Prohibition and fierce law enforcement cannot be justified from a human rights perspective or from a scientific basis, but conveniently banned drugs are blamed for the devastation and damage caused by prohibition.

Ironically, when they’re under the same quality control conditions as state-approved drugs, banned substances are generally less physically, socially and psychologically harmful. Further, there are medical benefits to many prohibited drugs that are being to denied to patients, leaving people with epilepsy, PTSD, depression, autism, Alzheimer’s, MS, Parkinson’s and cancer to needlessly suffer, or risk criminalisation and/or imprisonment.

Prohibition doesn’t stop people using drugs; it just makes using drugs dangerous. Once drugs are pushed underground users have little idea of the content of their purchase. The drug could be much higher potency than they anticipated, it could be mixed with highly toxic ingredients, and if they get into difficulty they are less likely to seek help. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest risks is posed not by drugs, but by a drug conviction. A criminal record for a drug crime can result in insurmountable hurdles when seeking employment, education, housing, international travel, insurance and relationships.

But drug enforcement is selective and profoundly divisive. It invariably targets the poor, the indigenous, people of colour, and people from black and minority ethnic groups (BME), despite evidence that levels of drug use are similar across communities. This discriminatory drug enforcement has resulted in worrying disparities in terms of over-representation of indigenous people and people of colour in prison, particularly in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and USA.

Image: Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

The prohibition efforts to reduce drug supply have failed abysmally (UN report records levels of opium production in Afghanistan last year) but despite the failure of prohibition, the drug policy ratchet only ever leads to more punitive approaches. Research indicates that policing to remove dealers from stable supply chains actually increases violence in communities, while militarised responses to drug cartels have effectively resulted in violent ‘drug wars’ that have destabilised countries such as Mexico. The worrying growth of violent gangs and drug cartels are not inevitable by-products of ‘drugs’. They are the inevitable outcome of a brutally enforced system of drug prohibition, one that was also witnessed in the 1920s with alcohol prohibition.

Like other forms of oppression that were once institutionalised by government, the lid is being lifted on prohibition, exposing the lack of evidence to support it. Many countries have adopted harm reduction approaches: the Netherlands has sold cannabis in coffee shops since the 1970s; Portugal decriminalised all drug possession in 2001; Switzerland began prescribing injectable heroin in 1991; and in 2014 Uruguay legalised home-grown cannabis. The old regime of prohibition is crumbling, and countries engaged in reform are realising the positive outcomes in terms health, employment, disease control, crime and addiction. There is no going back.

New Zealand was poised for drug reform in 2007 when the Law Commission was tasked to review the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. In 2011 after a four-year investigation the Law Commission published a comprehensive radical review, including 144 recommendations. Key recommendations of the Law Commission included rescinding the 1975 Act and replacing it with new legislation rooted in a health approach, a cautioning scheme for all drug personal possession, and ending the use of prison for low-level social drug dealing.

My arrival at Victoria University in January that year provided an ideal opportunity to help reshape drug law, policy and practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. I had imagined that a country respected for fighting hard to ensure women’s equal rights, sex workers’ rights, gay and lesbian marriage, and a country that stood firm against South African apartheid and against nuclear power would be more than ready to deliver much-needed drug reform.

Soon after I moved to New Zealand, I addressed the 2011 New Zealand Drug Policy Symposium on the Stigma and Discrimination as Barriers to Recovery, and in 2012 and 2013 I delivered papers at Criminology/Criminal Justice Conferences in Auckland and Wellington questioning the role and use of drug testing. However, I soon learned the dominant discourse on drugs and drug users was punitive and firmly rooted in prohibition ideology, with lip service paid towards evidenced based drug policies. Apart from punitive focused cherry picking, the extensive work and key proposals of the Law Commission quickly faded.

Instead of drug policy transformation, in my seven years in New Zealand I’ve witnessed the moral panic about methamphetamine contamination of houses; millions of dollars thrown at companies to carry out testing and cleaning; a punitive and dubious scheme to drug test unemployed people seeking work (with benefit suspensions for repeat positive drug tests); drug driving campaigns targeting cannabis users that conflate presence with impairment and crash causation; a questionable major investment to roll-out of US styled Drug Courts centred on abstinence, drug testing, scram ankle tags and 12-step residential rehabs; expensive annual police and air force helicopter missions to scour the countryside to remove cannabis plants; chronically sick people punished and/or incarcerated for self-medicating with home-grown cannabis; the introduction of a Psychoactive Substances Act 2013 that extended the net of prohibition further by outlawing possession of every new psychoactive drug; and the worrying move to bolster compulsory treatment with the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act 2017.

All rolled out comfortably and bedded in with minimal critique, challenge or resistance, while at the same time well-established harm reduction policies adopted in other countries – such as the distribution of naloxone take home, heroin prescribing, Good Samaritan laws, decriminalising cannabis self-medication and drug consumption rooms – struggled to gain traction.

While the Global Commission on Drug Policy (that encouragingly now includes former prime minister Helen Clark) presses countries to adopt evidence-based harm reduction policies and drug reform, New Zealand has gone in the opposite direction. The revelations concerning the meth testing of houses have epitomised just how punitive drug policies and practices have become in New Zealand – policies informed by prohibitionist ideology and intolerance, in which any level of drug presence is met with forceful consequences and assumptions.

Little has been done in this period to promote harm reduction, to advance the human rights of people who use drugs, or to push for much-needed reform as recommended by the Law Commission in 2011. In 1988 we were world leaders in harm reduction rolling out the first national needle exchange programme; 30 years later, how far we have fallen behind.

In decades to come, prohibition will be remembered as one of the most arbitrary, brutal systems of oppression in recent history. Some countries realised and acted upon this sooner than others. The chance for New Zealand to be on the right side of history is running out, but maybe the new government may surprise us.

Dr Julian Buchanan is a retired associate professor of criminology from Victoria University of Wellington. He has had a long interest in international drug policy, harm reduction and human rights.


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Image: Getty
Image: Getty

SocietyJune 6, 2018

How junior lawyers are pressured to keep quiet about harassment

Image: Getty
Image: Getty

The Law Society has professed shock after discovering the extent of harassment and discrimination in legal offices. But if you look at the barriers to reporting abuse, it’s little wonder juniors refuse to come forward, writes Madeleine Holden.

For the second time this year, the legal profession has been rocked by reports that it’s a hotbed of sexual harassment and a toxic environment in which to work. Last Wednesday the Law Society released the results of a Colmar Brunton survey of 3,516 lawyers to assess the workplace environment for legal practice. The study revealed levels of sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination so prevalent that Law Society President Kathryn Beck was moved to write a letter to members declaring “a serious and systemic cultural problem in [the] profession”. Nearly one third of female lawyers have been sexually harassed during their working life, and more than half of the lawyers surveyed have been bullied. Speaking to the media, Beck expressed shock on behalf of the organisation she heads: “The stories kept coming. How big was this problem? We didn’t know. Why didn’t we know about it? We didn’t know that either.”

For many people who experience bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination in legal workplaces – especially women, young people and Māori, Pacific and Asian lawyers – these results are far from surprising. And, as victims are well aware, one of the key reasons that the Law Society has been caught unaware is that legal workplaces erect barriers to the safe reporting of these matters, especially at a managerial and HR level, meaning that the behaviour festers in darkness.

NZ Law Society President Kathryn Beck

Hannah, 29, a lawyer who previously worked at controversial law firm Russell McVeagh, spoke to The Spinoff about how difficult it was for her to challenge the culture at the firm. (Hannah’s name has been changed upon request, for reasons this article will soon discuss.) She said that if junior lawyers raised problems with the culture of the firm or behavior of senior lawyers, the official response was to train the complainant to be less sensitive, rather than challenge the senior lawyer about their behaviour. “The common practice if you did go to HR was for them to send you on ‘Resilience Training’,” she explained. “This happened to a number of the girls, so they could learn how better to cope with their seniors.”

(Update: Russell McVeagh have responded to the claims made by ‘Hannah’; we have added their comments at the end of this story)

Hannah witnessed sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical and emotional bullying during her time at the firm. “My particular experience was after a period where we had quite an imbalance in the team, with some very strong ‘lads’ that dominated the culture,” she said. “There was a lot of pretty gross chat and generally quite offensive behaviour, both in the office and then over drinks later, which obviously escalates it all. One of the graduate lawyers I had been mentoring told me they were really struggling with the culture, and the attitudes of a particular senior in the team. At this point, the grad had been shoved into a wall by one of the seniors and told to ‘fuck off’ when he had challenged the senior for swearing abuse at someone else in the team.”

Despite the seriousness of the bullying and inappropriateness of the behaviour, Hannah told me she was discouraged by a senior associate from going to HR. “When I talked to her, she said she was hyper-aware of it and it also bothered her, but that I shouldn’t go to HR as they would just go straight to the partners and it would damage my reputation,” she said. “Her point was that nothing is confidential, particularly with HR.” Hannah’s experience led her to believe that, even if she risked her reputation by making a formal complaint, the exercise would be fruitless. “I don’t think I did [report this behaviour to HR], but I think a couple of juniors did, and I know our secretary had so many issues with one of the seniors, but no one ever did anything.”

The fear of damaging one’s reputation is an enormous disincentive to reporting harassment, bullying and discrimination in legal workplaces, as is the belief that nothing will be done even if that risk is taken. The Colmar Brunton survey identified that while misconduct of this nature is rampant throughout the industry, reporting it is relatively uncommon. For both sexual harassment and bullying, the survey found that less than one in eight of those targetted reported the harassment or made a complaint. Fear of the consequences, including impact on career prospects, was one of the most commonly cited reasons for failing to report inappropriate behaviour in the workplace – 65% of those who had personally experienced sexual harassment cited it as a barrier to reporting the behaviour – and distrust in the process or reporting outcome was cited as a reason by 57% of respondents.

As Hannah’s experience shows, this fear is quite rational. HR departments routinely respond to grievances by cautioning complainants to “keep their heads down”, or by shifting complainants, rather than perpetrators, out of their desired team. Some do nothing at all. Many smaller firms have no HR departments to speak of, meaning that complainants must raise the issue with a partner, who may be the perpetrator or have a closer relationship with the perpetrator than the complainant. For 10% of lawyers surveyed who had experienced sexual harassment, the reason cited for not reporting it was “The person I would normally report the issue to is the perpetrator”. For many lawyers, these outcomes are not worth the reputational risk. The legal industry in New Zealand is small, word travels fast, and powerless legal employees that “rock the boat” by making formal complaints or speaking to the press risk being permanently tainted as a “troublemaker” or “prude”.

Nothing confirms this fear of reputational harm quite like reporting on a story about misconduct in the legal industry: routinely, victims of harassment, bullying and discrimination are too afraid to share their accounts on record. Almost all request that their names are changed, and some decline to share their stories even under a different name, because of a fear that they’ll be identified from the details of the story alone – the more cartoonishly offensive the behaviour, the higher the risk that they’ll be recognised as the complainant. “Even if you give me a fake name, everyone will know it’s me from the story,” one source told The Spinoff, declining to share her grotesque experience of sexual harassment on the record. Almost without fail, sources use the same word to describe the level of harassment in the industry (“rife”), but few are willing to risk being identified as someone who had spoken out against their manager, partner or firm. Without stories, there can be no media coverage – another reason these anonymous results have come as a shock to the Law Society.

Discouraged from both internal and external reporting of the misconduct, many victims of sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination in legal workplaces suffer in silence. The Colmar Brunton survey has helped to confirm the prevalence of the problem, but the details of victims’ stories will not see the light of day until HR departments, managers and partners treat complaints with the seriousness they deserve, and lawyers are no longer stifled by fear of speaking out. Tackling the culture of abuse in the legal industry requires the culture of silence to be dismantled first.

Russell McVeagh responds:

We aren’t aware of the incident you refer to and we would be extremely concerned if any of our staff were treated in such a way by another member of our staff.

As you will know, Dame Margaret Bazley is conducting an independent review into our culture with respect to sexual harassment and bullying. If your source hasn’t already done so we would urge her to speak to Dame Margaret before she completes her review by calling 0800 779 779 or emailing ereview@rmcvexternal.com. Dame Margaret and her team treat all conversations with the utmost confidence.


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