National Portrait - Ross Bell, the reformer

Wednesday, 8 August 2018

New Zealand's drug laws are made for a world that no longer exists.

That's the way Drug Foundation director Ross Bell sees it.

The Misuse of Drugs Act took effect when he was 3 and it is still the law of the day.

'Everything that informed the law to be passed in 1975 is still the law today, yet over the past 40-plus years the drugs have changed, the global drug trade has changed, new substances have come along,' he says.

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'We now have some of the highest rates of drug use in the world [and] we still have the same punitive, criminal justice approach to drugs despite all these facts. At what point do we say there's a huge mismatch here between the law we have in place and the reality?

'The law is made for a world that doesn't exist. A utopia. Politicians continue to make drug laws that are not based on the real world.'

Bell, who has been at the helm of the Drug Foundation for 15 years, is a strong advocate of Canada's approach to cannabis and Portugal's approach to decriminalise all drugs.

 In June, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Canada would legalise recreational marijuana, making it the first of the G7 countries to do so.

Canada is a huge deal as far as cannabis laws go, Bell, 45, says.

'The New Zealand government has made a deliberate choice to leave the market in the hands of gangs. [In Canada] they have seen all the control was in the hands of the criminal black market of organised crime but they want to protect their young people by having the government regulate the cannabis market.'

The Drug Foundation takes a public health approach to drugs. It doesn't espouse the argument that everyone has the right to put into one's body whatever one likes – 'We'll leave that to the Libertarians.'

The bottom line is that the safest drug use is no drug use at all, but  the foundation is pragmatic, he says.

Human beings have sought to alter their state of mind since time immemorial.  The foundation's job is to advocate for policies and services that build a healthy society and reduce drug harm.

That includes reducing the harm caused by a conviction for drug misdemeanours, he says.

One of the Drug Foundation's biggest hurdles is getting drugs out of the criminal justice system and making it a health issue.

'We have huge harm associated with prohibition in New Zealand and that harm is much greater than the drugs themselves. Our view is that the law we have in place creates more harm than the substances the law is trying to control.'

Last year the Drug Foundation launched in Parliament  its model drug law, essentially advocating Portugal's approach to decriminalise all drugs, refer people  for the help they need rather than sending them through the criminal justice system, double resources going into prevention, education and treatment and harm reduction, as well as regulating the cannabis market, making sales legal.

Currently, he says, 80 per cent of everything the state spends on our drug problem goes into law enforcement, with only 20 per cent pumped into health.

That division is so out of whack with a workable solution. But the tide is turning, he says.

Bell grew up in New Plymouth with his two sisters.

His father was a printer at the local newspaper, his mother a nurse. Both were good unionists. Discussions around the dinner table were political of a certain shade – red.

'I remember going on marches with Mum when the nurses went on strike in the 1980s. I remember Dad yelling at the TV during election time when Muldoon kept getting re-elected.'

He credits a sixth-form teacher for his sense of social justice.

It was a legal studies class and the first time he learned anything about the Treaty, New Zealand Wars, Parihaka.

He had wanted to be an air force pilot but deplorable maths grades and the need for glasses put paid to that dream.

Bell left Taranaki for Auckland and university at 18 to study for an arts degree.

He was on the margins of student politics, hanging out in the quad where the student representative council met and debated the finer points of university life.

With an arts degree in international aid and development, Bell had big plans. 'I think I had the view that I needed to go around the world and save all these people from poverty. I thought I'd work for Oxfam or World Vision and fix the world.'

Instead, he tried to fix bits of New Zealand.

After staying on at the university to work as a research assistant, he got a job in Wellington at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the buildup to the Apec meeting New Zealand was hosting in 1999.

'All my leftie friends disowned me. I was accused of being a sellout. They picketed outside, handing out fliers saying 'For whom the Bell tolls'.'

After a year he moved on. By mutual agreement MFAT realised that he and big bureaucracies were not a natural fit, says Bell, who then went on to the Citizens Advice Bureau as social policy manager at their national office.

His work on housing, benefit and consumer rights taught him the art of advocacy and lobbying.

Four years later he came to NZ Drug Foundation.

The staff of two part-timers has swelled to 10 full-timers. There's plenty for them to do, says Bell, a father of two.

They were vocal in the meth-testing debacle, which saw a U-turn by Housing New Zealand in light of Professor Sir Peter Gluckman's bombshell report in May showing there was no real risk to humans from third-hand exposure to houses where methamphetamine has been consumed.

Bell believes heads should roll over the scandal. He had questioned the testing methods and standards from the outset.

But the foundation's stance on the argument was more about the immediate social impact on tenants being removed from their homes.

'We always said you shouldn't be evicting people. Bottom line. Even if they are smoking meth … don't kick them out. We weren't worried about contamination, we were all about keeping people in their homes and getting support around them. When people are vulnerable, don't make their lives more precarious.'

The foundation has thrown its support behind Wellington's wet house project and he says there's merit in the creation of injecting rooms in Auckland and Christchurch.

Such facilities offer detox and treatments on site and have been proven to get people off the gear.

But it's more than just offering a way out of the murk that their dependencies have left them in, he says. 'People who use those services discover that there are others who love them and care for them. I've seen the love and compassion in that community and it works.'

He anticipates the Auckland City Mission's new detox centre, with its recent $16 million in government funding, will have this effect on those on the margins who seek help from a community of people dealing in care and compassion.

Bell is adamant that New Zealand will see the light on a better way to manage its drug problem. It's already making waves with the referendum on legalising cannabis for personal use that the Government intends to hold by 2020.

The use of medical cannabis is on the table, though the foundation is asking the Government to widen its proposed medicinal marijuana bill.

At the heart of it all is the fact that addiction is still so stigmatised, he says. 'It's such a silent problem. The shame and the stigma is a real barrier to dealing with addiction and drugs.

'If you treat it as a health issue, rather than a criminal justice issue, you remove the stigma. This is what happened in Portugal. When they decriminalised all drugs they shifted the way the country saw the problem. It wasn't a moral failing, it was a health issue.

'You have to change with the times. The world has changed.'