Australian threshold quantities for ‘drug trafficking’: Are they placing drug users at risk of unjustified sanction?

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Australian threshold quantities for ‘drug trafficking’: Are they placing drug users at risk of unjustified sanction?

27 March 2014

Legal threshold quantities for drug trafficking, over which possession of an illicit drug is deemed ‘trafficking’ as opposed to ‘personal use’ are used in most Australian states and territories. Yet, in spite of known risks from adopting such thresholds, most notably of unjustified conviction of users as traffickers, the capacity of Australian legal thresholds to deliver proportional sanctioning has been subject to limited research.

In this study, the authors use data on patterns of drug user consumption and purchasing to evaluate Australian legal threshold quantities to see whether Australian drug users are at risk of exceeding the thresholds for personal use alone. The results indicate that some, but not all users are at risk, with those most likely to exceed current thresholds being consumers of MDMA and residents of New South Wales and South Australia. The implication is that even if the current legal threshold system helps to convict and sanction drug traffickers, it may be placing Australian drug users at risk of unjustified charge or sanction. The authors highlight a number of reforms that ought mitigate the risks and increase capacity to capture Australian drug traffickers.

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