Over a hundred and fifty people in New Zealand die every year from accidental overdose - a situation that’s getting worse. Today, Sunday 31st August marks International Overdose Awareness Day.

Harm Reduction Coalition Chair, Dr Kirsten Gibson says: “The 50-year-old Misuse of Drugs Act (MoDA) has not only failed abysmally in its purported aims to reduce the supply and demand for drugs, the MoDA has spawned dangerous environments that fuel our overdose problem. The overdose crisis is a drug law crisis!”

Fifty years of the MoDA punishing people and telling people to ‘just say no’ has not had any significant impact on the demand for drugs, nor has it reduced drug supply - quite the opposite. Record levels of drug use and drug busts are being reported in New Zealand with methamphetamine and cocaine both on the increase.

Overdose is largely a symptom of prohibition led punitive drug policies. People who use prohibited drugs (unlike state approved substances) have been denied access to quality controlled regulated supply. Instead they must buy drugs from the underground market produced via criminal networks, leaving the consumer with little idea of the purity or content.

HRCA’s Dr Julian Buchanan says: “Our drug laws have created a dodgy unregulated underground market, selling unknown drugs that could be so strong they could be lethal. They could be mixed with poisonous contaminants. They could contain other drugs that have serious adverse contraindications. Who knows? What I do know, is that it puts people at serious risk of danger, - dangers caused by our drug laws.”

Further, to avoid severe penalties and stigma, people who use prohibited drugs often do so in isolated places and sometimes alone, such as alleyways, derelict buildings or under bridges. This further increases their vulnerability should difficulties arise. If faced with a risky overdose situation, people are often reluctant to call the emergency services for fear of arrest for possession, supply or even possibly murder/manslaughter.

HRCA Secretary Brandon Hutchison says: “These risky situations that fuel overdose are created not by the drugs, but by our punitive drugs policies. If alcohol was prohibited, similar issues would be faced and we’d witness a significant increase of fatal alcohol overdose triggered by prohibition.”

He further explains, “to avoid the risk of lengthy prison sentences, the highly lucrative business of supplying prohibited drugs is constantly seeking less bulky drugs to avoid detection which is one of the reasons we’ve seen the arrival of the highly potent fentanyl on the streets of New Zealand.”

These high risk situations are inadvertently driven by the MoDA. If we are to avoid an overdose crisis HRCA urges government to roll out a full suite of pragmatic harm reduction services, including:

1. Low threshold patient-centred substitute prescribing of a range of drugs so people who are addicted know exactly what they are taking and no longer need to engage in the underground network to acquire the drug nor do they need to commit crime to fund it.

2. Overdose Prevention Centres in major cities where people who use drugs can do so in a safe and medically supervised environment. Sydney set one up 24yrs ago and over a million injections have been supervised, and over 11,000 overdoses have been successfully managed without a single fatality.

3. Easy free access to the opioid antidote naloxone to the friends and families who use drugs. Naloxone should be available to purchase at a pharmacy, like it is in the USA.

4. A Good Samaritan Law to remove the threat of arrest when calling for an ambulance.

However, Dr Julian Buchanan explains: “These are commendable stop-gap measures, but at some stage we have to tackle the cause of the problem - the MoDA. We have once again, the opportunity to be world leaders in drug policy, having in the past been the first country to roll out a national needle exchange scheme and more recently the first country to fund and deliver a drug checking service. We can be the first country to rescind the MoDA as recommended by the Law Commission back in 2011 take drug controls out of the hands of the criminal justice system and into the hands of the Ministry of Health.”

Harm Reduction Coalition Aotearoa (HRCA) calls on the government to replace our failed drug laws with a new fit-for-purpose Psychoactive Drug Act managed by the Ministry of Health, a single law that legally regulates all psychoactive drugs and responsibly manages the market.

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