But even the personal use of cannabis is still illegal in NSW, although users can be given two cautions.

All other recreational drug-taking remains forbidden, and our law enforcement agencies still go hard towards the criminal apparatus that will always find a way to operate if enough people want the products the state insists they can't have.

In an ideal world - perhaps - there'd be no drug trade, but archaeological evidence showing the opium poppy in cultivation 5000 years ago indicates we are dealing with some entrenched behaviour.

In Melbourne, an organisation called the Penington Institute - named after its patron, David Penington, a major player in Australian HIV/AIDS research and policy - says that risky behaviour, in the form of drug-taking, is "part of being human".

For some years now, the institute has positioned itself as an "independent voice of reason on drug policy".

Its latest publication, Australia's Annual Overdose Report 2020, takes a mass of coronial, medical and statistical data and melds it into a coherent picture of the human cost in unintentional deaths through drug-taking.

It reports 2070 drug-induced deaths in this country in 2018, of which 1556 were unintentional. Opoids, including prescription drugs such as morphine and fentanyl, as well as street heroin, were present in the bodies of 900 individuals at death.

The report notes that many overdose victims have more than one drug in their systems, including alcohol, which is well-known to exacerbate the effects of other drugs.

The report outlines the human cost not to condemn drug taking, but to convince policymakers of the need for a "shift in our approach, to drug policies that are based on evidence", while being "respectful" of the people involved in what the institute describes as an "epidemic of overdoses".

Newcastle and the broader Hunter Region has its problems with drugs, as does every other part of this country.

The institute acknowledges that its stance on the subject will be "challenging" to many people, and it concedes there "are no simple solutions".

But its belief that "it's far more productive to prevent and tackle drug use in a safe, effective and practical way" than to "judge people who use drugs" is a sensible starting point for lawmakers to remember.

ISSUE: 39,401.

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