With Medicinal Cannabis Awareness Week approaching, former Northern Territory and federal police commissioner Mick Palmer calls on governments to avoid repeating the failures of past prohibitionist policies.
When I first joined the Northern Territory Police, a law known as Ward Drink Liquor (WDL) was still on the books. The law targeted Indigenous Australians exclusively, classifying Aboriginal persons whose names did not appear in a citizens register — a government gazette-style publication listing all Aboriginal people officially deemed to be citizens — as wards.
Under this classification, those deemed wards committed an offence simply by consuming alcohol, and faced a strong likelihood of arrest and imprisonment as a result. The law remained in place until its repeal in 1967.
Whatever the original intent — perhaps to shield Indigenous Australians from the harms of alcoholism, or to discourage drinking — the law failed on both counts. It addressed symptoms while doing nothing about the underlying causes or the circumstances driving the behaviour.
Indigenous people continued to drink. The only tangible outcome was that doing so could result in arrest and imprisonment. Beyond being deeply discriminatory, the law punished the very people it claimed to protect.
Experiences like these early in my career led me to question the law itself and to ask whether some of the behaviours criminalised in our legal codes had any business being treated as crimes at all.
I recall being sent to question a young man lying in a Darwin hospital bed following a suicide attempt. At the time, attempted suicide was still a criminal offence.
Even then, it was almost incomprehensible that anyone would want to arrest, charge, and convict someone in those circumstances.
The criminal justice system of that era offered no pathways to support, protection, or treatment. Punishment was the only tool available, driven by the flawed and simplistic assumption that it would deter behaviour society had decided was unacceptable.
Attempted suicide is no longer an offence anywhere in Australia.
But the lessons kept coming. The crime then commonly referred to as buggery or sodomy — covering consensual sexual acts between men — remained on the statute books across Australia until at least the late 1970s. South Australia became the first jurisdiction to fully decriminalise homosexual acts, doing so on August 27, 1975.
Gay men alive today, including close friends of mine, still carry memories of a time when the so-called 'abominable' crime of buggery carried a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
Victoria did not remove the death penalty for sodomy from its laws until 1949.
Our history is filled with prohibitionist decisions that turned out to be counterproductive, deeply discriminatory, bigoted, unjust, unnecessary, and in many cases actively harmful.
Governments must be willing to absorb the lessons these bad laws teach if we are to produce better, more constructive outcomes going forward.
Few examples make this case more clearly than medicinal cannabis. Despite the progress achieved in recent years, the restrictions that continue to limit patient access cannot be justified by any objective measure.
The medical evidence is overwhelming, and I urge governments to take the lessons of history seriously, show genuine leadership, and act in ways that make a real and positive difference.
We all carry an obligation to ensure the mistakes of the past are not repeated.
Mick Palmer is an ambassador for the Australian Medicinal Cannabis Association (AMCA).
