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At a 30 November meeting, NSW government cabinet ministers
discussed a three-tiered system of depenalisation for the offence
of personal drug possession.
First spruiked by attorney general Mark Speakman, the
step-in-the-right-direction policy gained broad, but not unanimous, support.
A conservative minister went on to leak word of it to the Seven
Network. It then misrepresented the policy as decriminalisation,
whereas the government proposal doesn t aim to remove the
criminal offence altogether, but it would rather heighten the
threshold as to when sanctions apply.
Under the depenalisation model, a person found in possession of