The Independent Sex Party candidate for South Toowoomba in Saturday’s election, says that her social agenda could transform the electorate and make it a glowing model for the rest of Queensland.

Charlene Phillips said that the Sex Party’s drug policies could see drug usage rates in young people in Toowoomba drop by 20% in just a few years. “Decriminalisation of personal drug use is the only way to ween young people off drugs. When drugs are not illegal, you can produce educational material to advice young people. At a government level the issue needs to be taken away from the criminal justice area and given to the health portfolio. When they did this in Portugal a decade ago, it led to a significant drop in drug use by young teenagers”, she said. “Toowoomba has had major drug use problems for years. Neither the LNP, Labor or Bob Katter’s party have even bothered to put forward a drug policy for this election except to tacitly support more of the same”.

Ms Phillips said that unless the reformist candidates were elected to the state parliament, Queensland governments would continue to cause illicit drug use to rise. “Nothing that any government in Queensland has ever done has caused drug usage rates to decline”, she said. “In fact, every government in Queensland since the 1950s has presided over increased drug use and has been complicit in this escalation through their ‘tough on drugs’ policies.”

She said that the explosion in the numbers of synthetic drugs on the market in recent years had been directly caused by government laws which were meant to stop them. “Every time the government has listed one of these new designer drugs onto the poisons schedule, they hand a new drug, complete with marketing and promotion, over to drug dealers. Queensland drug dealers have never been happier than they are at the moment. We are now seeing a new designer drug introduced into the market place every month now to replace the one that was just made illegal”, she said.