Recent Developments in Cannabis Law Reform

In early 2004 both the United Kingdom (UK) and Western Australia (WA) introduced reforms aimed at avoiding the harms associated with minor cannabis offenders appearing before the courts. As the reforms involved different approaches available to police to divert someone who had committed an offence and one of the reforms - the Cannabis Infringement Notice (CIN) scheme in WA - was repealed in October 2010, it is useful to consider what lessons these two examples may provide for other jurisdictions contemplating reform. While WA introduced the Cannabis Infringement Notice scheme, allowing police to issue an infringement notice for a number of expiable offences, a more flexible approach to diversion was adopted in the UK. The UK reform was administratively simpler, largely reliant on police exercising their discretion to issue cannabis warnings and built upon earlier reforms to improve relations between police, young people and minority groups. Compared with the UK model, the WA CIN scheme involved complex eligibility and compliance requirements, was difficult to administer and resulted in substantially more cannabis offenders coming to official attention than before the reform. The experience with the now abandoned CIN scheme in WA shows that the extensive use of police discretion, as was followed in the UK, is a preferable and more sustainable model for managing minor cannabis offending.