20 years' jail for possession of a leaflet
By Karen Fredericks
BRISBANE — The Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) candidate in the Mundingburra by-election, Billy Tate, was charged on February 20 with possession of drug law reform literature.
Tate is the first person to be charged under an amendment to the Queensland Drugs Misuse Act, passed in November after some young people collapsed at a Gold Coast night club after swallowing the drug "fantasy".
Brisbane's only daily paper, the Courier-Mail, went ballistic following the incident, with pages of sensational and uninformed commentary. Curiously, the paper targeted the internet and campaigned for new laws to censor the net to prevent children accessing drug recipes.
In response to the Courier-Mail's campaign, Queensland's Coalition government formed a special task force to draft new legislation.
Within days, parliament passed amendments to the Drugs Misuse Act to allow new substances to be added to the illegal list without having to legislate, and creating a number of new offences, including the new section 8A, under which Tate has been charged.
Section 8A makes it an offence to produce or possess a "document" that contains information about the "manufacture" of an illegal drug. The maximum penalty is 20 years in prison.
According to HEMP spokesperson John Free Marijuana, the police raid on Tate in Mundingburra netted a copy of anti-prohibition newsletter Cannabis News and HEMP publication The Book of Bud. Both pamphlets contained, among other anti-prohibition information, tips on marijuana cultivation.
The state ALP supported the tightening of the drugs act. It did express some concern that section 8A might be used to prosecute children who download drug information from the net. But it accepted the Coalition's promise that the legislation would be used only against the "Mr Bigs" of the drug trade.
"So Mr Big has turned out to be Billy Tate of Mundingburra", John Free Marijuana told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. "It could also be the local library with all those chemistry abstracts."
Indeed, this law is so wide that police could target anybody in possession of a book, leaflet, poster, T-shirt, novel, magazine or souvenir from Amsterdam containing "information" about cultivation or manufacture of one of the substances in the growing list of more than 100 contained in the schedules to the drugs act.
Tate's case will be heard in June. He has lodged a complaint with the Criminal Justice Commission alleging that the police raid was part of a campaign of harassment against him because of his anti-prohibition stance.