Bob Carr has reunited with other key players behind a landmark drug summit to urge current leaders to display the same courage for reform shown 24 years ago.
The landmark five-day summit in 1999 changed perceptions of illicit drug use and established the political backing for the creation of the Kings Cross medically supervised injecting centre.
Premier Chris Minns has promised a second summit next year but advocates are concerned it won't move the dial much further than prior major inquiries into ice and festival drug use.
"At the beginning of the Drug Summit, the catch cry was courage," Mr Carr said on Wednesday.
"I still believe that courage is vital in this difficult area of drug policy."
The 99er event at Parliament House also featured Carmel Tebbutt, Clover Moore and John Brogden who were MPs in 1999 as well as the first medical director of the injecting centre, Dr Ingrid van Beek and other harm reduction advocates.
Ms Tebbutt, a former health minister now heading Odyssey House NSW, says the continuing high demand for rehabilitation services must be a key plank of the 2024 drug summit.
Odyssey House has faced 23 per cent year-on-year growth in client numbers, with four in 10 people seeking help for alcohol use and three in 10 for help with amphetamines.
The summit will also examine fixed and mobile pill-testing sites, from which successive governments have shied away.
Experts say pill-testing increases safety and harm reduction conversations but the premier stresses it would not be a "silver bullet".
Unwilling to wait for the summit, the Greens on Wednesday introduced a bill to license up to four pill-testing sites including one in a fixed location.
"Four years on from the coronial Inquest into the death of six patrons of NSW music festivals, we've still not had a government with the courage to introduce an evidence-based policy, which has widespread public and stakeholder support,' health spokeswoman Cate Faehrmann said.
The government has however shifted on decriminalisation by allowing more drug users caught by police to be managed in health programs, from early next year.
The Legalise Cannabis Party wants a step further, introducing a bill on Wednesday to legalise the personal consumption of cannabis.
"This will create a drastic reduction in the costs of law enforcement, it will attack the profits or organised crime and it will put cannabis where it belongs - in the domain of health," party MP Jeremy Buckingham said.
Uniting, which operates the Kings Cross injecting centre, hopes the Minns drug summit will be over five days to allow MPs time to go on the same journey the so-called 99ers did.
"It is time for NSW to really look again at the issues and not take anything off the table and for people to bring an open mind," Uniting NSW.ACT executive director Emma Maiden told AAP.
She said the law-and-order approach to illicit drug use was a key factor in intergenerational disadvantage and was leaving a financial and emotional toll on the state and its next generations.
One in eight people use illicit drugs each year and the vast majority didn't develop drug dependency, Ms Maiden said.
But those who became addicted were shamed and had their character questioned, unlike those with addictions to legal substances, she said.
