Speaker: Towards a realistic drug policy
385 Responses
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All valid points. It would be nice if the argument was turned from a criminal issue into a health issue. Cannabis is not a perfect drug, but it is certainly the lesser of three evils in terms of cannabis, alcohol and tobacco.(Can we start calling alcohol a drug also, not "alcohol and drugs")
It would be nice to go to the BDO or a summer concert in a main city and smoke a few joints without worrying about the police. In my job(most jobs I would say!!) you can't afford a conviction.
I'm getting a bit too old to slug back half a bottle of whisky(and get messy)or pop some MDMA(and get messy). A few joints seem to make the day at the concert somehow rosier and more enjoyable. And mellow.
Fill the BDO with alcohol rather than illegal drugs and watch the chaos ensue!!
Even for the anti drugs crusaders I would feel a system of the government regulating, controlling and selling cannabis would at least enable some control over the issue, and, of course, a massive income from the taxation and sale of cannabis that can be put back in to the community in the form of health and drug education/treatment programes.
At the moment cannabis is untaxed and uncontrolled, and is funding the gangs in New Zealand. Give the power back to the government and the taxes from cannabis sales back into the community.
If we could make the laws work and change cannabis use from a criminal to a health issue, then regulate and tax it, it would save a lot of young people from drug convictions for just smoking weed. Its hardly a crime that is worth ruining a young persons career and travel opportunites in the pursuit of criminal justice!!
DISCLOSURE: I have a 1999 conviction for possession of cannabis, busted in the Auckland Domain while reading a book after University by 8 police in the riot van. Nice. (Touch violent actually! Not on my part..more tearing the vehicle to pieces etc..)
LESSON: Never defend yourself in court. Unless you want a conviction. Or are a lawyer. Dumbass that I am..
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Legalisation is the obvious route to take for pot.
Good Luck, keep up the pressure, it wont change under National tho' -
All drugs are bad, hell too much water will kill you.
But come on, your source for Dak doesn't cause cancer is the Washington Post. The Punk joke was Cancer cures Reggae.
All mass murderers were pot smokers. Alcohol & cannibis both have an impact on mental health, the difference is Alcohol is known. Your denial as to the existant dangers inherant in the drug do your cause a great disservice.
Hows about the 41% increased risk of pyschosis.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17662880Edit - That said treat pot as a health issue not a criminal one. But to me even violent offenders should be treated that way and prisons done away with entirely.
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While I can to some extent agree with the above arguements and see that legalisation could be beneficial in a number of ways I do have a problem with the whole idea of easier access and greater freedom with regards to family life. As a teacher it is easy to spot the child in my class who has spent the weekend exposed to second hand cannabis smoke and it has a real effect on their learning, sometimes for a couple of days till it leaves the system. I'm not talking teenagers here but younger kids and it is a real problem. I agree also that alchohol has a just as much effect on families, it just manifests itself in different ways, violence etc. I'm not sure if this is part of the legalisation debate or not and probably has more to do with parents not taking on their parental role in a responsible manner. This highlights the problem I have with the legalisation debate is that the focus tends to be on the people with no family or responsibilities who just want to get high in social situations whereas there is a greater group of people using the drug in their normal everyday life. Legalisation would require a huge amount of education running alongside it. Of course everything I've said applies to alchohol also and I haven't touched on the problems of workplace intoxication.
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Although I support the decriminalisation/legalisation of cannabis, being around people smoking the stuff brings on a very rapid migraine. For this very selfish reason I'm wary of any moves which would increase it's presence in public spaces, or even make use at the private parties I attend more conspicuous.
Dodging the filthy smokers (of which my social group seems to have a proliferation at the moment) may have worse long term health outcomes, but at least a strong breeze from the wrong direction doesn't mean I have to abandon the event :-/
Of course my tolerance of cigarettes may only be due to growing up with a smoking father. (He recently gave up after a lifetime, and during a very stressful period which included my brother breaking his neck, and we're all very proud of him).
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I can't buy into The Lesser of Two (or three) Evils argument for the decriminalisation of cannabis. It is kind of spurious; akin to manslaughter is preferable to murder. To really convince folk, advocates for changing legislation need to construct better arguments.
Like Tony, my experience with students who smoke the weed is that they can't concentrate on their studies and usually fail.
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Are you trying to legalise cannabis or bring about prohibition on alcohol?
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As a teacher it is easy to spot the child in my class who has spent the weekend exposed to second hand cannabis smoke
Can you explain further Tony. What is this "easy to spot"?I understand any kid with lack of sleep (possibly due to irresponsible parents) but could you elaborate?
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Geoff: it is important to tease out the cause and effect here. Depressed and unsuccessful students turn to substance abuse. Students with poor self-discipline don't know when to stop (I should know). I don't doubt your observation, but I'd be cautious about your conclusion.
The manslaughter vs murder analogy simply doesn't fit. Both crimes result in unlawful death. In the cannabis vs alcohol comparison, we are talking about different outcomes: degrees of harm. If you can marshall a demonstration that there isn't a significant difference in outcomes, then that argument will fail. But I don't see anything else particularly wrong with it.
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my experience with students who smoke the weed is that they can't concentrate on their studies and usually fail
Oh pish posh. There are two people living in my house with masters degrees who would like to strenuously disagree with you. But they can't be bothered getting off the couch. :)
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Fair points, Stephen.
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I've becomed convinced over the past few years by good argument that cannabis should be legalised.
All the same, I'd like it to not be around me, or around my kids. I think there's sufficient evidence that developing brains are affected by cannabis. So I'd vote in favour of it being served in cannabis R18 or similar cafes, rather than legalised for general private use.
I'm also a fanatical anti-smoker, and would like to see cigarettes banned, but that's just pie-in-the sky type stuff.
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Why focus on the harm at all?
Alcohol is a marvellous drug. Legalised sales make the fun and socialable effects of alcohol easily available, whilst at the same time bringing a good sized revenue stream to society through taxation.
Cannabis is a marvellous drug. Legalisation would make the fun...
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Cannabis has very little in common with alcohol. Wouldn't decriminalizing heroin be far more productive in reducing alcohol related social problems?
No. Smack is addictive,and pretty sure too much can render one useless (overdose).Confidence booster,that it may be, but "too much, quite unhealthy" would knock your argument there Steven. Now, if you want a weight loss programme...
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would like to see cigarettes banned
This could be the squillionth chapter in the book called Things Which Would Never Work In A Million Years.
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I could produce evidence to suggest that has an affect on grown ups as well.
Adults don't have developing brains anymore, it's all downhill for us.
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Like Tony, my experience with students who smoke the weed is that they can't concentrate on their studies and usually fail.
Geoff, how do you know which of your students smoke?
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This could be the squillionth chapter in the book called Things Which Would Never Work In A Million Years.
Oh yes. But I'm allowed to dream :)
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Great post, thanks. I totally agree with you. No one ever says "My dad used to get really high and then beat the shit out of us kids".
In high school, I found pot to be a really good study aid. It allowed me to calm down and focus on the pointless busy work that I resented. In fact, the more I smoked the better my marks were.
I also like your point about the Netherlands. I stopped smoking pot when I moved there for two years. I think this was because buying pot became as mundane as buying bread or milk. I could get it any time I wanted. So I ceased to care about whether or not I had it or could get it. Gone were the obsessive evenings with friends calling around trying to score pot.
Now it just makes me incredibly nervous and I never touch it. But man it served its purpose for a time.
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Heroin tends to rank highly (well, highest) on harm indexes because of its potential for injection. This same quality increases the risk from, e.g., cocaine, barbiturates, and ketamine. As Nutt et al. put it in the Lancet*:
"Drugs that can be taken intravenously—eg, heroin—carry a high risk of causing sudden death from respiratory depression, and therefore
score highly on any metric of acute harm"For the record, that enlightening study ranked alcohol 5th, and tobacco 9th, in terms of mean harm from 20 substances. Cannabis was 11th. Ecstasy was 18th.
* = Lancet 2007; 369: 1047–53 (Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse)
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Good Luck, keep up the pressure, it wont change under National tho'
The Nats made great efforts pre-election to proclaim that NZers did not need a "nanny state". They were against the banning of incandescent lightbulbs. They were against the banning of pies from school tuck shops. They were against the banning of smacking kids, for a while, before they weren't.
They need to find some new revenue streams, but can't raise income taxes. They want to cut back on prison spending and court costs.
And their coalition partners Act and the Maori Party are lots more inclined to support legalisation than NZ First or the Progressives ever were.
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Can you explain further Tony. What is this "easy to spot"?I understand any kid with lack of sleep (possibly due to irresponsible parents) but could you elaborate?
An inability to focus, listlessness, red eyes, drowsyness which could also be signs of tiredness but then you take into consideration the knowledge of family background and you make an assumption which may or may not be right. But with the 5 year olds in my room it's not a good thing either way.
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Fair points but at the end of a hard day I would rather have a glass of beer than an unfiltered smoke of anything
Of course now I don't have really hard days a glass of pinot noir does just as well -
So I'd vote in favour of it being served in cannabis R18 or similar cafes, rather than legalised for general private use.
This, to me, seems the obvious short-to-medium term solution. Good for tourism too :) Long-term, as the population gets used to the idea and drug education is ramped up, I see decriminalisation as inevitable.
Prohibition of cannabis in NZ is demonstrably ineffective and, with regard to alcohol, hypocritical in the extreme. Especially so when looking at the relative social harm the abuse of each substance causes.
My mother drank herself to death over 30 yrs. I often wonder what her life would have been like if she'd had pot as a legal/medical substitute.
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legally permitting adults the option of using a demonstratively safer drug – like cannabis – instead.
The last word here is the magic one: "instead".
Why do you think that people would take up cannabis as a replacement for alcohol? It seems more likely to me that cannabis would be a replacement for nicotine, and people would smoke it as well as drinking.
What do the studies say about combining cannabis with alcohol?
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