Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
You need to contrast between those sent to prison for drug possession alone, and those sent to prison for burglary and drug possession or receiving stolen goods and drug possession.
Why does he need to contrast that? They are still serving time in prison for drug possession. Beginning and end of the story of people being in prison for drug possession. If this was not against the law, they'd be out of jail sooner. The amount of time spent in jail for cannabis is a real thing, real people's lives rotting in jail over something millions of NZers have done regularly. By all means wait 20 days to find out how much of a distinction that is, but Bomber's point stands - a lot of people are doing time for dope possession. They didn't get extra time for the booze found in their house.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Tim Michie,
Drug use is a health issue, and a personal liberty issue. That second part of it got eroded to being worth nearly zero, before being called by the umpire as now officially zero. I think the new name for Dunne should be "Silver Hammer".
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Hard News: Jones: The contender leaves, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I’ll be voting Green, although if they flex their backbones and support prohibition-under-urgency, it’ll be Dotcom/Mana getting my vote, money and possible shoe-leather.
I'd expect Mana to support it. So you got Dotcom (who can't even stand) or ACT (who you can't stand). In other words, you got bupkis.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Russell Brown,
I want to see drug use decriminalised but I’m also fine with the state having a regulatory role the way way it does with the food we eat.
A regulatory role, sure. But this regulatory role, no. I'm very much not fine with that.
I’ve always been pretty clear that the PSA on its own and as it stands was never enough
I know. It's not your fault. To me it's like refusing to fight someone who is pushing you into a corner, yelling in your face, and lining you up for the big shot. At no point did you ask for the big shot. But pardon me for not being surprised to see it coming.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Russell Brown,
I did say “elephant in the room style”. It could be done without that. It’s how it’s being done* in NZ that I’m referring to.
It seems better than just waiting for things to improve after the prohibitionist apocalypse. But, then, I’ve always been a dirty incrementalist.
Well, now we’ve got prohibition. That’s what they think of your incrementalism.
*ETA: Sorry, make that "how it was done". I'm still struggling to get my head around the fact that they just announced an intention to make every psychoactive substance illegal. Except, of course, the two that kill the most people by far, tobacco and alcohol. Oh and coffee. We've still got coffee. For now.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Idiot Savant,
The OIA will tell us whether he’s lying about the timing or not
Yes, it would be good to go from 99.9% sure he's a liar to 99.99% sure. That's incremental progress right there.
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The silver lining is the philosophical bankruptcy of harm reduction policy (elephant in the room style) has finally had the creditors called in. It's a bit like seeing Dunkirk as a step forward. Finally, we're in a position to call an end. Not the beginning of the end...that's still a long way off. That's where America is. We're at the end of the beginning.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to George Darroch,
Seize on suspicion, test.
The time, effort, and cost required to do this are considerable. Which means it is likely that only those who are in possession of quantities for supply, or who have other already illegal drugs, would be tested and then charged.
Yes, it's quite simple. With respect to drugs, the presumption of innocence, that golden thread in our legal system, is finished. This is the very same bunch of policies that not 3 days ago were being heralded on this very thread as amazingly progressive.
Whoever thought that got played. It was never about making some drugs legal or decriminalized based on harm. It was about making all drugs illegal. The only thing that's surprising in this move is that anyone would not have seen it coming. That a whole lot of really intelligent people didn't is actually astonishing. I guess the genius was the allure of "incremental" policy. It sound soooo scientific, so reasonable. Doesn't matter that every increment was predicated on the elephant in the room every time, so that no meaningful increments could be made, indeed only bad increments with a very slow dripfeed of increasing harm, could be.
Here we are now. Prohibition is back. Nice one.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Chris Waugh,
though methanol seems to be the most common cause of alcohol-other-than-ethanol related trouble
Yes, it's usually present in distilled alcohol (because it was present in the original base, whatever that was), and can be separated somewhat by taking the very first small amount of distillate and keeping it separately. The methanol evaporates at a lower temperature. People who home-still call this the "heads". Don't drink the heads! It's meths! I think most of them throw it away, but it could be tempting to keep and easily mistaken for ethyl alcohol.
But you should also know that this methanol is present in almost all non-distilled alcohol. It's just in a very low concentration. And that's what the toxicity issue around alcohol come down to, concentration. The small amount of methanol in your beer won't do you any harm. But if you drink the first 50ml off your still batch, you'll poison yourself. Similarly, if you distilled 90% pure ethanol, achievable by re-distilling the distillate, maybe even more than once, you'll have something that is only safe to drink if you water it down substantially. And that is how people get poisoned with ethanol.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to ,
What I am trying to point out is that cannabis can not be a medication in its raw form.
I give you that it's a much less precise thing when smoked as a plant. But whether that means it can be a medication or not? Pretty much a semantic distinction.
It is possible to grow it with differing amounts of THC or CBD, depending which you want. But yes, it would be clearer what chemical you were getting if that chemical were actually extracted and delivered in a purer form.
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