Posts by chris
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
legalising cannabis might cut alcohol consumption.
And why stop there? It stands to reason that P use may decline considerably were it competing in a marketplace with half a dozen legal alternatives.
Yet there's still the sense that this is attacking the symptoms rather than the cause, as Kapka Kassabova pointed out "It is said that Europeans drink to enhance consciousness, while the English drink to annihilate it", What is New Zealand's beef with consciousness?
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Tom Semmens,
nowadays almost the entire British political elite is narrowly drawn from those who matriculated at the Oxbridge universities.
As has always been the case.
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Hard News: Women and their representations, in reply to Jackie Clark,
The words “weight loss” are so ingrained in our culture. Every one talks about losing weight,
It's horrifying the way this ideal pervades, I got so self conscious I had to stop reading Graeme Tuckett's reviews:
"flabby-minded thinking of the worst kind".
some flabby direction and uncommitted support work
The twists are flabby and often pointless
Some names I'd have liked to have seen: Norma McCulloch, Frances Hodgkins, Robin Hyde and Keri Hulme. I'm pleased Georgina Beyer was involved, and yes to Margaret Mahy Hillary!
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to BenWilson,
class
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Russell Brown,
So I’m saying we need to stop fiddling with the law and start taking a good, hard look at the cultural and societal factors behind NZ’s drinking problems.
That's bang on. Sorry my last comment was in reply to Tom, I'm not sure what happened there.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to chris,
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. Are you suggesting we need a totalitarian government that happily butchers it own people and lets gangs of xenophobic goons beat up women in the street for being out with a foreigner?
I possibly should have mentioned that the foreigner in question, a wan yet Kong fu infused public schoolish Englishman chased down one of the attackers who was then arrested, dealt with by the standard Confucian restorative justice program, served time, and was subsequently released, his family and 'friends' paid the $12,000 to replace the tooth.
Tom your response brings to mind a 2004 case of two New Zealanders arrested here for being drunk and disorderly, one of whom wished to test these very boundaries by ripping open a policeman's poorly tailored vestment, buttons flew, as did the culprits on the next plane home.
Our young people “act out/up” because they can do so in the knowledge that if they are arrested due process will be followed and they are completely without fear of arbitrary and savage extra-judicial state brutality.
New Zealanders sticking it to the man? Even post Arie Smith-Voorkamp? I'd posit the phenomena is more closely related to the average kiwi male's difficulty expressing himself intelligently and articulately in what is still a largely repressively conformist society. As Lilith and Islander observed and as Russell touched upon:
The news media need to be wary of depicting any unconstrained behaviour as a threat -- the Herald ran a pic with a similar story last week that showed a crowd of people in Vulcan Lane.
On that note one has to wonder what the mayor is getting at with:
Mr Brown and Mr Coster drive up to Karangahape Rd. A transvestite in a blue sequined dress, 15cm heels and a blonde wig walks out of the Family Bar and Mr Brown averts his eyes.
Given that the continuing theme was mess and mayhem one can only assume that her hairpiece must have been all over the show, otherwise I can't see why it deserves a mention, except of course to highlight that Mayor Brown is not down with the T. Back of the net for normalcy.
Thanks Ben for responding to Tom's 'butchering' et al. .
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Hard News: The Perfect Drug, in reply to TracyMac,
Indeed Tracy. For the alcohol comparison I found:
"there were between 2205 and 2512 cannabis-related admissions to publicly-funded hospitals between 2001 and 2005.|there were between 2205 and 2512 cannabis-related admissions to publicly-funded hospitals between 2001 and 2005…
… But the Drug Harm Index shows cannabis is the most widely used illegal drug in the country, with 373,310 users – well above the next most popular drug, amphetamines, with 95,170 users."
"A total of 5,413 young people were hospitalised with alcohol-related admissions between 2002 and 2006"
[Alcohol Harm in New Zealand]
In fairness to the police they do refrain from specifying direct causality: ‘involved’ ‘related’ are conveniently loose terms, I think there’s something in that:
Perhaps Detective Sergeant Graham Pitkethley of the Waikato Crime Control Unit sheds some light on elements of this involvement/relationship:
… And it’s not just rural areas at risk, late last year emergency services were called to properties in Dinsdale and nearby Whatawhata after explosions while offenders were making cannabis oil….
… Waikato having one of the country’s highest levels of cannabis related hospital admissions”
Certainly in the cases of Detective Travis Hughes and Christopher Scott, killed when their Cessna 172 crashed in Central Otago while on cannabis reconnaissance, Detective Tony Harrod died falling from a helicopter sling recovering plants in Taranaki and Senior Constable Len Snee killed executing a cannabis search warrant on Jan Molenaar, cannabis decriminalisation would have delivered different outcomes.
In the Operation Foxy report the last paragraph in particular stood out for me:
"Operation Foxy should send a clear message to those involved in such activity that if you are accumulating wealth, we will pursue all possible avenues in holding you to account and seize any assets gained from that activity.”
After all, of any group in New Zealand, it is the police who are most acutely aware of the fact that despite inflated street values, the proliferation of this abundant wind-pollinated flowering plant with no actual monetary value is not merely unstoppable, but in concert with unfeasible legislation – potentially lethal.
In this way:
“purchasers often divert income from other every day necessities required to support their families.”
could be taken as a veiled comment on the social toll of prohibition. I would hazard a guess that a decent number of police would support the decriminalisation of cannabis and I feel it’s perhaps unfair to lay much on officers whose hands are professionally tied, when culpability lies squarely and quite clearly with successive Governments.
New Zealand Governments have stood back and watched billions of New Zealand dollars squandered on the black market. They have allowed gangs to expand and multiply. These respective individuals and parties have stood idly by while police and members of the community have been senselessly injured and killed. It’s high time they owned this.
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lack of public drunken aggro is nice
it really is aye. In urban areas the madness of the day complemented by the tranquility of the evenings seems almost diametrically opposed to the goings on in NZ. I recall you making a sound point last year that a lot of drinking is done fairly convivially with a meal, it got me wondering why the tribal NZer/westerner has this strange tendency not simply to get drunk but to ‘act out/ up’, there is a degree of self discipline or social responsibility that remains intact here despite intoxication levels (if only to be unleashed behind closed doors), perhaps it’s just a ghost of the June 4 demon, I don’t know, European comparisons come to mind. and yes Sanlitun… <grumble>.
some sobering stats (scroll down for NZ)
https://www.anzpaa.org.au/current-initiatives/operation-unite/alcohol-misuse-statistics -
Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Chris Waugh,
As you say there’s certainly considerably less public violence Chris, I feel safe on the streets here, the last time I was in Auckland I didn’t feel safe enough to go into town. The only instance of drunken stranger on stranger violence I can recall in Beijing was in Dong Cheng, a group of hooligans bottling a friend’s wife, knocking out her tooth, allegedly for being with a foreigner at a restaurant. I am concerned that in it is a little too easy to overlook the ever pervasive “家丑不可外扬” <home ugliness can not be scattered>- “what happens in the home stays in the home” mentality.
How much of that can be attributed to alcohol remains moot but it stands to reason that it must be an aggravating factor to some extent.
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Hard News: The Perfect Drug, in reply to chris,
This may be a superior rundown on THC:CBD ratios. My apologies for any inaccuracies