Posts by Alfie
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Phillips Matthews in Stuff on Peter Dunne as the quiet drug reform visionary.
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Polity: Eleventy billion dollars!, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Which are the countries such a controlled experiment is happening?
I mentioned a few (with links) in the earlier thread. The Netherlands is conducting small scale trials, Finland is taking the issue seriously and will be trialling a system in 2017-18. Switzerland is due to have a referendum on UBI in June.
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
He said the Prime Minister didn't have copies of the text messages and couldn't remember the exact date.
After getting rapped over the knuckles with a wet bus ticket by Archives NZ last year for deleting incriminating texts between himself and Slater Junior, you'd think Key might have learned a lesson.
Unless of course he was wearing his I'm just a dickhead who knows famous sportspeople hat this time, in which case, that's apparently O'K.
I wonder if Key has his own milliner?
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There’s nothing like a major media outlet blowing its our own trumpet… but what a pity they’ve mispelt the sponsor’s name. Twice.
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Hard News: UNGASS and the "Drug Free…, in reply to Brent Jackson,
It's complicated Brent. Smoking any substance is really not that good for you so the smart people recommend vapourisers. Or edibles.
Or (cough, cough), both.
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Larry Williams is not the only person who is happy to ignore facts and go along with his gut feeling. When Colorado proposed legalising recreational sales back in 2012, a local sheriff made this prediction.
“Expect more crime, more kids using marijuana and pot for sale everywhere,” Douglas County Sheriff David Weaver said in 2012. “I think our entire state will pay the price.”
Happily, actual stats from Denver disprove the myth that legalisation leads to more crime. In fact they show that…
* There has been no increase in criminal activity
* Violent crime is down 3%
* Property crime is down more than 11%Then there’s the other side of the ledger.
For August, Colorado collected $11.2 million in recreational taxes and fees and $2.0 million in medical taxes and fees, bringing the 2015 cumulative revenue total to nearly $86.7 million. In 2014, total marijuana revenue was $76.2 million.
There’s a bunch of official Revenue Dept spreadsheets here for anyone who wants to dig deeper.
So tell me Larry, when your gut speaks to you, what does it use for a mouth?
Confession: I’ve shamelessly stolen the last line from Scott Adams – Dilbert -
While it’s good to hear O’Connor supporting the Colorado approach, he gets away with claiming that…
…people would use more drugs if the law was liberalised…
"So you get the worst of both worlds, where you get all the increased use, but you don’t decrease the damage to society.
But he fails to provide a shred of evidence to back up that sweeping statement, when in fact the Amsterdam experiment has proved exactly the opposite. Despite weed being quasi-legal in that country since 1976, the number of young people who choose to smoke is less than in any other European country. As an example, the rate of marijuana use in France is twice that of the Netherlands.
Right winger Larry Williams takes this myth to a whole new level.
If its legal, it’s cheaper, and it stands to reason more drugs will be consumed, more young people will experiment. It follows that more consumption means more addicts, and more crime.
Sadly, the best Labour have come up with is "Don’t know". Doh!
Once again, I hope that the media don’t seize on these uninformed comments and turn them into fact. But I’m not holding my breath.
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The Herald reports that robberies targetting tobacco are on the increase. That's pretty predictable when you raise the price of a product so much, but guess who they asked for comment? Jordan Williams with the usual raising taxes doesn't work line.
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The Herald has a decent little story on how much various degrees earn which shows that entering the preforming arts may not be the best idea.
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There's more on the Government relaxing a little about cannabis on Stuff, including a poll which asks, Are you in favour of a softening in stance for minor drug offenses? At this early stage it's 89% in favour.
There's an odd quote from Jonathan Coleman.
"I think we've got too many drugs in society. Cannabis is very carcinogenic - I don't think it'd be a great thing to have more people smoking more cannabis," Coleman said.
Dr Colman claims that weed is not only carcinogenic but very carcinogenic. That sounds serious. As a medical doctor and Health Minister you might expect Colman to be well-informed on this subject, or perhaps not. Cancer Research UK says it's complicated but cites a NZ study.
A New Zealand study in 2008 compared people with lung cancer to people who did not have lung cancer and found that regular cannabis use does increase the risk of lung cancer.
Our own Drug Foundation pretty much debunks this myth (thanks Ross), and refers to a three decade study by Donald Tashkin of the University of California which concluded, "even smoking as many as 20,000 cannabis joints does not increase the risk of lung cancer."
Tashkin's study goes further, speculating that cannabis could even have a positive effect on the health of a smoker’s lungs.
The active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol or THC may have an “anti-tumoural effect” in which cells die before they age enough to develop mutations that might lead to lung cancer.
I'd rather government ministers based decisions on fact, rather than philosophy. This appears to be a drugs R bad view, rather than a strongly-held anti-smoking belief. After all, Dr. Colman blew cigar smoke at a woman during a U2 concert in 2006, while sitting in a corporate box as a guest of... wait for it... British American Tobacco.
