> Commercial cannabis and medicinal suicide here we come.

We can but hope. We're all aware of the plethora of prohibition-related harms that disappeared when alcohol was legalized and the market in it regulated, and no surprises that we've seen the same thing in jurisdictions that have legalized and regulated the cannabis market. As for the assisted dying debate, those looking for a moral compass could do worse than Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/07/desmond-tutu-assisted-dying-world-leaders-should-take-action

> there needs to a substantial concurrent increase in mental health funding for areas which deal with the mental health issues associated with marijuana.

I agree that funding for mental health needs to increase, and some of the tax take from regulated cannabis businesses can and should be deployed that way. But to the degree that cannabis use increases with the end of prohibition, it will be displacing drugs like synthetics and P, which people end up using when their dealers can't get cannabis, and which are much more harmful to mental health. So the net effect of cannabis legalization would be an improvement in overall mental health outcomes, even before you factor in the funding it makes available to government.

> I hope its lower than that! $100 for 14g seems more reasonable to me

Regulated cannabis businesses - both cultivation and retail - will have to start paying normal business taxes (income, GST, PAYE for employees etc), and possibly a further luxury tax (like that on alcohol and tobacco), so it's unlikely that the price will drop at all. On the other hand, they will be competing with both the remaining black market (in the shorter term), and home growing (in the longer term), so that will put a ceiling on the retail price the new, legal market will bear. Overall, it seems likely that prices will stay pretty close to what they are now.

> I wonder how many people will actually cast their votes on this basis? My pick is, not many. It certainly hasn't helped the Greens in the past.

In their first MMP election after leaving the Alliance the Greens only just scraped in over the 5% threshold on special votes, thanks to getting a large chunk of the votes the Cannabis Party got in the previous election. Jenny Shipley publicly lambasted the Greens for their cannabis decrim policy, thinking it would hurt them. She couldn't have been more wrong.

The Greens have also regularly attracted votes from young libertarians who understand that the Greens are actually much more sincerely libertarian than ACT, and cannabis policy has been an important test of that for them.

List MPs votes belong not to them, but to the party they represent. It always seemed logical to me that if a list MP resigns, or is sacked by their party, the next person on the list should take their seat. Electorate MPs are a different kettle of fish. They are elected to represent the people of that electorate, not their party, and I'm disturbed to discover that the "waka jumping" bill covers them too. Finally the criticisms of the Greens for supporting it make sense, and I would like to see them support the bill only if it's amended to exclude electorate MPs.

Earth to David Fergusson: Cannabis is less dangerous than tobacco:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306460313000257

Tobacco is legal. Cannabis is illegal. Explain again why you are not either supporting cannabis legalization, or calling for prohibition of tobacco? Oh yes, confirmation bias. Maybe you need to see a pschologist...

That video looks like something from the Onion. Suspicious hamster is suspicious...

@Ross Bell
That's a fascinating article, but it does frustrate me when journos make things up:
"The policy implications are unexpected. Quite apart from any other effects, decriminalisation could have a significant negative economic impact on vulnerable regions. Eliminating the risk of prosecution would drive the price of cannabis through the basement. After all, in a legal market, growing cannabis would not be difficult or expensive."

This guy doesn't even understand basic economics. Assuming the demand is going to be about the same, maybe slightly higher at first (by all means challenge me if you don't think that's a sound assumption), if supply started shooting up, and prices went down, fewer people would bother growing. Eventually it would find a point of compromise between what customers want to pay, and what makes it worth a grower's while to bother - that's how markets work. I suspect the average price would probably not be that far from the current price, although the Amsterdam experience suggests there would be a greater range of type and quality, and a range of prices along that spectrum.

Secondly, if there is a lot more pot around, the same people will buy it (by and large), and their spending power isn't changing. So what will happen is that they will buy the higher quality product from what's available, and the buried crap that people currently buy just before harvest time won't get bought (likely it'll just get smoked by the growers and their mates, handed around in big joints at parties etc).

Thirdly, he doesn't understand the flow of money through the economy. Currently, the cannabis market is one mechanism by which money from the city returns to marginal populations in the rural areas. The city is where most of the people who want cannabis are, and the country is the easiest place to increase cultivation. So even if he's right that cultivation increases (that's not a given, and depends on the regulatory framework that replaces prohibition), the only way law change would change the flow of money to those communities is if corporations are allowed to monopolize growing. This may be acceptable to the neoliberals among us, but I highly doubt it will be part of any imminent law change.

"Cannabis use has the biggest economic impact on people with the lowest incomes – in that group, one in ten smokers spent a fifth of their income supporting their habit. Both buyers and dealers who spent more than 10 per cent of their income on cannabis were four times more likely to be unemployed than the rest of the population."

This is misleading too. Reverse the order of that last sentence:
"Both buyers and dealers who were unemployed were four times more likely to be spending more than 10 per cent of their income on cannabis than the rest of the population."

They aren't necessarily spending more, you see, it's just a higher proportion of the pittance they live on than it is for employed, middle class smokers. Also, see what a difference to the perceived cause and effect relationship it makes when you put it that way? The journo's sentence implies (without actually claiming it) that they are unemployed *because* they spend such a high proportion of their income on cannabis. Bullshit.

Besides, these are the people who, without prohibition, would be growing their own, instead of paying for it, but they're stuck in the city looking for a job, so they have to buy it.

Then there's this from Dennis O'Reilly, who should know better (or maybe he does and the journo has reworded it):
“That’s where you’ll get someone who’ll score an ounce off a cuzzy and break it into foils to sell off to satisfy their habit as well as make some money.”

What he's describing is a basically an informal consumer coop, like when people group together to buy flour and other dry goods in bulk from a wholesaler, so they all get it cheaper, and maybe pay one person a bit of a commission for doing all the admin and running around, allowing his "satisfy his habit" for food. Amazing the power of words to make something relatively benign sound like something shady (remember: overeating and poor diet kills more people than cannabis).

Kia ora Russell, I heard this story on Radio1, thanks for documenting it online. 10CC taking TTHW's money for folking up Dreadlock Holiday is like suing a busker for belting out 'Stairway...' on a Saturday night in town. There's no way Hip-Hop Holiday could have been mistaken for the original, or sold to the same audience. Like the Fugees cover of Killing Me Softly, most of the groups fans probably never knew it was cover from 10-20 years before - musically a whole different generation.

I have to say it's cheeky of Amplifier to charge $20 for a handful of MP3 files. I might pay money for FLAC files (or some other lossless open format), but probably not $20, and I'd certainly pay for a record or a t-shirt, but charging people for MP3 files is like charging them for listening to the radio. Why not just host BitTorrent webseeds on the site, so people can come to the offical site to download their preview version, and see what a good deal the paid merch is...