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Archive for the ‘Govt Drug Policy’ Category

Police Racist Ageist and Naive

February 21, 2009

photo: Blair Anderson of the MildGreens Initiative with
Sandeep Chawla, Director, Policy Analysis and Public Affairs, UNODC

The media hullabaloo around legalisers and drug policy in the lead up to the Te Papa “Healthy

Image via Wikipedia

Drug Law” [mischaracterised as a] symposium was nonconstructive with National and Labour naively entrenching their positions and then Police issuing one of the most blatantly racist and ageist reports since they covered up ‘Harvey Thomas’! (NZ Police: Illicit Drug Strategy to 2010).

Why any government agency or NGO paid $850/pp to hear that unmitigated fraud (stating cannabis is bigger problem than Methamphatamine and is both a gateway drug and criminogenic) beggars me.

Image via Wikipedia

While the two big players at the select committee tables (and Peter Dunne with less than 1% of the party vote) remain seemingly ignorant of the implications of the unintended consequences of a criminal policy that ‘creates crime where there would be none’ – we are destined to continue the inefficiency that is so socially debilitating that it an impediment to anti-recession initiatives while making society sick, unsafe and dysfunctional…. and prisons swell at the seams.

Consider this private email to the writer from a USA State Senator; “With disbelief I read your Class D regulations for “restricted substances.” “It’s such a useful model – I still can’t believe you’ve actually set up this rational structure. Let’s see what happens when you try to get cannabis classified…” sig: Senator Roger Goodman, WA.

Yet Class D as a ‘partial prohibition’ was barely mentioned in Wellington, not by Police, not by Health sector, not by visitors, not by the NGO’s nor by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime[UNODC]… and certainly not in the context of a post prohibition paradigm.

Image via Wikipedia

We shouldn’t be surprised, the only Kiwi with a “Class D” brief at Te Papa was warned off at the door by the National Drug Intelligence Bureau Chief… under duress of arrest.

The New Zealand Drug Foundation should be embarrassed.

The exclusion from the debate was in direct breach of Ottawa Charter principles and ‘good faith’ with its own participation in and organisation of the Beyond2008 UN NGO consultations that highlighted the important role of ‘drug consumer’ representation and that drug policy is a human rights/health matter above all else.

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com/

Those Scots!, So Pragmatic about Street Disorder

June 9, 2008

Image via Wikipedia Forum sets out radical drugs plan

A report published by a Scottish Parliament-backed think tank has called for radical new ways to tackle the damage done by drugs and alcohol. Recommendations include the setting up of “consumption rooms” where addicts would be able to take drugs safely, and for heroin to be prescribed to users.

The report also suggested the taxation of cannabis to enable it to be more tightly regulated.

The Scotland’s Futures Forum was asked to look at ways of tackling addiction.

The think tank was established by the parliament and was tasked with looking at the challenges facing Scotland, and seeking ways to meet those challenges.

In this latest report it asked how the damage caused by alcohol and drugs in Scotland could be halved by 2025.

It said drug use had been historically seen as a justice issue but should be treated as a health, lifestyle and social challenge.

The report said a greater proportion of resources should be allocated to treatment research, monitoring and evaluation.

It examined the idea of drug consumption rooms and heroin-assisted treatment to combat the high levels of drug-related deaths and hepatitis C infection.

It also studied law enforcement and found prison unproductive and unsustainable for low-level alcohol and drug offences.

The forum believes cannabis should be taxed and highly regulated to help reduce availability and harm.

Former health minister Susan Deacon, who is now professor of social change at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, said it was important to be “open-minded” about the possible solutions to the drugs problem.

She said: “No-one is saying that there should not be an important enforcement element in drugs policy or the justice system does not have a role to play but I think there is widespread concern that there has been a disproportionate emphasis on criminal justice issues.

“We must look at drugs, alcohol and wider addiction problems as being health and social matters not simply matters which should be looked at within our criminal justice system.”

Canadian Senator Larry Campbell, who was behind the setting up of injection sites in Vancouver in 2003, said addiction should be treated as an illness.

He said: “We have 600 injections a day on average, we have had over 1,000 overdoses in the clinic, and we have never had one person die. – If they had been injecting in an alley or in a room by themselves, we would have had a number of people dead. – Secondly we have seen our HIV and hepatitis rates stabilise because they are not using dirty needles.”

He also added that more people were getting treatment for addiction, and street disorder had decreased as a result of the injection rooms.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/scotland/7442773.stm

Posted in drug policy, Govt Drug Policy, InSite, Larry Campbell, LEAP, Scottish Parliament, ThinkTank, Vancouver | Leave a Comment »

insightful.courageous.elegant.erudite.com(entary)

February 7, 2008

This extract is highly relevent to New Zealand citizens who have been subject to Waitangi Day (and Bob Marley’s birthday) ‘helicopter’ cannabis overhead spray regimes predicated on, according to police spokespersons, ‘the association between cannabis cultivation and organised crime’.

As the drug debate progresses in the UK with the AMCD review, there is also the Vancouver Forum on internatiopnal drug policy this week. A pity that the Law Commission didnt have anyone there. The MildGreens were represented by way of USA Greens champion Clifford Wallace Thornton jr. and LEAP, now with 10,000 ‘law enforcement’ membership.

Forum organizers noted that “over-reliance on law enforcement” criminalizes drug users unnecessarily, “fuels the drug economy and the black market, aids organized crime and terrorists [dependent on income from drug crops] and disproportionately targets poor people of colour.”

He [Former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen] noted that 220 U.S. mayors at a conference last June “agreed unanimously the war on drugs is not working.”

“Cops are so concerned about being labelled soft on drugs, soft on crime, and that next promotion, that we don’t even talk to our peers about what we believe.” /Jack Cole

There will be more to report on Vancouver in due course. /Blair

Meanwhile consider this insightful.courageous.elegant.erudite.com(entary)……

It is about time that policy makers woke up to the fact that a single mechanism linking damage to health with criminal punishment, as enshrined in the Misuse of Drugs Act, is entirely illogical. By all means reclassify cannabis. Reclassify all drugs. legal and illegal, according to the harm they can do. That’s one debate and of itself it is hardly straightforward. But deal with the criminal justice implications separately.

These two considerations have nothing to do with each other, and the link between them is entirely abstract, completely fatuous and vastly distorting. So much damage has already been done through the creation of the illegal market for drugs that it is hard to see exactly how to undo it. But dividing consumer health issues from supplier criminality issues would be a modest and entirely sensible start.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/openhouse/2008/02/an-unhealthy-de.html

The costs associated with the control, monitoring, and enforcement of international drug laws add ‘less and less to the benefits achieved and more and more to the cost to society. Ultimately, the costs outweigh the benefits’

(Gardner 1993: 308). http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/rpp/81/rpp81.pdf (
The market for amphetamine-type stimulants and their precursors in Oceania, the production, trafficking, importation, and consumption of ATS.,
Published by the Australian Institute of Criminology. Chapter: Conclusions)

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com

Posted in Efficacy, Govt Drug Policy, Law Commission Review, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, LEAP | Leave a Comment »

Drugs strategy debate ‘is a sham’

October 21, 2007

“‘Prohibition’s failure is now widely understood and acknowledged among key stakeholders in the debate… the political benefits of pursuing prohibition are now waning and the political costs of its continuation are becoming unsustainable.”

other highlights that have high relevence to the current New Zealand drug policy ‘situation’ / Blair

current policy is fuelling a crime epidemic.

drug prohibition has allowed organised crime to control the market and criminalised millions of users, putting a huge strain on the justice system.

half of all property crime is linked to fundraising to buy illegal drugs.

police claim that drug markets are the main driver of the UK’s burgeoning gun culture.

Home Office survey, commissioned in 2000, which showed the social and economic costs … were costs to the victims of drug-related crime.

the consultation process has been a sham designed to stifle debate on drugs policy

Drugs strategy debate ‘is a sham’ Special reports Guardian Unlimited:

Posted in crime, drug policy, Govt Drug Policy, gun culture, politics, prohibition | 1 Comment »