NZ Police Intel ‘New Cannabis’

The 102 page report is on the Police website at

http://www.police.govt.nz/resources/2008/Cannabis_Strategic_Assessment_Final3_2007_mirror.pdf

It is written in the traditional Image via Wikipediaprohibitionist style, is poorly referenced, makes numerous sweeping declarations (one sample 4.2.4 below), and is effectively a call to arms against cannabis, and by implication, the cannabis law reform movement.

It makes use of SHORE’s data, cherry picks a little from others, but treats statements by the INCB, Kofi Annan, Mario Costa as data.

Some sections, including some recommendations , are withheld , under the OIA act. (heads up thanks to BrandonH)

4.2.4 Cannabis Hospital Admissions by Gender and Age

The abuse of cannabis by young New Zealanders is a key focus of this assessment primarily because of the widely held perception that cannabis is a harmless drug. Many young people know national policies on cannabis vary from country to country that includes partial legalisation in some countries which portrays confusing and conflicting messages about the perceived harms posed by cannabis. Such messages ultimately undermine the credibility of the international drug control system and the findings of inquiries such as the 2003 Health Select Committee Inquiry Report on Cannabis

A keen observer of the human condition would clearly identify the acute irony in this Police interpretation of the 2003 Health Select Committee report.

extract:

“Based on the evidence we have heard in the course of this inquiry,” the committee concluded, “the negative mental health impact of cannabis appears to have been overstated, particularly in relation to occasional adult users of the drug.” “Evidence received in the course of this inquiry has raised serious doubts about commonly held beliefs about cannabis,” wrote the committee. “Evidence received during the inquiry supports the view that there can be subtle cognitive impairment in cannabis users,” the report says. In this respect, the committee drew to a large extent on the work of Prof. Wayne Hall of the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, who was commissioned to report on scientific research in this area. He found that long-term use of cannabis may cause subtle impairment in the higher cognitive functions of memory, attention and the organisation and integration of complex information. The committee said the evidence also suggested that cannabis did not cause behavioral difficulties, but rather that cannabis was frequently used by youths who misbehaved; neither was it a cause of suicide. “

Perhaps if Police Intel would read BHO’s quote heading this blog then they might acquire some ‘intelligence’ they seem to seek. (on our tick at that!)

“Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology,” – Pres Elect, B. Obama

If Police Intel would like to pay me $600wk for ten years, I would inform ‘them what is wrong with their strategic assessment , and who said it’. /Blair

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Experts pretend black cannabis trade harmless….

“The economic characteristics of the cannabis black market suggest it may only generate a low to moderate social harm. The relatively low black market price of cannabis, and the personalised nature of transactions, mean the retail market generates relatively little violence or public nuisance.”

(May 2001, para 22, A Submission to the Health Select Committee Inquiry into the Public Health Effects and Legal Status of Cannabis. Alcohol & Public Health Research Unit Runanga, Wananga, Hauora me te Paekaka Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland.)

Insert image of 14 year old South Auckland boy, hammered to death in front of his whanau for a cannabis tinnie!

Quite some precautionary principle!

“Family members have told how John, his mother and two of his friends were at home in Justamere Place, Weymouth, when two masked men burst in through the back door. The friends were celebrating a birthday.
John’s mother ordered the gatecrashers to leave, but they later returned and attacked John outside. The mother of a boy who saw the bashing said one of the attackers was carrying a hammer and the other a gun. John died that night of bluntforce trauma to the back of his head.” – http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10528811

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com

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Why is the youth vote so hard to crack?

The Dominion Post asked in an oped…

“About 95,000 Kiwis aged 18-24 are still not enrolled to vote. Why don’t young people vote and why don’t they care?” – KERRY WILLIAMSON – The Dominion Post Saturday, 04 October 2008

With young folk polling around 80% in the consumption of cannabis stakes – no wonder they are disillusioned with politics today. Not for the reason that the ageist prejudiced might first think either… for *every one of ‘that demographic’ who are under duress of criminal sanction even if arbitrary, a law that parliament has twice ‘set aside resolving in coalition agreements with parties that between them are polling less than half a percent between them.’ – And we ask why are young alienated… fur’chris’ake?

(*including those who don’t smoke pot, after all, it is politicians who would declare that it is the ‘law’ that prevents them from so doing, otherwise cannabis would be tantamount to compulsory. Yet the herb couldn’t be more popular if it were made so, or more culturally imbued in art, music, theatre, television and movies… )

What is needed to capture youth votes is a real NZ Green Billboard promoting homegrown solutions. (and a media that would tell the truth, when have you seen journalists ask our wannabe leadership tackle this one)

– don’t laugh, 1999 saw Jenny Shipley die in the polls after failing to tell the truth when questioned alongside Jeanette Fitzsimmons by Paul Holmes – Check the Waikato University analysis. Nationals wheels fell off – Nov 16, ‘not over my dead body’ Shipley denied due process and the recommendations of the National lead “Brian Nesson” Health Select Committee – ‘to review the law’ – for political expediency. She could have Jenny and Bill,
and the drugs we drink!looked to her own kids for some advice… they had more experience ‘in this matter’ than she may have cared to acknowledge parentally or politically.

Youth have had ten more years of double standards (and repeated coalition agreements) to be aggrieved but not one politician has been asking why…… tens of thousands of arrests every year… unpublished ‘tough on non-crime hypocrisy!’

How come its not OK to ‘correct your own kids’ but the state can abuse them arbitrarily with incarceration and cuff-links for a non-crime?

This is one law that is racist, ageist and sexist in its application… and young people are rightly ‘turned off’ by this white privilege shite.

It is time for some social ecology driven ‘protect our youth’ drug law reform, it is the stuff of social capital.

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

• Modern Day Slavery: Racism in the Drug War
• This is Your Nation on White Privilege

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ALCP Challenges Government to show some spine

ALCP calls on the Labour-led government to include a question in the next postal referendum, that asks New Zealanders to vote on the legality of cannabis.

Press Release: Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party
Tuesday, 26 August 2008

ALCP challenges the Labour government to finally act on it’s two Health select Committees findings into the harms of cannabis, The 2003 cannabis inquiry received 532 written submissions, with 78 percent of those supported changes to the current way cannabis is managed. Only 17 percent supported the continuation of prohibition. The study concluded that the government “…should reconsider the legal status of cannabis.”

ALCP Spokesperson, Steven Wilkinson says “This country has legalised prostitution, homosexuality, and acknowledges same-sex marriages. It is time time to deal with society’s last great hypocrisy, the prohibition of cannabis. Regulation is the mature and intelligent way for society to handle the drug cannabis. he said.

ALCP calls for a question to be added into the next referendum, asking New Zealanders how they think cannabis should be managed, through prohibition or regulation?

The recently released ‘New Zealand Illicit Drug Harm Index’, paid for by the New Zealand Police, shows the cost of prohibition exceeds 115 million dollars, while the actual cost of cannabis to society is only 67.3 million. Steven Wilkinson says “Where is the logic in spending more to prohibit cannabis, than the social cost to society from cannabis?”

ALCP feels its high time for New Zealand to have a say in how this drug is managed in society. The referendum would allow normal people to have their say without the fear of stigmatisation, and be heard by representatives who are expected to act on their wishes.

Mr Wilkinson said “This issue needs no petition when over 370,000 New Zealanders used cannabis in 2006. The jury is in, the studies are done. Now is the time to act.

Steven Wilkinson says “Does Labour have the mettle to shake off the shackles of that flotilla of parasite parties and do one last bold act. Include the cannabis question in the referendum”.

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Human Rights a Drug War Casualty

Image via Wikipedia The drug war’s dirty washing is exhibited everyday in popular media, absent scrutiny or oversight from academic or civil society.

I suspect all those living in this institution we call New Zealand would be generally appalled if it were argued that by our collective (in)actions we were held to be unfit members of the UN, yet everyday we incarcerate and continue to deprive the freedom of thousands of people in the name of compliance with one UN “Single Convention” – and to what end?

I have on many occasions raised the glaring human rights anomaly with government select committee and commissions including the NZ Human Rights Commissioner Rosslyn Noonan.

It has been the character of the response that ‘drugs are illegal’ and that people may choose not to consume them, thus consumption or possession is not a ‘rights issue’, rather society has the preeminent right to be protected from drugs’ harms and consumers. Else why the law?

This is wrong. It doesn’t matter how one spins the moral probity of drugs on society and the self, it is still wrong. It is not a little wrong, nor is it a little right. It is neither gray nor fudgeable. UN Drug policy focused on punitive ‘consequences’ purportedly sending signals to some market has delivered the very market it set out to eliminate. It is a policy that is condemned by its own failure that one can legitimately ask “what is the moral probity of those who maintain it?”
.
This week past has seen ‘tit for tat’ claims and counter-claims surrounding Shapelle Corby’s kilo’s. Another, incarcerated for 20 years for possessing enough methamphetamine one could sneeze and the evidence would have been mere vapours. Yet another, a candidate whom has stood his good name before his electorate and has politically and actively engaged for reasoned drug policy now stands charged with possession of 1.6grams of cannabis plant (ESR weighed it)material – doubtless with ‘active’ THC in nanogram quantities. All this in the same week that the Health Select Committee was hearing from NORML and others about the undoubted efficacy of the herb. [Sativex/Marinol proves the lie]. Methamphetamine is a prescription drug so safe it is given to Children (Ritalin) and to stroke sufferers. It’s prevalence and associated harms are a product of the very rules intended to protects us. There is little in the pharmacology of methamphetamine that redeems it as an ‘illegal stimulant’. It is not a good drug by any means.. but the more dangerous a drug is the less responsible it is of governments to abrogate its control, distribution, profits and quality to unaccountable networks.

So do drug users have human rights? or are we to maintain the notion that 52% of adult NZer’s are so craven that they should be deprived of their liberty, possessions and future options simply because we REFUSE TO BELEIVE they, drugs or consumers have any worth. For that is the PREJUDICE masked by this LAW. It is wrong. It must change. It is institutionalised ‘othering’ of people’s master status expressly prohibited under UN Charter. Discussion within the community is no longer avoidable. Civil Society cannot ignore the unresolved tensions between the ‘UN Single Convention on Narcotics‘ and ‘Human Rights’. And is so doing it must engage those whose ‘other status’ has for too long been ignored. It is the stuff of social capital.

Protection of human rights is clearly, specifically and repeatedly identified as one of the purposes of the UN in the Charter, and as a specific legal obligation of all UN member states, whereas drug control has been conceived from the outset as a subset of the higher aims of the Organisation and its Members.

Furthermore, the Charter’s own provisions make it clear that Charter obligations take precedence over other, conflicting treaty obligations. The principal recommendation making body of the UN, the General Assembly, has specifically stated that drug control ‘must be carried out in full conformity with the
purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and other provisions of international law, and in particular with full respect for…all human rights and fundamental freedoms, and on the basis of the principles of equal rights and mutual respect.’

If a principal organ of the UN directs that drug control must be in conformity with human rights, then this must be reflected in the operations of the UN. Human rights violations stemming from drug control must be highlighted and brought to an end, and the drug control machinery must adopt a rights-based approach to its work in order to avoid complicity in human rights abuses and to influence domestic implementation of the international drug control conventions in line with human rights norms. / http://www.beckleyfoundation.org/pdf/report_13.pdf

Blair Anderson

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