Shapelle Corby on LawFuel

This case exemplifies all that is wrong with the international drug covenants and conventions to which New Zealand is a signatory.

Recent hangings in South East Asia, firing squads in China, and most recently two Kiwi’s arrested (and presumed guilty) for 3.5oz of cannabis between them in India, (the home of Ganja, a plant named as sacred along with the river Ganges) all happen because we as a nation collectively give licence to kill and incarcerate cruelly and inhumanely.

Where is the legal profession on drug policy?

Or is the substantial legal aid grift and perpetual social mayhem an incentive for a silence closely resembling stupidity? NZ’s own National Drug Intelligence Bureau chief along with the BERL Drug Harm report (though much criticised) states that the revenue ‘churn’ through the legal system is a DRUG HARM.

The LEGAL profession are beneficiaries of the unintended consequences. So when are you collectively going to talk about that?

To the Law Commission? Yeah Right!

Curiously, in Christchurch’s sister city Seattle, it was the law profession that lead drug policy law reform. see King County Bar Association – http://www.kcba.org/druglaw/

“The principal objectives of this effort are: reductions in crime and public disorder; improvement of the public health; better protection of children; and wiser use of scarce public resources.”

sig Blair Anderson, Christchurch. 027 2657219
http://www.leap.cc http://mildgreens.blogspot.com

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One LifeBoy to Another

“At the same time, these maturing bodies are only just developing ‘reward’ chemicals such as endorphins, but still lack the emotional maturity to control them.” – Trevor Grice, LIFE Education Trust. [see Teen drinkers corrupting `brain software’ The Australian]

Trevor seems to forget the role of age of consent and obligation to state to ones life education.

These are the very same kids we are sending to Afghanistan.
Old enough to die for your country, old enough to make decisions for oneself.

I’d rather a soldier with self will and drink experience than the one for whom the double standards has alienated, for whom the law is in contempt and for whom in all likelihood has been arbitrarily criminalised for race, class, ageist and sexist reasons.

Even I mistrust a politicised justice system that endorses such prejudices.

It is not that the numbers are great, even problematic, rather, I urge you and your fellow prohibitory zero-tolerance brain robbers to consider whose freedom our soldiers fought for if not for those of our youth.

If Trevor’s concern for the foundations of our society is to measured (and, gongs aside it has never been) it cannot be argued that our current relationship with drugs and drug policy is logically or economically sustainable. And, like New Zealand the world is coming to terms with that.

The UN Human Rights best practice is not addressing the raft of unintended consequences of this War for whom, on a global scale are young people -innocent victims, mere collateral. Even the USA is taking an independent, from the boots up re-evaluation, including the international implications for the Single Treaty. These are changing times. ABC classifications are in disrepute. Even the AMA has recanted. [Gt. Britain: only one Nutt lost his chair job, seemingly being an expert is not enough… one must dogmatically hold the line against all reason. Where is the liberty worth fighting for in that?/Blair]

A Class D act would be to come up with UN complaint transitional solutions. Then we can really start protecting ALL our kids and stop this moral pretence.

Anything else remains deficient, inefficient, inequitable and it especially hurts young people. The very ones you’re trying to save, Trev!

Blair Anderson
(* and former LIFEBOY, BOYS BRIGADE, WINDSOR, NTH. IN’GILL.)

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Three Strikes, Prison Muster and RealCostofPrisons.org

Three Strikes, Prison Muster and RealCostofPrisons.org

The role of drug policy in elevating both real and imagined social dysfunction is behind the clamoring for ‘sensible sentencing’. This is attributable to the enforcement of USA centric United Nations International Conventions that have been highly critisised by its own Human Rights Rapporteur and other NGO’s in Vienna.

Image via Wikipedia

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, Professor Manfred Nowak, has called on UN member states to adopt a rights based approach to drug policies in his forthcoming report to the Human Rights Council. Recognising that the human rights and drug policy regimes in the UN have ‘evolved practically detached’ from each other, Prof Nowak’s report submitted for the 10th session of the Council draws the attention of members states to the issues of ‘drug users in the context of the criminal justice system and situations resulting from restricted access to drugs for palliative care.’

Last weeks presentations to the UN Committee on Narcotic Drugs [CND] put good measure to the massive scale of the problem and highlighted the exclusion of harm reduction and cost/benefit analysis of this crucial justice policy.

“Instead, they produced a declaration that is not only weak – it actually undermines fundamental health and human rights obligations.” – Prof. Gerry Stimson, executive director of the International Harm Reduction Association.

Lip service to policy being ‘underpinned by health’ was highlighted by Assoc. Minister of Health, Hon Peter Dunne telling the review that NZ continues to have an ‘abstinance’ focus, yet he failed to tell them we legally regulated psychoactive recreational drug use on the 6th of Nov. last year.

New Zealand, instead ratified yet again the legacy of US “justice” Puritanism.

The 1973 NY Gov. Rockefeller Drug Laws, President Reagan’s 1980’s militarisation of Police coupled to “Just Saying No” , CA Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1994 “Three Strikes”, NY Gov. Guliani’s ‘Broken Windows’ and the myth of ‘crack babies’ and other stories under Bush/Clinton has lead to record incarceration rates and displaced resources where ‘prison building’ is marketed as job creation and of social benefit.

Yet drugs are cheaper and more available everywhere.? Perhaps the academics ARE right, the policy IS both counterproductive AND deficient.?

The problem within the current ‘justice dialog’ is politicised white privilege on top of intersectoral governance failure.

See this creative ‘comic’ style presentation by “the Real Cost of Prisons Project” (courtesy of Families Against Mandatory Minimums) at

http://realcostofprisons.org/materials/comics/war_on_drugs.pdf

W. Churchill, before he was ever famous, said ‘we will be judged as a civilisation by how we treat those who have erred against us.’

New Zealand has a unique position with the broad terms of reference for the Law Commission drug policy review. It may yet yield best practice harm reduction in a rights, and thus responsibilities context. With Cannabis identified as the elephant in the room, and the NZ law already in place to restrict and regulate for adult use, and much of the justice ‘costs and consequences’ will disappear.

Imagine, the public disbelief if we were to read, “We are closing three prisons, we just don’t have the muster to warrant keeping them”.

Blair Anderson

Social Ecologist ‘at large’
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
http://efsdp.org

ph (643) 389 4065 cell 027 265 7219

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NZ gets all Human and Civil and Regulatory!

Image via Wikipedia

New Zealand makes strong statement on human rights and harm reduction at HLM

New Zealand made a strong statement supporting both human rights and harm reduction. The statement said that the provision of needle exchange in New Zealand was responsible for the country having one of the lowest rates of HIV among people who inject drugs anywhere in the world.

It then discussed New Zealand’s approach to formulating drug policy, and that there was a need to implement policies that work rather than just make people feel good. It also explained the country’s drug regulation model. (huh “Class D, your kidding Mr Dunne, have you gone mad and made soft recreational drugs R18 and for sale? )

Image via Wikipedia

New Zealand called for the prioritisation of human rights and the need for states to be compliant with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New Zealand expressed its opposition to the death penalty, and expressed support for civil society‘s involvement in the forumulation of drug policy.

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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?”
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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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