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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Police Powers – Nandor’s observervations

Former Green MP, Nandor Tanczos sent to my Bebo…..

Two pieces of ‘law and order’ legislation are being debated by parliament under urgency. The first is the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill. Going by the press release, it seems like a typical case of throwing good legislative time after bad. Justice Minister Simon Power says “”By doubling the sentence for participation in a gang we are reflecting the culpability of those gang leaders who organise the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine, and we are addressing the low rate of successful convictions”.

Eh? It appears that selling P is a worse crime if you are a Mongrel Mob member than if you are an evil sociopath with no friends. Not quite sure why. Nor am I sure why doubling the sentence will increase the number of convictions. (The release says that “of 339 prosecutions there were only 19 convictions” which I guess highlights either how poorly thought out the original legislation was or how incompetent the police are).

They ARE lowering the threshold for the police to get warrants, from investigation of offenses attracting 10 years to ones attracting 7. Of course if this is about targeting P as the Minister claims then this is irrelevant because manufacture and sale of P has a maximum of life.

Actually, it is already very easy for police to get warrants if they have a scrap of evidence to base an application on. The police always moan to politicians that the reason why they can’t get on top of gangs is because they are hobbled by pesky laws protecting civil rights. So politicians give police more powers, and shortly thereafter the police are back with the same complaint. That is how civil rights are consistently and continuously undermined. Just have a look at the new campaign to give police yet more powers over boy racers.

All in all, much as it grieves me to agree with Mr Cosgrove, it looks like political theatre gone bad. Sir Graham Latimer got it right when he said that the quickest way to destabilise gangs is to legalise cannabis.

The other bill is about DNA samples.From the press release:

“It allows police to collect DNA from people they ‘intend to charge’, and to match it against samples from unsolved crimes. At present, DNA can be collected only with consent, by judicial approval, or by compulsion where people are suspected or convicted of an offence punishable by more than seven years’ imprisonment, or another specified offence”

So it is about giving the police the right to take DNA from anyone they wish (I intend to charge you….when I’ve got some evidence) and to use that for a fishing trip through the DNA database.

“And any misuse of profiles will be subject to the full extent of relevant law and civil rights protections, and the police will develop guidelines to avoid any arbitrary or unreasonable application of this power”.

Just like they did with Tazers, MoDA search without warrant powers, pepper spray right? Somehow I don’t feel comforted.

—
Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›

Spokesperson on Climate Change, Environment and Associate ‘Shadow’ Law And Order.
http://www.Republicans.org.NZ

Social Ecologist ‘at large’
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
http://blairformayor.blogspot.com
http://blair4mayor.com
http://efsdp.org

ph (643) 389 4065 cell 027 265 7219
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Survey Reveals Majority Want Marijuana Legalized

Image via Wikipedia

Survey Reveals Majority Want Marijuana Legalized (the zee gives it away, of course this survey is USA based but…. it is the home of the drug war and if politics earnestly represented community consensus this war on people would be over… yesterday! /Blair)

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An over-whelming majority favor the legalization of marijuana, according to a new Headline Press survey. The new poll found that 86% of all those surveyed favor the decriminalization of pot. ( see American Chronicle )

The online survey, conducted over the last two weeks of October, found that only 14% of those surveyed do not want the use of marijuana legalized. Studies indicate that the medicinal use of marijuana aids in the healing or prevention of cataracts, broken bones, a variety of cancers and other ailments.

Opponents of the legalization of marijuana argue that since the use of alcohol is already legal in all states the usage of marijuana should continue to be outlawed. Controversy surrounds the usage of marijuana, despite increasing scientific evidence that its long term damage effects are limited. A state law in California allows the legal dispensing of marijuana for medical purposes.

Those who favor its legalization point to the lack of law enforcement in many other areas, criticizing lawmakers and other government leaders for allowing the growth of white collar crime, which helped to damage the national economy with the credit crisis through actions on Wall Street.

Enforcing marijuana prohibition costs American taxpayers roughly US$10 billion annually and results in more than 829,000 arrests a year, far more than the total number of arrests for all violent crimes combined. The arrests are much easier to obtain by police than the time and effort required to produce arrests in many other areas of law enforcement.

Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›

Spokesperson on Climate Change, Environment and Associate ‘Shadow’ Law And Order.
http://www.republicans.org.nz/

Social Ecologist ‘at large’
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com/
http://blairformayor.blogspot.com/
http://blair4mayor.com/
http://efsdp.org/

ph (643) 389 4065 cell 027 265 7219

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Rethink the War on Drugs

Image by #_Gwen_# Crime is an issue that often seeps into Presidential elections in one form or another. Indeed, the Bush Administration has rolled back or undermined the two primary crime-fighting initiatives of the Clinton Administration by allowing the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons to lapse, and by eliminating Clinton’s COPS program, which put tens of thousands of new police on the streets of American cities. Gun control is largely a dead letter, since the NRA has shown that it has the power to keep any type of gun in the hands of anyone who wants them, as well as the power to punish any Democrat who seeks greater gun control legislation.

One area that could bring large dividends in terms of crime reduction would be to change tactics in the quagmire of the American war on drugs. With blind fidelity to a failed policy, we continue to fritter away scarce law enforcement resources fighting sale and possession of drugs and to put hundreds of thousands in prison at enormous cost to taxpayers and to inmates and their families.

Many substances from alcohol and nicotine to marijuana, cocaine, and heroin impose high social costs on American society, but only the illegal drugs lead to mass incarceration, corruption of police, street killings, and other acts of violence in the effort to market them to a desirous American population.

Just as the end of Prohibition generated enormous crime reductions, legalization of the above drugs would likely bring about similar crime drops, while risking increases in the high costs attending the likely increase in consumption and abuse.

The proper way to deal with all of these addictive substances is to legalize, tax heavily, ban all forms of marketing, and fund efforts to restrain consumption and provide treatment for abusers. Instead, we have pursued a policy that either puts hundreds of thousands of Americans in prison when a coordinated and aggressive regulatory posture could likely restrain demand in a far less costly manner, or gives far too much freedom to stimulate demand and sales by aggressive marketing and advertising.

One potential obstacle to a regime of legalization coupled with discouraging regulation and taxation is that the suppliers of addictive substances will use constitutional arguments to advance their objectives (one can imagine the briefs by sellers of marijuana insisting on their first amendment rights to peddle the drug should legalization occur) or enlist the support of compliant legislators to help stimulate demand (note the activities of the gambling industry for an unwholesome example).

This might suggest that constitutionally enshrined restrictions on the ability to market harmful substances might be an important antecedent to an effort to reduce crime by eliminating the staggering social costs of the war on drugs.

Rethink the “War on Drugs”
John J. Donohue III, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
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So what is there to understand?

Image by mmcrae01 via Flickr

• “The last few years have seen an extraordinary shift in thinking about this issue with increasingly mainstream figures arguing we should consider legalisation as an alternative to what they regard as the failure of the law-enforcement strategy.” – BBC’s Mark Easton
  
• “I think what was truly depressing about my time in the civil service was that the professionals I met from every sector held the same view: the illegality of drugs causes far more problems for society and the individual than it solves. Yet publicly, all those people were forced to repeat the mantra that the Government would be “tough on drugs”, even though they all knew that the policy was causing harm.” – Julian Critchley (Ex- director of the UK Anti-Drug Co-Ordination Unit)
• “The only completely effective way to ameliorate the drug problem, and especially the crime which results from it, is to bring the industry into the open by legalising the distribution and consumption of all dangerous drugs, or at the very least by decriminalising their consumption.” – Alan Duncan MP, Conservative Former Cabinet Member
  
• “If the UN is right and drugs account for 70 per cent of organised criminal activity,’ argues Glenny, ‘then the legalisation of drugs would administer by far the deadliest blow possible against transnational organised criminal networks.” – Misha Glenny
• And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal? – Felix Mendelsohn, 1915
  
• Image via Wikipedia“The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.” – Albert Einstein
• “As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners.” – Paul Krassner, 1999
  Image via Wikipedia
• “There is, in my opinion, no government policy that is as immoral as drug prohibition…” – Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman
  
• The government is good at job creation. Every arrest of a drug dealer creates a new high-paying job opening. – Peter Guither
  
• “In the end, legalization of certain substances may be the only way to bring prices down, and doing so may be the only remedy to some of the worst aspects of the drug plague: violence, corruption, and the collapse of the rule of law.” – Jorge Costaneda – Mexican Foreign Minister
  
• “No one is asking for some free-for-all for drugs. I want drugs to be controlled and regulated, but we do not want to allow what has happened over the past thirty years to continue, whereby, in an illegal market, criminals – irresponsible people – sell poisoned drugs that kill young people. We want to say to those irresponsible people that we will control them, take their market away and not allow young people to be their victims any more. I believe that the experience of Switzerland and the Netherlands, and now of other countries, is that the only way to do that effectively is to collapse the market by replacing it with one that can be regulated, licensed and controlled.” – Paul Flynn MP Labour
  
• “The fundamental problem is the collision between the dramatic rise in the use of drugs and a policy that prohibits them. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that drug users impinge on the rights of other people only when they steal, and they have to do that only because of prohibition.” Liberal Democrat Baroness Walmsley
  
• “I joined the unit more or less agnostic on drugs policy, being personally opposed to drug use, but open-minded about the best way to deal with the problem…However, during my time in the unit, as I saw more and more evidence of ‘what works’, to quote New Labour’s mantra of the time, it became apparent to me that … enforcement and supply-side interventions were largely pointless. They have no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs.” – Julian Critchley -Former director of the UK Anti-Drug Coordination Unit in the Cabinet Office

  —
  Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›

  Spokesperson on Climate Change, Environment and Associate ‘Shadow’ Law And Order.
  #6 ‘on the list’ http://www.republicans.org.nz/

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Election 08 – Whose Servant Am I ?

Image by Mr Jaded via FlickrRace and the ‘war on drugs‘ were so inextricably linked as to be indistinguishable, US lawyer and executive director of Break the Chains, Deborah Peterson Small, told delegates at Release’s Drugs, race and discrimination conference in London. ‘You could even say “what’s drugs got to do with it?”‘ she said. ‘A lot of the conversation we have around drugs is not around drugs. It’s around social control and maintaining the status quo – we’re not having the real conversation.’

Drug policy was partly driven by public fear of crime, much of which was stoked by a media largely no longer there to keep the public informed, but to serve the interests of the large corporations that owned it, she said. This fear was then used as an excuse by governments to implement ineffectual drug policies. ‘The “war on drugs” has become a proxy for dealing with other issues,’ she said. ‘Are we really engaged in a war on drugs, or are we using it as a way of addressing issues in society that we haven’t figured out how to deal with yet?’ / http://www.drinkanddrugs.net/features/oct0608/whats_drugs_got_to_do_with_it.pdf

Image via Wikipedia…. perhaps this insight at this time explains why and crucially at election time, neither National “get tough on crime’ and Labour ‘eyes wide shut’ or the minor parties, including the Greens will not discuss the politics of pot (or any other drug) unless it is preconditioned with the prohibitionist rider ‘that use = abuse’, there are harms, and that drugs = crime. Yet the harms of alcohol and tobacco are never held to the same zero tolerance account. Whose interest is this serving? Consider…..

“A cross the many policy responses to drugs in society, the war on drugs ethos, its legislative instruments, and their enforcement has become a significant driver of drug harms. Through its mass criminalisation of users, its abdication of market control to unregulated criminal profiteers, and creation of a vast anarchic and violent criminal economy, prohibition, whatever its original intentions, has become a policy of harm maximisation, in both public health and criminal justice spheres.” /Danny Kushlick / http://www.drinkanddrugs.net/features/oct0608/in_pursuit_of_truth.pdf

Image via Wikipedia‘I think there’s a good reason why the propaganda system works this way. It recognises that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it’s important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them. Correspondingly, the other side of the coin is that it’s extremely important to try to bring out the truth about these matters, as best we can.’ / Noam Chomsky, Interview in ‘The Chomsky Reader‘

Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›
Spokesperson on Climate Change, Environment and Associate ‘Shadow’ Law And Order.
#6 ‘on the list’ http://www.republicans.org.nz/

ph (643) 389 4065 cell 027 265 7219

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