New Zealand Cannabis referendum 2020, please don’t fu*k this up.
New Zealand has a terrible track record with drug law reform.
Kiwis love drugs.
Kiwis are obsessed with coffee, and arguably has some of the best coffee in the world (Kiwis that travel realize this). Kiwis also have a renowned binge drinking culture, this is something to be less proud of. Last but not least, kiwis love to smoke weed, with some of the highest self-reported adult use in the world, all while still being very illegal.
Our track record with “progressive” new drug laws is fucking bad.
In the early 2000s, there were party pills everywhere. A hoop hole in NZ law was used to proliferate party pills around the country. Some relatively harmless, others lethal. Teenagers across the country gambling with types, doses, and combinations. With zero-knowledge, let alone education about the pills.
The term “party pill” was very broad and made mostly young New Zealander’s guinea pigs. These pills had all sorts of experimental chemical combinations. Rumours floated around of horse de-worming drugs amongst other veterinary drugs.
In reality, in the best case, party pills were either high doses of caffeine mixed with mostly inert plant matter. Or in the worst-case high doses of BZP (Benzylpiperazine), which a C level chemistry student could make in his or her garage for peanuts. BZP is amphetamine (speed) chemically “tweaked” to legally not be speed. Arguably this “tweak” made it more dangerous than speed (big round of applause for politicians please).
Then came The Misuse of Drugs (Restricted Substances) Regulations 2008. It banned the use of BZP, so manufacturers just made more “tweaks” and made new drugs. This reactionist method is used around the world, by regulators. It doesn’t work, they ban one thing, and 10 more drugs almost identical to the banned substance emerge. Only minor chemical tweaks needed to skirt the law.
Take speed not weed?
So New Zealand’s first “progressive” new drug law was to give 18-year-olds franken-speed. Not a great start.
Every young New Zealander at the time had horror stories about the effects of these pills. Mixed with one of the worlds worst drinking cultures, the big city streets of New Zealand on Friday & Saturday nights were war zones, of hyped (high) young people, inches away from lethal drug combinations/doses.
All the while, police were locking people up for cannabis cultivation, possession and use. The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
The message was clear.
“Here we made a new version of speed legal, but don’t you bloody dare smoke a joint, you junkie!”
The harder the war on drugs is fought, the more experimental drugs get made. The war on drugs has been the driving factor in the proliferation of 1000s of new chemical combinations, that would have otherwise never been discovered.
The drug war incentivises the creation of new synthetic drugs. Its what you get when you make plants illegal. We humans, don’t simply follow laws, we find ways around them.
Cannabis should have never been illegal in the first place.
Cannabis has a history intertwined with humans, all over the planet, as far back as we can trace. If we include hemp in the story of cannabis, then one could argue our history was built upon cannabis.
New Zealand tries to be “progressive” with its drug laws and misses the most obvious move. Just make weed legal! In fact, why was it ever made illegal? Well, we know why, and it wasn’t to “protect” people but that’s a whole other blog post.
Just when you think the NZ government has learnt its lesson on drugs the hard way. The government doubles down on their incompetence and announces the steaming pile of shit that was the Psychoactive Substances Act. Which made synthetic cannabis legal!
Holy shit! After having a nation of young people frying their brains on BZP, why not finish them off with completely untested synthetic cannabis. Just to rub it in your face, the packaging says “not for human consumption”. Makes you wonder no government can be that stupid, can they?
This initiated a synthetic cannabis epidemic, which has killed, addicted and scrambled the brains of thousands of kiwis. All the while real cannabis remains highly illegal. Real cannabis has a track record of 0 recorded deaths ever! That’s ever, as in FOREVER! In one disastrous year alone, synthetics claimed the lives of around 40 kiwis.
I wonder how many of those kiwis would have been content to smoke a normal joint, of real weed? My guess is all of them!
Reactionist laws again!
After a couple of years of allowing kiwis to buy fake almost unregulated weed, which if it didn’t kill you, could cause massive seizures and hospitalizations. The government then passed more legislation and banned it. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Now, New Zealand has an underground synthetic cannabis black market. I mean, it did make people highly physically addicted. (The same cannot be said for REAL cannabis) Of course, it wasn’t going to go away.
This fake progressivism is the problem.
New Zealand should have started with cannabis legalization, before all of these terrible attempts to be “progressive”. You can’t progress without fixing your mistakes first. If kiwis would have just been able to access legal cannabis, maybe they wouldn’t have had such a thirst for party pills or synthetic cannabis.
I wonder how many fewer alcoholics, meth addicts and synthetic cannabis users would NZ have if cannabis was legal.
Synthetic cannabis is only a problem in countries without legal access to the real thing.
Synthetic cannabis, by definition, tries to mimic what cannabis has been doing for thousands of years. Why would you make natures version illegal and then leave it up to chemistry dropouts to make a 3rd rate version, to supply a nation of well,….drug lovers?
Most of the general public are not interested in breaking laws if there is another option, and most people will take what’s s on offer. Often with an over-estimation of the governments’ competence. It wasn’t uncommon to hear “they wouldn’t sell it if it was dangerous”.
Everyone has seen the new tobacco packaging that clearly states the health dangers, and risks of smoking. While remaining very legal to buy. If the government cared about your safety, why is one of the worlds leading causes of death and disease, legal and legal in every country on earth?
Lots of stuff is dangerous, where is the government then?
Let’s pretend for a second that cannabis is super dangerous (it’s not). Let’s pretend it kills thousands of people per year, just like alcohol or tobacco (it doesn’t).
Then we have two options,
Option 1.
We decide as a society that we want to protect people from dangerous things and we ban everything. No more alcohol, no more tobacco, no more caffeine (which has killed people), no more fast cars, no bungy jumping, no rock climbing, no boats, no swimming, no hiking, no diving, no sports. I mean shit, you can legally put on a wingsuit and jump off a cliff. A 2012 study showed that 72% of base jumpers have witnessed a death or serious injury. If we want to protect people from danger, then surely we need to ban all of these things. Don’t we?
Option 2.
Personal responsibility and freedom! We accept when a base jumper dies, that he or she knew the risks. Then we turn around and lock someone up for possession of 2 cannabis joints because we want to protect them, and save our communities from the devil weed?
We need to treat drugs (and let’s start with cannabis), as a personal freedom issue. We need to educate about the potential dangers and risks, and then allow ADULTS to make an informed decision. If a grown adult can strap on a wingsuit and jump of a cliff, then they need to be allowed to smoke a joint, period!
Most people can enjoy alcohol without a problem, but 10–15% of people can’t. Do we base our alcohol regulations around the people with the problem?
No, that would impede your right to enjoy a wine with your meal, or a beer at the pub on a Friday night. I often think about the absolute outrage there would be if we passed laws to stop people drinking to protect the small percentage of alcoholics from getting their fix. That protest would come hard and fast!
Why does the same logic not apply to cannabis, a drug that is orders of magnitude less dangerous than alcohol?
No country has got cannabis legalisation right, NZ could be the first!
Cannabis is the most used illegal drug in the world. Making it illegal hasn’t discouraged anyone, so what should NZ do?
Legalisation is a tricky word. It only means a new set of rules, but rules none the less.
The question is not, should we legalise cannabis? The question is, what exactly should the new rules be? Before I suggest what the new cannabis laws should be, it’s important to look at the mistakes that other countries have made.
Currently, no country on earth has got this right, here are some examples.
The Netherlands.
Most people wrongly assume cannabis is “legal” in the Netherlands. It’s not! Cannabis in the Netherlands is “tolerated” in certain licensed premises known as “coffee shops”. Usually, they do also sell coffee.
The cultivation and transportation of cannabis are still highly illegal and the police regularly raid the homes and apartments of growers, who supply the coffee shops. Also, the transportation of the sacks of weed to the coffee shops is a risky job. These drivers disguise themselves as a scooter pizza delivery service to get the weed in the door of the licensed premises. Once the cannabis is inside the coffee shop, the police tolerate it. Of course, the coffee shops have strict regulations of exactly how much cannabis is allowed on-site, and every single gram of weed must be accounted for electronically. Police regularly check the coffee shops for compliance, any lazy accounting and they can be shut down and/or fined.
The Netherlands, in reality, have an idiotic system where they tolerate something, which is legally impossible to grow or transport. Dumb!
Interesting side note, the Netherlands has some of the lowest rates of cannabis use, amongst adults and teenagers in the world. While New Zealand has one of the highest.
The U.S.A
The United States of America, are not so united on the topic of cannabis.
As of now, most states have at least passed medical cannabis laws, and about 12 states have some form of recreational cannabis laws on the books.
However, under US federal law, cannabis remains a schedule 1 drug. Schedule 1 by definition, means the government deems it to have zero medical value. Other drugs on the Schedule 1 list are heroin, LSD, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), amongst others.
Funny thing is the government regulates the sale of heroin through pharmaceutical companies, with pain killers (suddenly it has medical value when they sell it). Every other drug listed above actually does have some medical value, at very least needing more research. Which under schedule 1 becomes painfully (almost) impossible to do.
Back to cannabis, the US still has a massive problem with black market cannabis. Firstly, because not all states agree about recreational cannabis, there is big money in moving cannabis from a legal state to an illegal one.
Secondly, the tax on legal cannabis is way too high. When the price difference between legal and illegal cannabis is too vast, people will go for the cheaper option. These illegal channels have decades of experience and don’t just disappear. The black market will fill the gaps in the market, it’s what it does. In America, there is a demand for affordable weed, and the black market is happy to supply. California, for example, is experiencing a massive spike in illegal grow operations. California was one of the first states to have legal weed.
Legalisation around the world has been a fucking joke!
There are people still locked in cages (prison) in California and Colorado for as little as a joint, from back when cannabis was illegal. Why are these people not realised immediately? It is legal there, after all.
If governments cared about personal freedom and the right for an adult to decide what they do or do not consume, then these prisoners would be immediately released, with a nice payout for time served.
The reason they are not released is that governments don’t care! They care about taxing cannabis and making money from it, and large corporations also want in on the action. If a private prison system (like in the US) can keep people locked up for old cannabis laws (for profit) and big companies and governments can make billions from selling cannabis to the population, then everyone is happy. Except if you are the one locked in a cage for smoking a plant before the law was changed, then you have to rot in jail. While people are outside the prison blowing clouds of cannabis smoke.
Other countries have tried to get cannabis legalisation right, I won’t go onto list them all, but trust me, it’s a disaster everywhere.
Weirdly, the 70 odd years of the war on drugs, has made it extremely hard to shut the war machine down. Whole departments comprising of 1000s of people in the police have built careers on it. Waving the white flag on the war on drugs will mean massive job loss. People don’t like losing their jobs and fair enough. It has been reported that prison guard and some police unions have been lobbying to keep cannabis illegal.
Also, the black market channels are heavily entrenched and will fight for their survival too. We are not seeing real legalization anywhere in the world, just a “change of rules”, power from one mafia to the next.
The rules are being made to assure the government gets their piece of the pie with extra taxes, and massive global companies are lobbying for heavy regulation, this usually translates to, heavy registration fees for cannabis companies. Which is going to automatically price 99.9% of the population out of getting into the industry. Cannabis will be a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide, and the powers at be are positioning to ensure that the new market is absorbed by the owners of the existing market. The largest alcohol and tobacco companies in the world are already invested in cannabis companies, and you can beat they are already in the ear of policy-makers.
What exactly should NZ do?
New Zeland is a country of drug users. Priority number one should be early education about the benefits and risks of drug use. I mean let’s be honest if cannabis use or any drug for that matter only had negative outcomes, then people wouldn’t do it. In the same breath, addiction is very real, and there can be many negative outcomes from drug use.
However, education is information, and information needs to be honest and balanced. Teenagers appreciate honesty, you can’t lie to a room full of teenagers in the age of the internet. Lie to them, and lose their trust altogether. So education needs to be comprehensive, the only person that can stop a teenager from doing drugs, (any drug) is the teenager. Education will influence them, and help to (hopefully) have teenagers make smarter choices.
This won’t work for every teenager, some will inevitably decide to smoke weed, which will be illegal. The question is what do we do with the kids that break the law? We know locking people in cages doesn’t help, and we are thankfully more sympathetic towards teenagers when compared to enforcing laws on adults.
Underage people that disregarded the law, will need help and understanding. We need youth education councillors funded by the government. Money we could instantly have by stopping the war on weed, which costs New Zealand 100’s of millions of dollars a year.
What should the NZ legal framework be?
We know that taxing legal weed too high, won’t make the black market go away. (Which kind of seems like the point of cannabis legalisation.) The price of legal cannabis needs to be priced at or around the price of illegal weed. People won’t mind paying 5–10% more and likely even higher for high-end products, but price people out of the market and we might as well not even legalize it.
There needs to be safety regulations, around quality control, with clear labelling. However, we need to allow small and medium-sized businesses into the legal game. NZ can’t allow massive licensing fees, to run a cannabis business. There is no need to put this roadblock in the way, it only serves to make the market elitist, a small number of already massive companies would love to seize control.
Government quality control can be easily funded many times over with the savings from the war on weed, and not clogging the courts with cannabis cases. Not to mention, the extra tax the government will get from the sale of cannabis (hoping, of course, the tax is reasonable).
The key to success for NZ
Allow for the right to grow your weed at home. Cannabis is ridiculously easy to grow, and NZ has a perfect climate to do so. Even if it didn’t, home growing technology has made it easier and cheaper than ever before.
Allowing people to grow their own, will allow people to escape high prices, and have complete peace of mind, as to what they are consuming. Consumers will likely accept a cannabis tax in licensed premises if they know they can grow their own at home, and escape the tax if they wish.
NZ should have licensed premises where cannabis is strictly sold to those over 18. I say 18, only because the legal age for drinking in NZ is 18. Perhaps this is too young, too young for any drug use. There must be some consistency, you can’t have alcohol use at one age and cannabis at another.
I think 18 is too young to make decisions about drug use (alcohol included), and the age should be raised to 21 or even 23. Science is clear the brain is still developing until late into your 20’s. However, I realise it is ignorant to think a law will stop a 20-year-old from getting or consuming legalised drugs. However, does setting the age limit too low, send the wrong message?
New Zealand has a real chance to be world-leading. With New Zealand’s aforementioned history of dropping the ball with drug law reform, New Zeland needs to get this right. I hope they do, but history is not on their side.
Summary of what NZ should do in 2020.
Make recreation cannabis legal, ASAP. Adults should have autonomy over their bodies. No victim, no crime, period!
Expunge the records of anyone with non-violent cannabis drug offences. Release them immediately from prison, before the first gram of legal weed is sold. Also, pay them some money, for what is one of the biggest injustices of all time.
Put all that money spent on chasing and locking people up, into drug education. Make it compulsory in all schools, and have online resources for parents. Better parenting is the key here, teachers can start the conversation, but it needs to continue at home.
Heavy penalties for adults supplying cannabis to underage youth, in addition to licensed premises breaking the law. This will take community buy-in. It needs to be socially unacceptable to make cannabis accessible to underage youth. Police will play a role, but the grown-ups of the world need to keep each other in check.
Have licensed premisses that can grow, sell, and offer a location to consume cannabis. License fees should be reasonable and accessible to the average person wanting to start a business. The average person should not be priced out by an arbitrary registration fee.
Regular spot testing of cannabis establishments should be carried out. Testing for pesticides and chemicals mainly, but also testing potency and accuracy of what’s on the label. Heavy penalties for the manufacturer if dangerous chemicals or pesticides are found.
Tax cannabis no more than 10% of the black market value. Any more and the black market won’t go away.
Why is there no black market for alcohol? Quite simply, because there is no market for it. Alcohol has good quality controls, is affordable and easily accessible. If a 12 pack of beer suddenly went from 10–15 dollars to 50 dollars you can bet there would be a black market, almost overnight.
Also, allow adults the ability to grow their cannabis plants at home, if they wish. A reasonable limit should be set, maybe between 3–6 plants per person. This allows anyone that needs a larger supply, (i.e medical) the autonomy to take care of themselves. People are allowed to homebrew alcohol if they want. Very few do, but it’s allowed. Cannabis needs to be granted the same freedom.
Drug driving could be a problem and should be regulated and policed. However, the method of testing is of utmost importance. Urine and blood testing of cannabis are not fair to the user. A moderate to a heavy user may never give a clear urine or blood sample. THC is fat-soluble and sticks around in a persons fat tissue for a long period, long after the user felt the effects of cannabis.
A cannabis user could be 100% of clear mind while driving and test positive for a joint they smoked days or even weeks ago. I’m all for drug-driving tests, but we need to focus on impairment and not what chemical metabolite we can find in someones piss.
Alcohol testing seems pretty fair. You can be drunk at midnight, get 8–9 hours sleep and more than likely be fine to drive by the morning. Imagine the uproar and protests if you drank a beer or two a week ago, and then tested positive in a roadside test. People wouldn’t stand for it, and we should not tolerate this with cannabis either. Test but be fair for fucksake.
There are saliva and sweat tests being development for cannabis, which would test for more acute use (within hours, not days), this needs to be the path the NZ police take.
What about medical users, that smoke or ingest cannabis often and will need to drive?
Many people don’t know this, but experienced cannabis users can be “high or “stoned” and drive perfectly safe. An individual can build an incredible tolerance to cannabis, and function very well. With THC levels, that would put most normal people to sleep. There needs to be wriggle room in the law for this, and it comes down to impairment.
A police officer can use saliva or sweat tests to determine if someone has ingested cannabis acutely, but the next step needs to be an impairment test. I mean what’s the point of testing for drugs while driving? It should be, “Is this person impaired, can they safely drive this vehicle”? Then let’s test impairment before we bring the full force of the law into play. A simple two-minute roadside test, of basic coordination, and alertness can and should be done. Then the police have the final discretion if that person is fit to drive or not. There should be heavy penalties for people that are driving while impaired, no matter what is causing impairment.
A war that can’t be won.
The war on drugs is much like the war on terror. It has no endpoint, you can’t get to the end, it’s a “forever war” Great if you’re in the war business or the business of locking people up. Not so good for the rest of us.
The “war on drugs” will never be won. You can’t fight chemicals, they don’t fight back. They just are what they are. Drugs are tools, tools are great when you use them right. You can use a hammer to drive a nail into wood or hit yourself over the head with it. The hammer doesn’t make the decision, you do!
People have always, and will always use drugs. The powers at be, seem to be in favour of “productively drugs”. Caffeine, and tobacco Monday to Friday to get the worker bees, working. Even when tobacco is proven deadly, they just slap some warning labels on it and tax you some more. Followed by alcohol Friday night through Sunday to make you forget about how much that 9–5 slog sucked.
Cannabis legalisation is coming whether we like it or not. Unfortunately, it appears that we will only be granted access to this plant when a heavy tax system is in place, and a huge registration fee is set up for businesses. Which will ensure the already huge multinational companies, keep their market share of getting us intoxicated. Huge alcohol and tobacco companies have already invested billions into cannabis, to incorporate it into their new and existing products.
New Zealand has a chance to give people freedom over their bodies and what they consume. Rather than just another “rule change” for their big business lobbyist buddies.
The question isn’t whether cannabis should be legal or not. Of course, a fucking plant should be legal, it should have NEVER been illegal in the first place.
The question will be, what will the law say. Is it for the people, or is it for big business? Creating another market for them to siphon off.
Do the right thing NZ. You’re due a good decision.
