Posts by mildgreens
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That the rest of the world is talking seriously about the unintended consequences of a (legal and illegal) drug policy that creates criminals and we have a LAW COMMISSION inquiring into alcohol AND illicit drug management escapes the media AND political anal'ists.
The blind adherence to the Single Conventions on Narcotics is driving the deviancy amplification and disrespect for rule of law that is choking our judicial, corrections and policing while we collectively wax lyrical about sending messages ~ to whom fur-chris-ake. We spend mega-millions on failure and sheeple keep voting for it.
Like (another) 600 police. A sign of success would be 600 less Police.
But they vote for it... like somehow they will be miraculously protected.Dont Vote for Failure, Vote for Success... reform the DYSFUNCTIONAL drug laws, remove the double standards (and save a bazzilion at the same time).
And watch the prisons (and all that it means) reduce back to where it used to be.
Open another Hospital, and a few more schools with the money thus saved....
Now there would be a politician I could vote for.
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And ETS fits in where?
(perhaps Bill English is is going to contract and converge sometime soon!)
And despite citizens and police being mown down as collateral damage in the war on drugs, English believes the answer to prohibition is more prohibition.... JK is coming gunning for your house if ya grow pot! The National Caucus (and hangers on) believes it will improve the balance of payments~! No doubt getting that sage advice from the nations Drug Intelligence gurus - the POLICE, how else do they fund 300 more cops for Counties Manukau. 300 more police who are going to find a lot of pot validating the cannabis-crime nexus! and save us form all that harm.The boondoggle that is the NZ criminalisation industry, must be choking on the knowledge that the Netherlands is closing 5 prisons, and only keeping another three because Belgium will pay the Dutch for the warehousing of its citizens.
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PROHIBITION DOESN'T WORK
The White House had the National Research Council [www.nationalacademies.org/nrc/] examine the data being gathered about drug use and the effects of U.S. drug policies. NRC concluded, "__the nation possesses little information about the effectiveness of current drug policy, especially of drug law enforcement.__" And what data exist show "little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use." In other words, there is no proof that prohibition "the cornerstone of U.S. drug policy for a century" reduces drug use. = National Research Council. Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us. National Academy Press, 2001. p. 193.
"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana." = Milton Friedman (an economist of note that BERL might recall)
In the "The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," a report recently done by Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron, on the causes of drug crime, Miron said his research "very much suggests that it is prohibition. It's not drug-consumption-related, it's fighting-over-disputes-in-the-illegal-drug-trade-related. And that's a result of prohibition, not a result of the drug."
Hubert Williams, President, Police Foundation; former Chief of Police, Newark, New Jersey said "Miron persuasively demonstrates, the net effects of prohibition, both past and present, are to increase violence, enrich criminals, threaten civil liberties, and make drug users more ill. The right question for policy makers, he concludes, is not whether drugs are misused but whether the benefits of prohibition outweigh its exorbitant costs. All in all, this is a solidly researched and dispassionate discussion of a topic that is too often couched in moral and emotional terms.”
Aside from the NZ Police's questionable use of the DRUG HARM INDEX to self interestedly perpetuate an unaccounted policy, demanding as it were 'more resources' without any accounting for 'deliverable outcomes' is entirely contestable in managerial let alone economic terms. The Drug Squad is in effect 'deficit funded' without as much a skerit of evidence that the resources AND priorities are allocated with ANY efficiency.
This is POOR management.
This was roundly critiqued by visiting top cop and former head of Scotland Yard Narcotics/London Metro, Chief Super Det. Eddie Ellison to the Ministry of Justice in 2004. (Eddie was also a founding member of TRANSFORM, now with UN consultative standing )"It wouldn't pass muster at Police College in let alone the Home Office. There is no room in modern policing for unaccountable deployment blindly following political directives" -(private conversation with the writer)
Eddie presented to 17 MoJ Officials alongside Snr Detective Jack Cole, both of whom were executive directors of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition [www.leap.cc] also recently accredited by the UN.
Eddie also conveyed this to Gregg O'Conner of the Police Association.
Some months later the MoJ couldnt find a single person who attended the board meetingroom presentation, declaring again in a recorded telephone conversation to the writer "we have a very high staff turnover'
The BERL DRUG HARMS report and the subsequent Police Intelligence claims that cananbis is the problem, bring the POLICE once again into disrepute.
There is no accounting the POLICE and JUSTICE stupidity of continuing to bang ones head against the wall and hoping it will soon stop hurting....
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This BERL DRUG HARM report is absolute evidence that Accountants should stay away from Drugs.
It is yet to be explained by either NZ's Drug Intel community, or the poiticians who pander to 'drug fears' why 515 Professors of Economics including 3 Nobel Laureates say the 'cost/benefits' of prohibition has yet to be done. (www.prohibitioncosts.org)
Curiously the BERL harm benchmark is based on the financial/social differential between the drug harms 'under prohibition' and drug hams if there was no drugs....
BERL has accurately measured failure!