Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Time to start thinking about rearming, folks.
It's nice of you to post these historical documents about what people said one hundred years ago about the yellow peril, but how about a bit more 21st century thinking?
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As discussed at great length in this thread, the real people at risk from the adverse effects of cannabis use are teenagers - a group who also tend to particularly attuned to the types of arguments you put forward.
I would hope that a sensible legalisation policy - R18, maybe only available from a licensed premises would reduce the number of young people doing pot.
Legalisation would savage the black market. Legal prices would probably be lower, and also, I think most users would prefer to be inside the law than outside it. So there would be very little incentive to sell to the black market - which would be where under agers would get much of their drugs.
People that are currently selling pot - not many of them are going to refuse to hand it over because you don't look old enough. And its distribution methods and network are perfectly designed for getting it to young people.
Surely one of the advantages of legalisation is to try and seriously damage the black market drugs network, and that seems like a good thing for everyone.
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To me the biggest argument against the legalisation of cannabis is that we don't know what unintended consequences it will cause.
And it's possible, if we're that worried about this, to embed into the legislation an end date if we really want to have the argument twice.
If you time stop it at... 5 - 10 years, then you can do some research near the end which investigates who it's affected the country and get some good data on users and their behaviour, crime etc.
If the sky hasn't fallen in, you make the law permanent.
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Kyle, I think you missed my point. Harm reduction is not the driving force behind "The War On Drugs" and using it as an excuse to criminalise behaviour is not on in my book.
You must be arguing with someone else, as I didn't advocate a war on drugs. Harm reduction does seem like a good basis to modify our drug laws and figure out which should and shouldn't be legalised.
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[citation needed?]
Umm, I thought it was relatively uncontroversial. But this PhD seems convinced:
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/healthissues/1127400726.html
Cornell and Rochester University say the same thing:
ie, 21 - 22 years old.
And then you'd have to rebut This
Well for that you should talk to a scientist. The idea that children shouldn't be given alcohol, marijuana in order to protect their brain development didn't seem controversial to me.
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Cannabis may be legal in California this year. If so, it will provide a model for NZ to consider when we change the law here.
That's got a big financial driver behind it. The State of California is basically broke, and the taxes on pot is one of the possible solutions to the problem.
All mass murderers in NZ were mentally ill, and all smoked pot. I can't locate a link to it, but it stands to reason with the extreme risk to mental health. This is where Norml blames the victim.
I'm not sure if repeating your unsubstantiated claim makes it any more likely to be accepted, particularly now you've admitted it came from a health professional, not an expert on... mass murderers.
(And how someone can be a mass murderer without being mentally ill, I have no idea.)
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Its my body. Not yours.
Noone should be able to dictate what I can or cannot consume, regardless of the harm to myself if I so choose - unless I harm others.
I can't buy this argument.
As a society we have responsibilities to each other, both to the community, and individuals in it. That includes concern about what people do to themselves that can cause them harm.
To me it's not a question of whether we should allow you to put whatever the hell you want into your body, because if I see someone down a whole bottle of sleeping pills I'm hopefully going to do something. It's about what we do about people's actions. Currently we put them before the court and then in jail. In some instances we should probably just make it legal, possibly in a limited way. In others we should transfer our concern from crime to health, particularly dangerous addictice substances. Some we might just wish continue to keep illegal.
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I started learning how to read and write proper, when I was 35.
I didn't say you stopped learning as an adult, clearly you can keep learning until the day you die.
But your brain stops physically developing in your youth. That's when all the connections that are going to be made, are made. Not something you want to screw up with chemicals.
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This could be the squillionth chapter in the book called Things Which Would Never Work In A Million Years.
Oh yes. But I'm allowed to dream :)
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I could produce evidence to suggest that has an affect on grown ups as well.
Adults don't have developing brains anymore, it's all downhill for us.