Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Rex Widerstrom,
Or perhaps Lion Nathan might float a “party pill” division.
That actually worries me.
One of the problems with the legal trade as it stands is dodgy marketing via Facebook et al. And one of the fake-pot companies has an incentive scheme going with retailers -- rewarding those who can sell the most in a month. But that's small beer compared to what the big guys might do.
I wouldn't go as far as plain packaging -- because packaging does actually help consumers differentiate between products -- but I'd be looking for tight controls on marketing.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to bmk,
I worry about that too but I just can’t see how removing WFFwill lower food prices. It would possibly lower rent prices as families simply would no longer be able to afford the higher rents. But I am pretty sure food would stay horribly expensive.
Removing it probably wouldn't do those things, and certainly not quickly. More to the point, I actually don't think we could substantially cut back WFF anyway. It's here now.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to bmk,
WFF was the only thing that allowed us to afford the escalating rent, food and petrol prices that occurred from 2005 onwards.
I know. But I worry that it has become a kind of wage subsidy that allows real wages and salaries to stay low and/or gets eaten up by higher retail prices. So many working people now literally depend on it. A friend who returned from Britain last year can't get over how expensive food is here. I worry about that.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I’ll also be talking to Mike Joy
ooo ooo ask him how he felt about being compared to a lawyer by a politician
I will be sure to.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Alex Coleman,
Cullen then had to go out say that actually, the surpluses are a lot more fragile than the headlines look. And got mocked for his trouble.
Your perception obviously differs, and that’s cool. But the idea that those headlines were ‘certainly’ good for Labour does kind of ignore what was being said in the articles.
I think you're both right. The blossoming surpluses implied sound economic management --but did certainly become a target in themselves. Cullen was often described as "greedy", as if he was keeping all the money for himself. It was an infantile but effective line of argument.
I suspect history will praise Cullen for delivering zero net government debt to his successor, and for significant attempts to improve our miserable savings performance -- and look less fondly on Working for Families.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to 3410,
It’s kind of incredible that no other major media outlet seems to have done this.
We've just found one brief mention. Which includes a quote Joy says he didn't actually utter. Sheesh.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to ,
What I say is that its helpful to recognize the difference between Addiction ( substance dependency) and compulsive behavior (compulsive gambling). This is in the interest of more complex thinking about things.
Fair enough, but my view is that pretty much the same thing is going on in the brain in both cases. And we know how junkies and P-heads get about the rituals around their drug consumption. They basically start getting high before the drugs get into their bodies.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Ross Bell,
But neither does prohibition.
Indeed. In no sense does the government want to give a green light to methamphetamine, but that's not the same thing as proceeding with business as usual.
Methamphetamine addicts need help, not criminalisation. The drug courts idea would seem to fit well there.
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Update: we've rejigged the show slightly towards a theme of evidence-based policy and I'll also be talking to Mike Joy, the Massey environmental scientist whose warnings about our waterways were dismissed by John Key in the recent BBC Hard Talk interview.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to ,
Um, pokies are not a substance. Sometimes I wonder about the misuse of language.
True. But they do trigger a similar dopamine response to a number of prominent drugs of addiction.