Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Wouldn’t it be nice if Dunne heard that. I remember watching a Campbell live one night where Dunne went to see first hand the effect his synthetics had had on people.
They weren't "his synthetics" though. The period of attempted regulation was brief and he'd spent years banning one after the other.
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It's been a strange interesting week and a weird day (Prince!), and the ever-changing security access rules (which it was hard not to see as malicious) made a saga out of getting up to the Level 4 gallery high above the General Assembly. It's a combination of the customary freakout when Heads of State are in the building and some institutional pissiness against the Non Governmental Organisations, or NGOs. In which I got caught up!
But I eventually got up via the back stairs (no, really) and after only two hours of listening to speeches from peoples whose names started with "His Excellency", the civil society speakers were let on right at the end of the whole three-day summit.
The third or fourth of those was Tuari Potiki, the chair of the NZ Drug Foundation, the Director of Maori Development at the University of Otago – and a former IV drug addict (and former Hep C patient) who was given his choice, treatment over prison, when he was 28.
I cried, and I'm still feeling quite emotional about it. In a week of bullshit, it felt very direct, and the applause from the gallery was sustained. Papa Nahi was up on the same level as me and gave a karanga from the front of the balcony. It was a fine interruption to the grind of UN process.
The video isn't up yet, but the text of the speech is here:
https://www.drugfoundation.org.nz/media/statement-to-UNGASS2016
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to nzlemming,
Apology accepted, but it’s not about what people think now – it’s about what people thought then. That’s where the cause comes from. Happiness was only an effect, and not the most important one, which was legal status and freedom from discrimination (still a work in progress, as with so many other minorities).
Hmmm ... but greater happiness was an outcome, and if you're measuring outcomes, you'd include it.
I heard it more in the sense of "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," which seem a better, more human set of goals than those of comparable declarations.
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Anyway, good afternoon of Media Take interviews today.
The Jamaican solicitor-general Kathy-Ann Brown – who is amazing – couldn't join us at the last moment, but they sent over one of their people with a couple of people from the Jamaican NGOs they're supporting, including a rasta called Ras Iya V. Really good folk, the Jamaicans. Nice to meet them.
The Mexican journalist we interviewed was pleased with her President's speech, but observed "We need to hold him to it when he gets home." The same applies, I think, to our own Mr Dunne. The words have been very good, now perhaps it's time for the actions.
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to BenWilson,
The Homosexual Law Reform Act never came about through harm reduction arguments. It came through the argument of it being a fundamental human right.
Humans rights arguments have been quite strongly advanced at UNGASS, if generally in condemnation of the most serious human rights deprivations – like being killed by the state.
But I do think it's a useful avenue to pursue here in New Zealand. There will inevitably be more purchase in arguments about the right not to have your ability to work and travel impaired than in the right to get high because you like it, but it's a spectrum.
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Otago Uni having a brag about the other New Zealand speaker, Tuari Potiki.
http://www.otago.ac.nz/otagobulletin/news/otago609502.html
He's a great guy, real sense of presence and composure about him.
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
A more direct consequence of a harm-reduction approach would be the struggle to get raw cannabis legalised and regulated – it would run counter to NZ public health strategies to be green-lighting smoking. Perhaps cannabis would be more likely to get the nod as cannabis products. Or do you run a public health campaign telling everyone how much healthier using a vapouriser is?
At any rate, the same philosophy would dictate that you would avoid doing further harm to people who chose to smoke anyway.
With respect to Ben’s substantive point, I’m not sure the kind of goods he means can easily be conceived by the state. Harms manifest at a population level – you measure them in your hospitals and courts. But is there any good way to measure how much more people enjoy music or sex, or just feel happier, when they take drugs? Maybe only individuals can conceive those goods because those goods are individual.
One way this crosses a line is in the case of Uruguay’s determination to makes legal cannabis a state monopoly. It’s not going to work if you don’t provide the pot people want to buy. I guess demand would be somewhat inelastic – but the market giving everyone exactly the pot they want in Colorado (including for health reasons) seems to make more sense.
You smell weed all the time on the streets of Manhattan now. And not just weed, but intensely perfumed smoke from what I take to be modern strains. It’s an article of faith in New Zealand that we have the best weed. I’d say it’s more likely we’re yokels these days, taking what we get.
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Tomorrow is a big day – the NZ Permanent Mission has kindly given us the use of its boardroom and I'm going to interview as many people for Media Take as I can.
We have NZ delegation members Tuari Potiki (who speaks on Thursday) and Papa Nahi, as well as Mexican journalist Lisa Marie Sanchez and Sanho Tree. We're hoping for Nick Clegg and Helen Clark. I really hope we get Clark – the UNDP contribution seems hugely influential here – it has given the whole event some important focus.
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Back enjoying a Brooklyn 1/2 Ale and some chips in my hotel room. (These stainless steel rubbish bins hold a whole bag of ice perfectly!)
I couldn’t get into the viewing area above the General Assembly for the opening this morning, but it turned out to be better watching it on screens in a breakout room.
The UN deputy secretary general wanted everyone to get along, even though “some aspects of the drug agenda are sensitive and controversial”. He talked up the human rights language and references to “proportionality” in sentencing in the text of the outcome document but said “it means, in our view, refraining from the death penalty”.
The SDGs got more airtime, as “a new tool in our hands, which we must use”.
UNODC chief Yury Fedotov focused on the “drug policy must put people first” language, but still sounded very much like he was defending the orthodoxy.
Werner Sipp, President of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), was interesting, if contradictory. He allowed for “some flexibility” in the way states interpreted the conventions, but “flexibility has limits – it does not extend to any non-medical use of drugs. This was a pretty clear dig at the US and was applauded by both prohibitionists (for obvious reasons) and reformers, who heard it as saying that the US and others can’t pretend they’re staying within the conventions and needed to reform them if they want to legalise. He slammed militarised drug policy but concluded “neither is it necessary to seek so-called new approaches to the problem. We don’t need new approaches."
Switzerland, Brazil and Costa Rica spoke to to motion and all three slammed the absence of a rejection of the death penalty for drug offences. After all the foregoing talk about “balance”, “consensus” and “integrated” and “friendly” nations, it became pretty fucking clear what a lot of signatories felt about the document. There’s an emerging theme of “we signed it not because it’s actually good but because it’s a first step”.
And then … Indonesia, whose speaker talked up the “sovereign right” of countries to choose capital punishment (subtext: all the other countries are picking on us). He said that China, Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran all wished to have their names attached to his statement on the matter. Ugh.
WHO director Margaret Chan was, I thought, a bit absurd and disappointing. She banged on about the brave new approaches of her country, Hong Kong, which turned out to mostly be adopting methadone substitution 30 years after countries like NZ. Her story about someone getting their jewellery stolen didn’t make for much of a metric for success.
Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto gave the speech of the day – passionate, focsed and practical. It was all the more remarkable given that he’d cancelled his appearance a few days before, in what seemed to be a rejection of the disappointing UNGASS process. Others suspected it might be because he just didn’t care that much, but that’s certainly not how it came across.
He declared that that “Mexico has paid too high a price” under the drug war, which had “not reduced production, trafficking or consumption of drugs” since is began in the 1970s.
He explicitly endorsed medical cannabis and wound up by issuing what sounded a lot like a call for a legal, regulated drug market.
I listened to a few others, including a depressing speech from China, whose rep bitched about other countries “injecting political factors into drug control”, and then took a break.
We’d just got seated at one of the roundtables which are supposed to sort out details of how principles are acted on when word came through that Peter Dunne was up soon at the General Assembly. It had been a palaver getting in to the roundtable, then we had to run around finding the right door into the General Assembly.
Dunne’s speech was very good – emphasising the need for boldness in reform (I wonder if this is as much a message to the government back home as to the by-then sparsely-populated room) although I’m still snickering about the phrase “the pillar of boldness”.
Most remarkably, he talked explicitly of a “regulated market”:
Responsible regulation is the key to reducing drug-related harm and achieving long-term success in drug control approaches.
The key word here is responsible – we must not conflate boldness with recklessness – changes in policy must ensure that the likelihood of harm is minimised.
It is imperative that any move to a regulated market is an authority-led process, and that we do not find ourselves in the position of playing catch up.
Closing lines:
If nations continue to muddle along, choosing the easy options and throwing the problems to their police and judiciaries, then the answer will be very little.
If the pace of change picks up, appropriate regulation is put in train and bold, innovative, compassionate and proportionate policy thrives, then the answer will be progress.
I came back to the hotel to regather and do some work after that, and on the way a UN cop explained to me why access had been such a pain today. Partly just managing limited spectator space, but also that today had been a “dry run for Thursday”, when Obama comes. I actually still have little idea of where I’ll be allowed to be on Thursday. These guys need to work a little on their conference fu.
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Up Front: Cui bono?, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I would like to say that that most (not all) of the people I have interacted with during my son’s long history with Work and Income have been very pleasant and polite. It is the crooked unrealistic system they work in which is the problem, and this comes from the top – ie the Government.
And the person Jim and Fiona dealt with when he went in for his meeting was pleasant and helpful and even got him sorted with some counselling support. It was just a farcical basis for the meeting to happen on in the first place, which, as you say, is the fault of the system.
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