Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Cannabis reform is a serious…, in reply to Joe Boden,
I’d be happy to support a well-regulated legalization scheme, if we could achieve it, because I believe it would deliver the best results. I’m just skeptical that we will achieve it.
I'm skeptical but I think it's what we should aim for.
If we do end up getting a referendum, the support of the various political parties do not vote as blocs. NZ First voters will vote on their own recognizance, as will National Party members. It doesn't matter that Simon Bridges is a prohibitionist, there is no way the country has the high levels of support for legalization that it does without a lot of that support coming from National voters. This is hardly surprising - I know a lot of National party voters who smoke bud. They probably don't admit it freely, being illegal and the kind of thing that could end up being a workplace bludgeon, but it's simply a widely appreciated thing in NZ, and this is obscured by the mantle prohibition draws over truth.
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Hard News: Cannabis reform is a serious…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Eliminating the civil rights of all to protect a small bunch of users is ethically untenable. It’s analogous to removing the right to drive cars because speeding drivers keep killing people.
That’s the grossest level framework that applies to this, although I tend to think the right to drive has a nuance in it. We rate the right to drive highly not just because of some arbitrary philosophical stance about the sanctity of rights balanced against harms, but also by a simple evaluation of the incredible utility of cars.
I doubt our right to drive would justify all the death resulting from it if cars were only toys we played around with, rather than extraordinarily useful devices that have become integral to the life of any dwellers in cities with significant suburbs (you could further argue that the significant suburbs arose from the existence of all those cars, but at this point it’s not that relevant – we now have them and the people in them want to be able to use them in a way that fits their chosen lifestyles), let alone for rural people and anyone engaged in any kind of goods production or the provision of mobile services.
I table this point for at least the 20th time – the harm reduction framework has never made more than partial sense to me because it ignores that the enjoyment people might get from recreational drugs is a good in itself. If that is not acknowledged then harm reduction leads to prohibition being taken seriously and all the arguments against it focussing on the harm of prohibition, the negative side effects of people being taken to task by law enforcement, and the engagement with criminal elements that are required for any would-be users, and the chances of being accidentally (or deliberately poisoned). It treats as irrelevant or even ridiculous the main reason that people take these drugs – that they want to, because they enjoyed doing it, and all the focus is on how to minimize the use of something inherently harmful, short of prohibition.
To me that’s only half of the reason for legalization. In general I usually agree with the points raised on harm reduction, and I can see the cunningness of it as an incremental approach (it leverages off people who rate caution higher than fun, typically on behalf of the children), whilst still thinking that the nuances of harm reduction are NOT the source of a general public majority for legalization, they are political window dressing to the enormous number of people who have simply smoked cannabis at some time and had a good time who see THAT as an important reason why it should be legalized, too.
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Hard News: Cannabis reform is a serious…, in reply to Russell Brown,
most of them stop using it because they don’t like it any more
This happened with me and computer games, although I do know people still caught in that vice, even at my extreme age.
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Hard News: Cannabis reform is a serious…, in reply to BenWilson,
They’re probably not perfect, but they’re better than simple assertions that our roads will become less safe.
Even if were proved to make the roads quantifiably less safe this would not necessarily be a knock down argument against a law change. It would be grist to the mill, a thing to weigh up, depending what that quantity is.
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Hard News: Cannabis reform is a serious…, in reply to Russell Brown,
We can do two things at the same time.
Yes, or we could fail to go SmokeFree by 2025 and still change our cannabis laws. I can't really see what the connection is.
government never apologized to health department and parents for synthetics debacle
That government is gone, so this can never happen. Not that it actually should be any kind of blocker that a government fails to apologize before fixing something.
adding recreational pot to binge drinking culture does not make our roads safer
Pretty sure that horse bolted long ago. But this is, at least, one of the more serious questions. I don't think there's any need to reinvent the wheel on this, when there are plenty of stoned driving statistics out there, both before and after decriminalization. They're probably not perfect, but they're better than simple assertions that our roads will become less safe.
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Very good blog to kick off the debate with. Thanks, Russell. I hope we have a place here where sensible debate on this will happen over the next few years.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to WH,
And yet still I am not prepared for the idea that a billionaire president honored a sports team in the White House by serving them a McDonald's meal.
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Arohanui Russell. So sorry to hear about Grant.
5 days offline with family that I just had would have been unendurable 10 years ago, with major Public Address withdrawals. 5 days off Twitter, OTOH, is to be heartily recommended.
Since this is a yearly reflective post, can I put the call out for good PA folk to share what the year (or more) has brought for them, too? Will put in mine when ten fingers can do it justice.
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Hard News: Just quietly, this is a big deal, in reply to linger,
this should be seen only as a stopgap measure.
It sounds like that's how the Govt does see it. It's also like trainer policy - if society doesn't collapse as a result of this, then formalizing it properly later on is way easier. It also makes a lot of sense that it happens near simultaneously with the medicinal cannabis bill. Otherwise that stood a big chance of being a corrupted gateway stopgap measure in a really crappy way. Now, there is a much reduced incentive to subvert the medicinal pathway as a backdoor for recreational cannabis, giving that pathway a real chance of showing its worth.
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This is now my favorite NZ government ever. I mean the whole government too, the Greens and NZF get a lot of credit.
