OPINION
I’ve noticed two things recently. The first is you want to get pseudoephedrine back on the shelves and, secondly, your opposition to the previous government’s plans to ban tobacco.
This to me demonstrates one thing – that you get that prohibition and the war on drugs has been an abject failure. It’s been such a failure that if all recreational drugs were to be legalised today it would actually result in less harm.
There’re several reasons why prohibition and the war on drugs have been a failure.
One reason is what’s called the balloon effect. This means that if, say, opioid production were to be stopped in one place it will just resurface in another place. The ban on pseudoephedrine is in a way an example of this. The ban, arguably, stopped the local production of methamphetamine (a very unpopular drug despite what the media says), so it simply ‘moved’ to importation (although in the case of meth, local production always made up a small percentage, but my point remains.)
Another reason is that the drug trade is a business. And in business you have positions or ‘roles’. So if a the head of a major cartel were to ‘retire’, he is simply replaced with someone else, usually someone with more ‘experience’, if you know what I mean. Business is about profit and because the drug trade is an illegal business it is very profitable.
Believe it or not, people do drugs mostly for positive reasons, with the number one reason being social. Alcohol is one example, cannabis another, and definitely party drugs like MDMA. Negative reasons such as addiction, ‘escaping reality’, etc. are way down the bottom of the list. By far most instances of drug use are non-problematic. So why should the majority who use recreational drugs responsibly be punished for the minority who don’t? How, may I ask, is this fair?
You also can’t measure the harm caused by drug use without also acknowledging the benefits. Alcohol is a prime example. Yes, alcohol causes a lot of harm but the harm that it causes is offset by the benefits it brings: things like having a wine with a nice meal, being able to have a beer or two with your mates, etc.
The big question is how to go from prohibition to a legal recreational drug market. You could just repeal the Psychoactive Substances Act and the Misuse of Drugs Act but that’s not the best approach.
It’s all about finding the sweet spot, and the best way to find the sweet spot is through measured incremental changes. For instance, even though I voted yes, I thought the proposed cannabis legislation went too far, too soon. It would have been far better to start by just amending the Misuse Of Drugs Act to allow the growing of a limited number of cannabis plants for personal use. Then after, say, a year do a review and, for example, allow social sales.
You may ask, why now? There’s the threat of the drug cartels who, in case you haven’t noticed, have been busy setting up shop in the Pacific Islands. There’s also the threat of an opioid crisis happening here. There’s also the fact that cannabis legalisation in the US has put to rest the prohibitionist lie that drug liberalisation would result in a health crisis so dire it’d make the flu epidemic of 1918 look like a mild cold.
You and I both know you can’t just sit on your hands. It’s time for you to ACT.