How Media Bias in New Zealand Contributes to a Prohibitionist Attitude

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The bias against cannabis in the New Zealand media expresses itself in a number of ways. Some excerpts from a recent Southland Times article called “Invercargill Teen Jailed for One Punch Kill” show how biased this sort of reporting is.

Thanks to a phenomenon called the serial position effect, psychologists know that, when presented with a list of items, a person reading them is more likely to remember the one that was first in the list. Keep this simple fact in mind when analysing this piece.

The article told the pathetic story of Tyrone Palmer, who killed a man named Matthew Coley with a single punch to the side of the head in Invercargill earlier this year.

Near the beginning of the article is the sentence “On Friday, April 8, Palmer had… used the class A drug LSD, cannabis, and alcohol.”

Understanding the serial position effect, we know that anyone reading that passage is likely to take away from it the message that “the class A drug” LSD and cannabis were at least as responsible for the sucker punch as the alcohol was.

Anyone with a clue, of course, will know that the LSD and cannabis had nothing to do with the violence for the simple reason that psychedelics do not make people violent. Moreover, there are hundreds of cases of unprovoked violence every year in New Zealand that involve alcohol and no cannabis, and there is never a case of unprovoked violence in New Zealand that involves cannabis and not alcohol.

“The judge was particularly concerned about the effect drug and alcohol use can have on young people. ‘I am intensely troubled by the reference in the narrative to the use of [LSD], cannabis and alcohol.'”

Apart from again manipulating the reaction of the reader by leading them to associate LSD and cannabis with the violence, this sentence also uses the common prohibitionist rhetorical device of distinguishing ‘drugs’ from ‘alcohol’.

The reason why this is done is because much of the impetus behind cannabis prohibition comes from the liquor industry, as the first thing any industry does in a capitalist system is to try and destroy their competitors, and the alcohol industry knows that a large proportion of people would rather smoke cannabis than drink alcohol.

The article waits until the very last sentence to mention that Coley’s mother “planned to keep warning New Zealanders of the dangers around youth drinking.” So the quote of the one person in the whole story who places the blame on the alcohol is shunted down to the very bottom of the story.

Incredibly, the final sentence for punching another human being to death was 22 months – the same as the sentence initially handed out to Kelly van Gaalen last year for cannabis cultivation.

The ultimate effect of the kind of dishonest rhetoric shown by the author of the Southland Times article is that growing a medicinal plant comes to carry the same penalty as killing another person.

Karl du Fresne: Thinker of Yesterday

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The Establishment is wheeling out all manner of propagandists in their last-ditch efforts to continue the War on Drugs, and after booze-sozzled losers like Mike Hosking and Paul Henry have had their say, the barrel is truly being scraped.

The latest pisshead Baby Boomer to do a King Knut impression is Karl du Fresne. His attempt to defend the indefensible is called “It’s the underbelly of society that lives with with drugs’ consequences.”

As you will see, only someone whose brain has been damaged by alcohol could write a piece of drivel like this.

The only one sentence that makes sense in the whole piece is the first one: “My generation has a lot to answer for.” Du Fresne was born in 1950, and thus is part of the generation responsible for the War on Drugs. Not for drugs, nor for drug use, but for the War on Drugs.

His entire article gets this simple truth arse about face.

“Drugs were one way of rebelling against a society they found dull and stifling.” Du Fresne accidentally makes an ironic point here – the generation of people who are young in 2016 take drugs specifically because the mainstream cultural narrative of New Zealand is set by people like Karl du Fresne.

“Many of the people whose jobs disappeared in the 1980s sought escape in cannabis, glue and later, methamphetamine.” Many people did, after all, there were a lot of them. But none of the cannabis users came to the attention of the coroner – unlike the heroin users, which du Fresne neglects to mention (perhaps severe long-term alcohol abuse has damaged his long-term memory?).

Nor the pissheads, who will never get mentioned. The vast majority of people who became substance abusers on account of the economic policies of the 1980s became alcoholics. In terms of actual damage done, alcohol outstrips cannabis by 1,000 to 1. But du Fresne, like most alcoholics, sees the bottle as his little darling, never to be questioned, never to be sullied, above all criticism or blame.

“…it was the middle class that introduced society to the mind-expanding delights of drugs, but it’s mainly the underbelly of society that has had to live with the consequences.” With typical pisshead logic, du Fresne here blames the damage wrought by the War on Drugs on the drug users themselves. The middle-class hasn’t been as damaged by drugs because they haven’t been attacked by the Police or the Justice system to anywhere near the same degree as the working classes have.

It’s been known since du Fresne’s time that if a Police officer finds cannabis on a white middle-class person who speaks with a University accent chances are he’ll let them go with a warning, but if it’s a Maori or poor white person they get the hammer. So the “consequences of drugs” he talks about are the consequences of the Drug War, and nothing else.

Du Fresne’s delusional attitude to alcohol (the sure sign of an addict) shines through when he accuses the Drug Foundation, which presents factual research about the effects of drugs, of taking a “shrill line against alcohol”.

Never forget: to every pisshead, speaking the truth about the effect of alcohol is an unreasonable thing to do.

“But while there are valid arguments for decriminalisation of cannabis, and especially for its medicinal use, the reformers can’t ignore the baneful effects of drug use.” Why the fuck would any cannabis law reformer care about the baneful effects of methamphetamine, heroin, legal high, nicotine etc. use? None of those drugs have anything to do with cannabis whatsoever, so why are they lumped in the same category? And alcohol left out? It makes no sense at all.

“Neither can they ignore the risk that liberalising the cannabis laws will send the dangerous message that drugs are OK. They may be okay if you’ve got a university degree and live in a good suburb, but they’re not so liberating if you’re a hungry kid living in a freezing state house where any surplus money goes on P rather than food or heating.” Yes, that sentence really was that stupid. Du Fresne essentially argues here that cannabis law reform is bad because some poor people spend money on P. It makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever.

“A good starting point for the debate might be a more honesty.” An honest conversation about the damage done to New Zealanders by drugs would start with one word.

Alcohol.

Why is this not mentioned?

The answer is this: Karl du Fresne is a complete and utter fucking whore, and the alcohol companies that advertise in Fairfax media are his pimps (he has many pimps, reflecting his total lack of shame). He propagandises for putting medicinal cannabis users in cages by using rhetoric that would be illegal if it was applied to Maori or gay people. All the while knocking back gallons of the drug that does more damage to New Zealand society than all others combined.

We don’t need boozeroos setting the cultural agenda for young people in this country any more. New Zealand needs to give a voice to the stoners and trippers among the young, and put Karl du Fresne, and his entire worthless generation of drug warriors and out-of-touch geriatrics, out to pasture.

You Won’t Understand John Key on Cannabis Unless You Understand Sadism

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Now that New Zealand has finally gathered the gumption to have a national discussion about cannabis, the end of prohibition is in sight. The reason why it was so hard to get a conversation about cannabis started is that prohibitionists have long known that as soon as it did, inevitably the forces of freedom would win, as they had both evidence and compassion on their side.

But what does compassion have to do with it?

As it turns out, everything. You simply cannot understand the cannabis law in New Zealand unless you understand the compassionate-malicious spectrum of human personality, for cannabis prohibition will not end in New Zealand until it is seen for what it is: naked sadism.

It’s time for a look into the ghoulish horrorscape that is the mind of a prohibitionist.

“In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism.” – H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken was an American philosopher-king active in the first half of the 20th century. Realising that satire was one of the only ways to get a complex message through the thick skulls of his fellow Americans, he took the piss out of the cultural peccadilloes of his time, one of the stupidest of which was alcohol prohibition.

In a small, self-published volume in 1926, Mencken observed that “Prohibition has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so vastly augmented the number of users.”

The infuriating thing for anyone who has tried to get the law to reflect justice and compassion, is that exactly the same is true of cannabis today.

What’s the past-year usage rate of cannabis in New Zealand, where growers are jailed? 14.6%.

What’s the past-year usage rate of cannabis in the Netherlands, where it’s sold openly? 5.4%.

That data is from 2008 – if you want something more recent, there’s a report that states teen cannabis use has not increased in Colorado since measures were taken to legalise it a few years ago.

It can be seen that cannabis prohibition has not reduced the number of people who use it – if the objective was to reduce the health problems that cannabis ostensibly causes, then prohibition is, prima facie, a failure. So why has the Drug War raged on for decades despite the lack of evidence that it is effective?

Because it is not effectiveness that is the issue.

Cannabis prohibition does not have to help the nation to be supported by prohibitionists. It only has to harm the sort of person who uses cannabis.

This is why John Key can so glibly claim that the Police are not really prosecuting anyone, and so there is no hurry to change the law – the Police are not prosecuting National voters. Most National voters own their own homes, and so can smoke cannabis in privacy away from people who might dob them in. Most Labour voters live in shared housing, and more often have to risk smoking in public.

Make no mistake: the point of the cannabis law is intentionally to fuck over the sort of people most feared by the control mechanism and its lackeys – the freespirited, the creative, the spiritual, the kind, the young, the rebel, the unbrainwashed.

Why is John Key vicious like this? Perhaps this is revenge of the nerds, Kiwi style. Key, like Peter Dunne, was severely bullied at school, and perhaps supporting cannabis prohibition is one way that they wreak their petty revenge on the braver kids who experimented with life rather than striving to get ahead.

Another possible explanation is the the old, uptight white male that John Key represents deeply resents the ruthless historical process that is stripping him of his privilege and is lashing out.

When I was a barman, the worst customers were not the young men who suffered most of the demonisation but the male menopausal men who felt their plummeting testosterone and the lack of physical dominance that came with it, and knew that their best days were in the past. Perhaps John Key is of an age where his erectile health is no longer reliable, and he bitterly resents the young people who know that using cannabis enhances the pleasure of lovemaking.

The truth is probably that cannabis prohibitionists are simply malicious, petty-minded bigots who support harm for harm’s sake, as long as it isn’t happening to them.