Category: justice

Peter Dunne Just Made it Legal to Violate the Bill of Rights Act

The Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill received Royal Assent this week, now making it legal for any New Zealander to violate Section 11 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, as long as the victim uses a psychoactive substance.

This column has already reported on human rights abuses of psychiatric patients in New Zealand, and it seems Peter Dunne, in his decades-long, multibillion war on the poor and vulnerable, has laid the legal foundations for more.

Like the Psychoactive Substances Act – another invention of the psychopathic Dunne – the Substance Addiction Act is worded so vaguely as to almost be meaningless. Almost anyone can be involuntarily interred for almost anything, raising the possibility that the barbaric New Zealand mental health system is about to get even worse.

Section 7 of the Act lays out the criteria for compulsory treatment. These are vague enough that use of almost any psychoactive substance, legal or otherwise, is enough to force compulsory treatment on someone.

Section 8 lays out the criteria for severe substance addiction. They are broad enough that most of the New Zealand population would have qualified at one point in their lives. For example, anyone who has tried to give up cigarettes but has found it hard could have “treatment” forced on them.

Why is the New Zealand mainstream media so obsessed with whether or not Donald Trump is a fascist, when our own Government is passing laws giving itself the right to force mental health treatment on any Kiwi expressing their right to cognitive liberty?

Having a “very serious addiction” that “seriously diminishes the person’s ability to care for himself or herself” is one thing – but the problem is that the people defining what a serious drug addiction is don’t have an accurate idea of what the drugs they are legalising compulsory treatment for actually do.

New Zealand has, after all, fallen behind Arkansas, Uruguay and South Africa in social progress on the medical cannabis issue. Many New Zealand mental health patients have had the experience of trying to explain their medicinal cannabis use to a doctor who, by some crude calculus, simply decides that the regular use is a sign of addiction.

Section 9 states “A person’s capacity to make informed decisions about treatment for a severe substance addiction is severely impaired if the person is unable to…(a) understand the information relevant to the decisions.”

Potentially this means that if you disagree with a doctor that your medicinal cannabis use causes reefer madness, creates holes in your brain or makes you psychotic/schizophrenic/depressed/anxious/insomniac/narcoleptic (or whatever stupid shit the Govt. says that cannabis does), then you can be said to not understand the relevant information.

Given the rubbish our authority figures already believe about drugs, how can we trust them for one moment to make accurate decisions about who is so addicted that they need to be forced into treatment?

It’s already clearly not in the interest of medicinal cannabis users to be forced into prison, yet they are, at the cost of $400,000,000 per year – so how can we trust that the same Govt. doing that won’t also use this new law to aggress against medicinal cannabis users?

Section 12 of the Act states “the interests of patients should remain at the centre of any decision making.” But the Government is already supposed to be making decisions on the basis that the interests of the governed are at the centre – and they have utterly failed, because they have made it a law that medicinal cannabis users are to be brutalised by the Police and by the Health and Justice Systems.

In the Hansard record of the third reading of the Bill, Ruth Dyson said “We are putting a significant number of new patients into the system under this compulsory treatment regime.”

So we can expect that these new powers to detain the mentally ill will be used against them, and especially against those who have found relief for their mental illness in medicines that they do not have Parliamentary approval for.

It’s worth noting that the New Zealand Police can and will go as far as killing any Kiwi who resists treatment under this law.

If a patient will not go voluntarily, even if they have a good reason – like being one of the five New Zealanders who had electroshock therapy forced on them after they had explicitly withdrawn their consent last year – the Police will use force to get them to comply.

And if the patient resists that, the Police will kill them. We know this because the Police will go to that extent to enforce any law, no matter how trivial.

For the Catholic Dunne, this latest persecution of the mentally ill is a continuation of the brutal religious tradition he embodies; a tradition of abuse stretching even further back than the Inquisition.

The Psychoactive Substances Act made it illegal for anyone to have anything to do with any psychoactive substances that were not on a Government-approved list, and this Substances Addiction Act makes it possible for the Govt. to go as far as violating the Bill of Rights Act in enforcing compliance with that.

The mainstream media, of course, is too busy copy-and-pasting the latest social media gossip about Donald Trump to report on any of this. Other channels will keep you informed.

Some Problems With Defining Psychosis or Mental Illness

The medical establishment likes to give the impression that they are the authority on mental illness and that they know what they’re talking about. What we used to call “being mad” is now known as psychosis, which even has a nice, neat clinical definition: it requires a “loss of contact with reality”.

The difficulty with this definition – which no clinician will admit – is that no-one knows what reality even is. Simple logic will tell you that there are as many potential interpretations of what reality is as there are perspectives upon it to take.

And these are infinite.

So the definition of psychosis has become “loss of contact with what is commonly agreed upon to be reality”.

At this point one can continue to ask if it is legitimate, but it is worth noting that this no longer matters. Once the balance of political power supports the enforcement of a medical paradigm in which a loss of contact with what is commonly agreed upon to be reality is considered psychosis, that is what psychosis will be.

Even so, one must ask the question: how does the psychiatrist know what is commonly agreed upon to be reality?

The doctor can only know about reality in so far as they have experienced it, and chances are that they have experienced it from a biased perspective for reasons that are not admitted to because of politics.

For instance, the average doctor is a decidedly middle-class person. It takes a highly unusual academic aptitude to qualify. It’s unlikely that any given doctor has seen reality from the perspective of a very poor person, or of a mentally ill one.

So it’s apparent that whatever is commonly agreed to be reality is whatever the lowest common denominator considers it to be. And mostly all we can agree on is that the physical world is real – because, after all, it looks like it – so anyone who disagrees with this is psychotic.

Mostly we can agree on the realities of the social world – don’t hit people, kick them, spit or swear at them etc. Other social realities are not so clear.

For example, is homosexuality a mental illness or not? There was a time, only a few decades ago, when psychiatrists who considered themselves “experts” in psychosis and mental illness were comfortable in diagnosing their homosexual patients as mentally ill.

If one answers that the criminalisation of homosexuality was obviously a mistake and now we know better, what about the use of medicinal cannabis? Because a majority of psychiatrists still consider medicinal cannabis use for the alleviation of mental illness to be an “abuse” that leads to psychosis, and this opinion is no less ignorant, arrogant and boneheaded than the old ones about homosexuality.

Cannabis use can lead to psychosis, but not for the reasons they think it does. Cannabis wakes you up. Psychosis is little more than being prematurely woke, and panicking thereby. Cannabis makes you aware of things that you had previously been too stupid to be aware of. And this can cause psychosis in the young and in the dull.

In so far as people are dumb, anyone becoming suddenly woke is going to have what the still-dumb would call a “loss of contact with reality”. In fact, it’s hard to see how this is avoidable, given that the opinions people hold before they become woke are inevitably those of the herd that they have absorbed out of pliability.

Anyone who, for the first time, learns a truth that the majority do not already know risks being seen as a psychotic, because the majority have be conditioned to treat anyone waking up from mass delusions as if they are sick in the head.

In cases of purely technical knowledge, this is no big deal. In cases of politics or religion, or, even more crucially, of reality itself, it is a big deal.

Anyone who has read Plato’s Republic will not only understand the analogy, but they will also realise that woke people realised all this over 2,000 years ago, and warned anyone capable of listening in texts like Republic.

The famous analogy of the cave warned those already on the path to waking up that their superior insight will not and can not be accepted as such by the plebs.

So anyone who has been awoken to a higher order of reality by the original perspectives of thought offered by certain psychoactive drug experiences ought to know, right from the beginning, that these perspectives will never be accorded credibility by a medical establishment that is absolutely stuffed full of paid-up worshippers of the cult of materialism.

Any belief in a reality beyond the material is a mental illness in the current paradigm of the Western medical establishment.

Whereas the ancient Hindus, the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks all came to a similar insight over 2,500 years ago – that the primary basis of reality is consciousness and that the material world, or Maya, is an illusion – one cannot simply expect this insight to be acknowledged by our cultural guardians of how reality ought to be interpreted.

They are materialists, and therefore anyone disagreeing with materialist dogma will be considered mentally ill. Psychosis is therefore not really a “loss of contact with reality” but “disagreeing with the materialist clinician about what reality is”.

So for the rest of us it may be a matter of bunkering down until this materialist craze blows over and those who have seen beyond can speak freely again.

Is this the Age of the Pleb?

There are many systems of thought that describe various times, epochs or ages that humanity appears to pass through on its collective historical journey through the Great Fractal. Plato’s Republic described it alchemically, the Hindu cosmology describes it in a similar fashion and many other traditions have a time of increasing disorder leading to a climactic revolution.

In Republic, Plato laid out how culture disintegrates over time. Society begins in a Golden Age, according to Socrates in Book VIII, and gradually deteriorates.

It begins with rulers who put virtue above all, and who accordingly cannot own property. Because of the errors that these good people inevitably make as a consequence of being fallible, they are replaced by an inferior and greedier set of rulers.

Eventually the greed of the society leads to money being lent out at high rates of interest, which inevitably concentrates wealth in the hands of a very few. Society degenerates further into the rule of the mob, when doing whatever one wishes to do is the only value.

Here there is little of the higher order that an alchemist would associate with gold, silver or iron. Indeed, the men of gold have vanished by the time it comes to democracy. The man of clay takes charge by convincing the man of iron that the man of silver wishes to enslave him, and by convincing the man of silver that the man of iron wishes to kill him, and so ensures that those two mutually destroy each other.

The Hindu timeline tells a fantastic – and weirdly similar – story. Each Great Year, or Age of Man, or Maha Yuga, itself consists of four smaller Yugas.

The first of these, the Satya Yuga, is also known as the Age of Truth, and it corresponds very closely to what an alchemist would call a Golden Age and what Plato would have called rule by aristocracy. Here it is the gods that are, rightly, in charge of their creation, and everyone knows their correct place.

In the next age, the Treta Yuga, righteousness gradually diminishes. An alchemist would call this an Age of Silver – spirituality begins to give way to materialism, and kings and rulers must use cunning to get their will through, no longer able to rely on the confidence that the ruled have in them.

The final stage is the Kali Yuga, which is known in Hinduism as a Dark Age.

Both of these systems of thought, like the Norse Ragnarok and the Abrahamist Armageddon, suggest that the human experience starts good and gradually gets worse until it has to be restarted in violent revolution. Before we get to this point, however, things have to become genuinely terrible.

An alchemist might point to the immense population surge of the last 150 years and declare that this must be the time of the man of clay, because it appears that no longer does anything other than sex matter. People breed mindlessly, with no thought to the long-term benefit of their actions or whether more offspring are desirable, and so the human population has exploded.

A consequence of this is a resurgence of lowest common denominator culture. American popular culture seems to have sunk to an almost childish level, with the people happy to accept any display of gross incompetence or unfitness for leadership from their ruling class.

In New Zealand it can be seen with the increasing media attention given to soccer, which is the McDonalds of world sports, at the expense of excellent sports such as rugby and cricket, and with the degeneration of the nation’s most popular media portals into click-baiting drivel.

Perhaps all of these systems of thought are all correct and we are currently living in the Age of the Pleb, ruled by the worst among us, and by the worst instincts within ourselves.

The good news is that, in all systems of thought that warn us of such a thing, the Age of the Pleb is always replaced by a new Golden Age.

To some extent, how this develops is inevitable. The man of gold, born into the age of the man of clay, finds himself impelled to take action. The degree of degeneration strikes him as obscene, and out of righteous anger he takes action.

This action usually has the effect of bringing fire into the world to burn away the rot and filth of the Age of the Pleb. Sometimes this means war – and with a massive and still-growing human population creating ever more pressure on ever depleting natural resources, this seems very possible.

The other way we might exit the Age of the Pleb is by a fiery revolution of thought, in which the mental cobwebs of long-decayed religions are burned away by righteous fire and the brutal monkey instincts at the bottom of our brains are tamed and sublimated into something valuable.