Category: justice

‘I Like Smoking Weed’ Is a Perfectly Legitimate Argument

There is a faulty premise in the national consciousness – the premise that the pro-cannabis lobby has the responsibility to make the case for legalising cannabis before prohibition can be repealed. All kinds of politicians, from Andrew Little to Peter Dunne, have trotted out this lazy deception.

This line of rhetoric is false because it relies on a more fundamental premise, which is that the manner cannabis was made illegal was legitimate in the first place.

The usual apologia is that the politicians are our lawful representatives and so the laws they pass are done so with our consent, and so the politicians have the consent of the governed, and so all the laws they have passed are legitimate, including the ones pertaining to cannabis prohibition.

Basic logic that even a child can understand will tell you that, in the case of cannabis, the lack of a victim makes the law against it categorically different to other laws.

Punching people in the face is bad because it causes suffering.

Stealing someone’s food is bad because it will make them suffer from hunger.

Killing people is bad because it causes suffering to the remaining friends and family (not to mention the person while they’re being killed).

Murdering, shooting, stabbing, raping, kidnapping, defrauding, robbing, stealing, assaulting and battering – all of these are crimes because they have victims.

Outside of the delusional fantasy role-playing world that judges, lawyers and politicians have invented, crimes are distinguished from non-crimes on the basis that crimes cause suffering, not on the basis that a bunch of paedophiles in Wellington have decreed them thus.

This might sound really obvious to any Buddhist readers out there, but to many Kiwis, conditioned from childhood to obey authority without ever questioning its legitimacy, it appears revelatory.

It also puts the moral responsibility back on us to consider if the laws being passed by our supposed representatives actually have the effect of reducing suffering in New Zealand or not. The responsibility is not on our political representatives to make moral decisions on our behalf, because politicians are men of silver and philosophy is the preserve of everyone.

One argument is that cannabis, even if not directly harmful, may be indirectly harmful because of long-term health considerations of the user that the general taxpayer has to pay to treat. This argument contends that we ought to wait for science to prove that cannabis is relatively harmless.

The truth is this – we don’t need to prove that science says cannabis should be legal because science was never used to make it illegal. We also don’t need to prove that cannabis is harmless because harmless is not the standard things have to reach in order to be legal.

It’s legal to consume any of alcohol, caffeine, sugar, fat or tobacco to whatever extent one likes and to have the taxpayer cover any medical costs that may arise.

It’s legal to fill the tank of your car up with petrol, a vital and ever-diminishing resource, and to drive around and around in circles for no reason.

It’s legal to join a rugby team and to hit another person in a tackle with the intent of injuring them and to break a bone oneself and to go on ACC.

It’s legal to go into a forest with a rifle and shoot dead a whole bunch of large mammals.

All of these activities arguably cause more harm than smoking cannabis does, even under the broadest interpretation of health issues.

The standard to make cannabis illegal – which has never been met and which never will be met – is that there is more suffering under a regime of cannabis freedom than under a regime of cannabis prohibition.

Until this standard is met, no further reason for using cannabis need be given than ‘I like smoking weed.’

Cannabis and Alcohol Users Must Unite Against the Wowsers and Control Freaks

Some Kiwis might have woken up from a New Year’s-induced stupor long enough to ask: “What happened to the Wellington Sevens?” Well, sit down, folks – I’ve got a bitter and tragic tale to tell.

The short of it, though, is this – New Zealand is full of wowsers, and those wowsers saw Kiwis having a good time and decided that this had to be stomped down as soon as possible, lest anyone get carried away.

The linked article notes that the occasion was essentially “a two day party with a bit of sevens rugby on the side” and it died because “the organisers have slowly strangled the event with tighter and tighter regulations as the years went by.”

Amazingly, putting several tens of thousands of drunks in a confined space in the middle of summer didn’t end without problems.

But, as this essay will argue, so what?

14 years of what had grown to become the single greatest annual festival in the Kiwi cultural calendar, was destroyed by the Fun Police in a couple of years: “the wowsers have killed off the atmosphere that made the Wellington Sevens so popular.”

This year, an event that used to sell out a 30,000+ seat stadium in minutes has struggled to sell so much as 1,300 tickets. The general attitude towards the event from once-loyal partygoers is that “they can’t have fun at the event in case they upset someone.”

The question is: why do we let them do this to us?

So what if a few drunks caused trouble and created a sub-optimally family-friendly atmosphere. So what? Do we live in a McDonald’s playground?

It’s time to stop the rout! Everyone who enjoys drinking alcohol has to face up to this fact – cannabis is already illegal and tobacco is being made illegal. What’s going to stop the control freaks from cracking down on alcohol once they’ve banned tobacco?

And will Kiwis do anything it when it happens, or just take it up the arse as we have done thus far?

Is it acceptable that it is gradually becoming illegal to have fun? Are we doomed to end up like the Soviet Union, streets full of dour, grey-faced citizens conditioned to be afraid to crack a joke or a smile, lest they fall foul of some bureaucratic juggernaut that comes after them like a pitbull?

New Zealand has to face the very real possibility that, as our population continues to age, we will eventually ban every possible avenue of enjoyment and turn the whole country into a giant old folks’ home.

Pissheads and potheads, its time to acknowledge that we have a mutual enemy that is only growing in power as the population ages and our politicians become ever more out of touch with reality.

This enemy has existed all throughout history, and it waxes and wanes in strength according to the fashions of the age. It’s an enemy that resents all fun, resents all happiness, and which resents life itself.

The New Zealand Wowser is the single greatest threat to our quality of life. If we do not begin to oppose them, we will wake up one morning to find that everything is illegal except for a curated, Health and Safety-approved set of behaviours on a short list.

Having Three Children or More is Tantamount to Being a Murderer

Whether you realise it or not, these are exciting times for Planet Earth. We are currently in the middle of what is known as the Sixth Extinction (in the history of Earth), or the Holocene Extinction, after the geological era. This has been caused by humans, and is reshaping the biosphere of the entire planet.

The Sixth Extinction began with human migration outside of Africa. The existing megafauna of other continents – like the Woolly Mammoth and the Moa – occupied niches that were highly sensitive to the introduction of a new apex predator, and almost all of them were wiped out by human expansion.

Today, the Sixth Extinction has wiped out significant numbers of species on every land mass and ocean. The current rate of species loss is believed to be 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than what it would have been without human presence.

And it’s not just because we’re particularly wasteful or greedy.

One inescapable fact of nature and reproduction is that, for your offspring to occupy a niche within nature, they have to drive out any possible competitors in that niche, and then to defend it against all comers. So for your offspring to so much as exist and continue to exist, they have to kill other life, because nature is permanently in a state of flux and this means conflict.

Your offspring have to eat. There’s no way around that. The cattle sector of agriculture has been responsible for 80% of the rainforest destruction since 1970. And one estimate of the world’s fish stocks suggest that the number of fish in the oceans are now 10% of their pre-industrial value.

Even if you raise them to be vegans (which is itself morally questionable), the food still has to be grown somewhere and your offspring have to live somewhere, and much of the remainder of Amazon rainforest destruction is for soybean production, housing space, or for hardwoods.

This rate of destruction is not inevitable. In fact, it is a function of another variable: our rate of population increase.

Given the increase in the human population in recent centuries (as depicted in the graph above), it is simply unavoidable that we would do the amount of ecological damage that we have done. Because people have to consume the environment around them in order to continue to live, an increasing population will always alter its environment – and therefore contribute to species extinction – in so far as it needs to eat.

The central contention of this essay is this: anyone who has more than two children does an amount of environmental damage to nature which, in terms of degree of tragedy, is equal to committing murder.

After all, there is one thing we do know for certain about our increasing population, and that is the higher it increases, the higher the demand for the limited resources of the planet become, and therefore the closer we move towards war.

If a couple has two children to replace themselves they are not increasing the amount of pressure on the environment. Only by having three or more does a couple ensure that their offspring have to expand into other niches instead of (relatively) simply just inheriting those of their parents. This expansion means aggression against the previous inhabitants of those niches – and this is unavoidable.

Perhaps, if humans were serious about avoiding the environmental collapse that would kill us all, we would pass a law so that any man who could be proven to have three or more children is to be executed. If three children was considered too restrictive, we could start with a boundary of four or even five.