justice – Page 55

The Case For Cannabis: Legalisation Would Not Increase Drugged Driving Deaths

The resistance that many people have towards cannabis law reform is fear based. Like a panicky chicken, the prospect of any change at all is met with terror. One of the fears that people have at the thought of cannabis legalisation is that it will lead to carnage on our roads. As this article will examine, these fears are misguided.

As with many of the misgivings that people have about cannabis law reform, the fear of an increase in drugged driving deaths is based on a misconception about how dangerous cannabis is. This is partially based on ignorance, and partially based on the idea that being high on cannabis is like being drunk on alcohol.

The idea seems to be that perfectly otherwise normal people will smoke some cannabis and, because cannabis makes you go crazy, they will get in a car and drive like a crazy person. This perception has been stoked by sensationalist media reporting involving headlines such as “Stoned driver faces jail” when the driver in question had also been smoking methamphetamine.

The idea that cannabis legalisation will lead to more road deaths is not accurate for three major reasons.

The first is that it ignores the substitution effect (for the sake of argument, let’s agree here with the lazy assumption that legal cannabis will lead to more use). An individual driving under the influence of cannabis might not be as safe as a sober person. But evidence from elsewhere shows that, if cannabis was legalised, a proportion of incidents of drunk driving will be replaced with incidents of stoned driving, which are safer.

Research has shown that rates of alcohol use fall in places where recreational cannabis is made legal. This is because cannabis and alcohol serve as substitutes to a large extent. Because rates of alcohol use fall after cannabis legalisation, rates of drunk driving also fall, and this means that traffic fatalities also fall – significantly.

It’s better for a driver to be sober, but if they aren’t going to be sober, it’s better for them to be stoned than to be drunk. It’s a grim calculus, but if legalising cannabis would lead to twenty extra drugged driving deaths but would prevent fifty drunk driving deaths, it would be a worthwhile move.

The second is that the actual science is inconclusive as to whether being stoned impairs driving safety. Various studies have provided contradictory results. The lazy assumption is that being under the influence of any psychoactive drug, including cannabis, will make a person worse at driving. The reality is that stoned drivers take a variety of measures to reduce their risk of crashing.

Part of the problem is that unregulated cannabis contains a great variety of various cannabinoids, and these cannabinoids can be present at a great variety of frequencies. Studies appear to be clear that high doses of THC impair driver safety, which follows logically from the fact that THC is known to have a psychotogenic effect, but there is no such evidence suggesting the same about high doses of CBD.

It also appears to be true that, unlike alcohol, cannabis tolerance has an effect on whether it impairs driving performance. For many cannabis users, cannabis is merely a background substance that quietens distracting thoughts. All these reasons mean that, although no responsible person would advocate driving after using cannabis, a person who has just smoked it is not necessarily unsafe to drive.

The third is that it is irrelevant. Like with many arguments against cannabis law reform, focus on the specifics misses the bigger picture.

Not everyone trusts the Government when it says that cannabis is a substance that isn’t safe to drive on. As the linked articles above demonstrate, there are indeed instances when a person who has consumed cannabis is not safe to drive. But why would a person trust a Government public safety notice on the subject, when they have previously lied about cannabis full stop?

Over recent decades, governments all over the world have denied that cannabis was medicinal. But because people all over the world knew that it was medicinal, the end result has been decreased trust of governmental pronouncements, particularly when they relate to cannabis. So if the a government would give the perfectly reasonable advice to avoid driving within two hours of smoking, it might well be ignored.

If cannabis was legal, and if the Government spoke to the public honestly about it instead of lying, users might trust them when giving intelligent and prudent advice about smoking cannabis and driving. This would save many more lives in the long run than could possibly be saved by putting cannabis growers and users in prison.

The idea that cannabis legalisation will lead to a spate of fatal traffic accidents is fearmongering. It’s the same kind of fearmongering that claimed that legalising homosexuality would lead to everyone dying of AIDS. The experience of overseas territories that have legalised cannabis shows that these fears are little more than hysteria.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

New Zealand Still Runs on A Spoils System

There are many different kinds of corruption in the world’s various political systems. One of the most blatant is the type known as a spoils system. Although this is commonly believed to be a corrupt form of government that we have now moved past, New Zealand still runs on a spoils system, as this essay will examine.

A spoils system is when the victorious party gets to dish out government posts and gifts from the treasury as if they were the spoils of war. Like a conquering Roman legion, all the treasure and booty are piled in a big heap, and then apportioned out by the leaders to their lackeys.

When the spoils system was blatantly in play, an incoming Government would remove many of the previous Government’s supporters from any influential positions so as to install their own. Back then, there wasn’t a public taxation fund to pillage, so the spoils of victory mostly involved jobs in central Government. The position of regional postmaster was a particular favourite.

Although the New Zealand Government would like to give the impression that it fills its positions based on merit and that this merit has been determined after great thought and dutiful application of philosophy, it also runs on a spoils system.

Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter is married to a man named Peter Nunns, who is a principal economist of a transport consultancy firm named MR Cagney. Since taking power in 2017, Government spending on hiring this particular firm has leapt from around $50,000 a year to $246,000 a year, with this money coming from 18 different contracts.

Incredibly, none of these contracts were even put up for tender. The linked article lists a range of excuses for this supposed coincidence, but all of them are just red herrings. The simple fact is that MR Cagney had money being piped into it from the central government, and that the victorious Green Party increased the flow of money fivefold as soon as they were able.

Shane Jones’s $3,000,000,000 Regional Development Fund is another example of the spoils system at play. Jones found himself in charge of the treasury, helped himself to a few billions, and now he’s doling it out in exchange for future favours. Like a jolly brown Santa, he descends from the skies to bring gifts to those who have behaved correctly.

The reason why it’s purely a regional development fund is because that will best reward New Zealand First voters. According to Dan McGlashan’s Understanding New Zealand, there is a correlation of 0.60 between voting New Zealand First in 2017 and living in a rural electorate.

The only other party to come close to this is the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, at 0.40. New Zealand First is, therefore, very much the party of the countryside, and this $3 billion fund is little more than payback for the support of the countryside at the last election.

Treating New Zealand as the spoils of war is far from something the Sixth Labour Government invented to keep coalition allies onside. It didn’t matter to John Key and Bill English that over two-thirds of the country explicitly said ‘no’ to asset sales, because the majority of National voters fell into the one third who said ‘yes’. The Labour, New Zealand First and Greens voters that made up the two thirds didn’t support National, therefore didn’t get any of the spoils of the National victory.

In a sense, democracy can’t avoid being a spoils system because if the winning party doesn’t reward its voters, it may not get voted in again. The Labour Party rewards Maoris, not because they are communists, but because Maoris vote for them in great numbers: Dan McGlashan found a correlation of 0.58 between being Maori and voting for the Labour Party in 2017.

If voting for the Labour Party didn’t have some kind of payoff, perhaps people wouldn’t do so again. This is more important the more marginalised your voters are, because these are the most likely to abstain from voting. Therefore, whichever party wins the election is all but obliged to dish out the spoils to those who voted for them, because if they don’t then the other side will, and then the other side will stay in power for longer.

There are several problems with this, however. One of the most obvious is that, once it’s apparent that it’s a spoils system contested by Team Rich and Team Poor, there arises a great incentive to disenfranchise Team Poor.

There will always be more poor people than wealthy ones, and so the obvious move for the wealthy, from a game theory perspective, is to demoralise the poor so that they don’t bother to vote. Widespread use of this strategy can have a devastating effect on social cohesion, as America has demonstrated. It could be argued that it was this phenomenon that led to the rise of Hitler during the Weimar Republic.

The only way to get around this is to increase the solidarity of the nation, and the strength of the bonds between each person. This cannot be achieved until the rotten, half-collapsed structures of the previous age are finally razed to the ground. From the ashes, a true spirituality can arise, and this will inspire us to make the right moves elsewhere.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

The Case For Cannabis: Quality Control

Libertarians like to complain about government regulation, claiming that it leads to stifled innovation and more expensive products. Although this is true of mature markets, regulation for emerging markets of any good or service usually keeps cowboys out of the industry. An argument for cannabis law reform is that it would maintain a certain level of quality within cannabis products.

The black market means a lot of things. It means shady characters, violence, turf wars, unbelievable amounts of bullshit and prison sentences. It also means a variable quality of product – and this has a number of adverse consequences for people’s health.

Black market alcohol still regularly kills people in places like Norway, where legal alcohol is extremely expensive, because it doesn’t have the same quality controls as the commercial product. As a result, the person making it often has little idea of how strong their product really is. Sometimes it’s as strong as absinthe.

Despite the fact that legal alcohol still kills a lot of people, most people can understand the quality control argument against alcohol prohibition. Although legal cannabis would be much less likely than alcohol to kill people, there is still a quality control argument to be made for cannabis law reform. If one approaches the subject of cannabis law reform from a harm reduction point of view, then legalisation makes a lot more sense than prohibition.

When growing cannabis, there’s not too much that can go wrong. It’s called weed for a reason. Nevertheless, it’s still possible to grow buds that have mold on them, especially because of the fact that they are often grown indoors in moist environments, or grown outdoors in places where the rainfall can’t be controlled. This mold can easily lead to lung conditions if the bud containing it is smoked.

Much worse is that sometimes black market cannabis is sprayed with various substances that make it appear more sticky or provide more of a “hit”. This can be anything from legal highs to fly spray. It might be hard for some people to believe that anyone selling cannabis could be so unscrupulous, but that’s what people are exposed to when cannabis is on the black market. It’s complete chaos.

None of these things would happen if cannabis was commercially grown, at least not any more often than you’d buy moldy bread from the supermarket. If it ever did happen, it would trigger a review of quality control procedures at the place of manufacture, and new procedures would be put in place to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Quality control is not simply a matter of physical safety. The more science advances, the more we are coming to appreciate how many active cannabinoids there are in the cannabis plant, and how different amounts of various ones can have entirely different effects to others.

We’re starting to learn that cannabinoids like delta-9 THC, while immensely enjoyable in the right context, are not necessarily helpful from a pain relief perspective. We’re also learning that cannabinoids like CBD have a wide range of medicinal uses, but that it’s difficult to gather useful scientific data about how to prescribe them, because it’s hard to get hold of accurately calculated doses.

A regulated cannabis industry would allow for manufacturers to create products that had precise and known amounts of each ingredient cannabinoid. This would make it possible for doctors to prescribe a regular supply of the right cannabinoid at the right dose. In this context, the right dose means a dose that is strong enough to achieve the desired therapeutic effects without being so strong that it causes other problems.

Neither is quality control simply a matter of health.

Perhaps the worst examples of a lack of quality control can be found in the various ripoffs that occur on the black market. There are many elderly people who are desperate to get hold of cannabis medicine for conditions that cause them to suffer, and for who legal medicines are unsuitable. These elderly patients are then forced into the black market, and often get tricked into giving money to someone who supplies a substandard product – or even no product at all.

That vulnerable people can get ripped off to the tune of thousands of dollars by clowns who don’t know how to manufacture quality cannabis products, or by criminals who are happy to supply rubbish that doesn’t work, is one of the cruelest outcomes of cannabis prohibition. Some of these people are trying to find solace to deal with the pain of the last days of their lives, and cannabis prohibition leaves them exposed to the most exploitative elements of the black market.

This has been a common occurrence on various FaceBook groups, where old people are given a small amount of CBD oil as a sample and then asked to pay thousands for a low-grade oil that confers no therapeutic advantage. Because cannabis is illegal, these old people have no chance of getting justice through Police action. Of course, the scammers are fully aware of this, because prohibition is a criminal’s best friend.

Cannabis should be made legal so as to make sure that the cannabis that people use, and which they are going to use regardless of the law, is of an adequate quality. This will not only avoid the occasional physical illness that comes from buying black market cannabis, but it will also decrease the suffering caused by criminal activity in the cannabis market.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

Is New Zealand Now A Tyranny?

In the Greco-Roman world, tyranny was defined as a form of government in which the rulers were unrestrained by laws. If the rulers are unrestrained by laws, then they are capable of inflicting any amount of cruelty upon the people, without there being any obvious way to stop them. This is widely agreed to be a terrible and evil form of government. This essay asks: is New Zealand now a tyranny?

One of the clearest examples of a tyranny is the presence of arbitrary and seemingly random punishments. New Zealand man Philip Arps is facing 14 years imprisonment for sharing a video of the Christchurch mosque shootings last month, on the grounds that the video was “objectionable content”. This is an incredible potential punishment if one consider the seven years imprisonment that Myron Robert Alf Felise got earlier this year for punching teenager Eli Holtz to death.

If New Zealand would bring in a 14-year maximum sentence for common assault or petty theft, it would be an obvious case of tyrannical overreach. So how can it be possible for them to introduce equally as severe a punishment for an action that did not harm anyone? It seems especially bizarre if one considers that New Zealanders are sharing and viewing videos of murderous terror attacks every day, but none of these are likewise criminalised.

A second example of tyrannical behaviour is the numerous laws and actions carried out by the New Zealand Government without the consent of the people, or even in cases when the people had explicitly withdrawn their consent. A current and ongoing example of these is the campaign of harassment currently being conducted by the New Zealand Police against anyone thought to be right-wing.

There are several anecdotal reports on social media about people having Police officers come to their house, often without warrants, in order to intimidate them and to gather intelligence (and one hilarious recording of such by New Zealand alt-media legend Vinny Eastwood). According to these reports, Police officers are demanding information about other right-wing people, and demanding to know if people are racists or if they supported Branton Tarrant.

One of the worst examples was what happened to Adam Holland in Queenstown (see image at top of article). Holland had two airguns and a crossbow removed from his possession on the grounds that Inspector Olaf Jensen had personally decreed Holland was “not a fit and proper person to be in possession” of such, and that “Police hold serious concerns regarding [Holland’s] mental and emotional wellbeing”.

Police officers have zero psychological education to justify any serious concern about anyone else’s wellbeing, and their whimsy is nowhere near a sufficient basis to remove possessions from a private citizen who has not used them in commission of a crime. What sort of country strips citizens of possessions on the basis of one Police officer’s judgment? How long until they take machetes and kitchen knives away?

Holland’s experience is just a further example of a process that started before the Sixth Labour Government. The Fifth National Government was happy to sell national assets, despite a referendum that explicitly declared the public unwillingness to do so, and all recent Governments have refused to acknowledge the clear public desire for cannabis law reform.

If a clear and direct expression of the public does not constrain our rulers, then what does?

A third example is the ongoing free speech violations. Justice Minister Andrew Little currently has a giant warboner over the possibility of introducing so-called “hate speech” laws, in which criticism of certain power structures becomes a criminal offence. As has been seen in Austria, where a woman was given a criminal conviction for saying that Muhammad was a pedophile, hate speech laws soon lead to the criminalisation of dissent.

The Government hasn’t started stripping our rights to speak away quite yet, because they are currently in the process of sounding out how much they think they can get away with, but the process of using propaganda to soften public resistance to such tyrannical laws is in full swing. The mainstream media is busy acclimatising the public to no longer being allowed to speak freely.

The really frightening thing is that such laws directly violate Section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, which guarantee New Zealanders the right to impart opinions of any kind in any form. If the Government is not bound by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act when taking our rights to speak away, what are they bound by? And if they are bound by nothing, as appears to be the case, then how are they any different to the literal definition of tyranny?

A fourth example is given in the image above. The Spinoff regularly runs articles attacking the enemies of the Government and making apologies for unpopular Government actions (although rarely are they so blatant as in the example above). The worrying thing is, as they admit on their company page, The Spinoff “works with NZ on Air and Creative New Zealand to fund our work” – in other words, they take Government cash to produce propaganda.

When the Government works hand-in-hand with the free press to create propaganda pieces, you don’t have a free press. In fact, the need for an authoritarian government to totally control the narrative was even mentioned by Josef Goebbels in his Principles of Propaganda. So the Government funding a media enterprise that pretends to be independent, but which in reality attacks enemies of the Government and propagandises for Government policies, is something fully in line with tyrannical Nazi principles.

The only way New Zealand can get out of this is to come together as individuals, ignoring the government, and to decide on a set of our rights that are inviolable and which must be respected by anyone who wishes to rule us. A starting point could be the essay published here expounding a seven-fold conception of inherent human rights. If all Kiwis agreed that every other Kiwi possessed such rights, we would be free of tyrannical measures.

If this doesn’t work then we’re left with anarcho-homicidalism.