justice – Page 66

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Does Not Lead to Crime

One of the reasons offered by prohibitionists for keeping cannabis illegal is that that cannabis leads to crime, by way of some quality inherent to itself. This is a favourite reason trotted out by people whose livelihoods are dependent on government funding for cannabis prohibition, people who are often pigs at the trough in more than one sense. The truth is not only that cannabis is not criminogenic by itself, but that cannabis prohibition is what has caused criminal behaviour to become related to the substance.

One common line of horseshit that people often hear with regard to cannabis use is that it warps people’s brains and makes them impulsive, and thereby criminal. By means of some nebulous kind of brain damage, people who use cannabis lose their ability to control their own inner malice and naturally come to start abusing themselves and other people, both mentally and physically. They come to commit crimes of opportunity when they would normally have resisted the impulse to do so.

Another stupidity is that cannabis addiction leads to stealing to service the cost of the addiction. Confusing cannabis users with the worst kind of crack or heroin user, this stereotype has it that legal cannabis would lead to a large number of people becoming addicted to it and then stealing from other people to get the money to buy more cannabis. Ignoring the fact that finding a dealer who has a proper supply is many times harder than getting enough money to buy the weed in the first place, this idea suggests that prohibition is good because it leads to fewer burglaries and muggings.

The fact is that neither of these glib just-so stories is true.

There is indeed, a link between cannabis and crime, and it comes from the criminal associations that have to be made in order to maintain a cannabis supply. Because cannabis is illegal, the only people that can supply it regularly are professional criminals. So a person who has a need for medicinal cannabis has to deal with professional criminals on account of that they are forbidden by law to deal with a pharmacist.

It is true that, when a person who needs a regular supply of medicinal cannabis comes into contact with a professional criminal, this can lead to crime. What is also true is that this criminogenic effect is a consequence of cannabis prohibition, and has nothing to do with the nature of cannabis itself. The professional criminal might expose the cannabis user to other drugs, or to illegal firearms, or to stolen goods, or even to blackmail. This is a result of the fact that only criminals deal in cannabis when it’s illegal.

Cannabis doesn’t make people stab and rob other people by itself. Going without cannabis, much like going without other psychiatric medicines, mostly just puts people in shitty moods and carries a risk of psychosis. But if you’re the sort of person that does stab and rob people, then its almost a certainty that either you are involved with cannabis or that you move in the same circles as someone who does.

So it’s true that there is an association between cannabis and crime. But this association can be explained by the fact that both are illegal, rather than that involvement with cannabis inherently causes criminal conduct. In places where cannabis is legal, as it (sort of) has been in the Netherlands for some decades now, people who want small amounts of cannabis – even if they want it regularly – can get it without coming into contact with the criminal underworld.

As a result, cannabis does not lead to exposure to harmful criminal activity in places where cannabis is legal at the same rate as it does in places where it is illegal.

Because of all this, we can state that the truth is really close to the opposite of what’s commonly said. A Forbes article from earlier this year showed that crime had fallen in Mexican states that border America, on account of that cannabis law reform had taken the cannabis trade away from the black market. Homicides related to the drug trade were believed to have fallen 41% because of cannabis law reform, as incidents of turf wars over illegal cannabis sales essentially vanished.

These statistics reveal a couple of things. Not only does cannabis not inherently lead to crime, but cannabis prohibition itself inherently leads to crime. Prohibiting cannabis is to move it onto the black market, which is to ensure that organised crime will fight over territory and distribution profits. Once there are large, black market profits to be made in the trade of an illicit substance, ensuing violence is all but guaranteed.

The laws against cannabis prohibition can only be supported if a person understands nothing of the crime wave that followed in the wake of alcohol prohibition. Cannabis prohibition takes all the legitimate demand for the substance – and the demand for it is legitimate, not “drug addiction” – then gifts all of that demand to the black market, who are the only people willing to supply it. This means that it’s prohibition itself that causes the crime that is associated with cannabis, and not the cannabis itself.

Cannabis law reform is necessary so that people who want to engage in the cannabis trade are not exposed to the criminal underworld. This will reduce crime rates by keeping citizens who would otherwise be law-abiding away from the sort of professional criminal who might take advantage of them, or who might bring their criminal influence into other areas of the cannabis user’s life.

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.

How A New Zealand Nazi Party Could Eliminate All Competition Through Existing Mechanisms

Suprisingly few understand that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power by winning democratic elections. Fewer still understand that the subsequent march from liberty to totalitarianism was made in a small number of entirely legal steps. This essay suggests something original: that a New Zealand equivalent of the German Nazi Party could assume dictatorial powers by exploiting current New Zealand law.

The German National Socialist Worker’s Party won 33% of the party vote in the November 1932 federal elections, which was eventually enough to get Hitler, the leader, appointed German Chancellor. From there, the Nazis succeeded in having all opposition banned by means of the Reichstag Fire Decree and then, later, the Enabling Act. The effect of these two pieces of legislation was to make Germany into a one-party state, with all political power held in the Nazi Party.

But wait! you cry. The New Zealand system is different to the Weimar Republic. Our Mixed Member Proportional system is designed to prevent extremists from taking power, by making it impossible for parties to get representation unless they get a proportion of votes above a predetermined threshold. This is true – but there’s a catch. The fact is, this threshold is both a precedent and a mechanism for totalitarianism.

A party needs to get at least 5% of the party vote before it is allowed to have any seats in Parliament. Any party that gets less than 5% of the vote gets no seats at all (unless they also win an electorate seat). The logic is that if you cannot command at least 5% of the vote, then it is best to exclude you (and your voters) from Parliament entirely, on the grounds that you represent a radical extremist movement.

This logic is essentially the same logic that Hitler used to ban the Communists, only wrapped up in prettier packaging.

A hypothetical New Zealand Nazi Party that knew that they were going to get, for example, 33%+ of the vote, could simply raise the MMP threshold to 30%. This would mean that a party needed 30% of the total party votes in order to be allowed to have democratic representation. This New Zealand Nazi Party would then be the only party that got over the threshold, and consequently be the only party allowed to have a seat in Parliament.

Some might object this would be undemocratic, on the grounds that it would exclude too many people from having a say. But there are already enormous numbers of people who are excluded from having a say. It is an obscenity that a party can currently get 4% of the party vote and not be allowed any representation, especially when a slimebag like David Seymour can get in with a little over 10,000 votes.

After all, if it’s permissible for a hundred thousand people to have their democratic voice silenced because of some arbitrary threshold set by anti-democratic forces, then what does it matter if that threshold is raised a bit by slightly less democratic forces? The precedent has been set, by the status quo, that such conduct is acceptable. The only question, then, is what proportion of people are to be silenced.

Raising the threshold to 30% would only change the degree of disenfranchisement. There would be no categorical change.

Effectively, those parties that could get over 5% now have colluded, and they have made it impossible for anyone who can’t get over 5% to get into Parliament. It has been decreed that any movement with fewer than 120,000 or so members will have no voice at the table. This is borderline criminal, as it makes it impossible to oppose the political class through the democratic system. If your problem is with neoliberalism, then there’s no point in voting, because the entire political class is neoliberal.

A party has to be neoliberal to get enough attention from the neoliberal mass media to get 5% of the vote in the first place, because electoral financing is doled out in proportion to how many votes a party received in the previous general election, so without already being big enough to get over the 5% threshold it’s impossible to get enough media coverage to get there. The game is completely sewn up.

The major parties can’t even point to the relatively small “wasted vote” count and say that the small size of this voting bloc is evidence that few people are dissatisfied with the system. The fact is that many, many more people might vote for alternative parties if the threshold was low enough for them to have any chance of being allowed to have representation. But when even 100,000 votes isn’t enough to get a single seat in Parliament, the will to start new parties is massively, and artificially, suppressed. So we don’t know how many voters would vote for the National-Labour-New Zealand First-Green Establishment if there was a fair threshold.

The way to get around this is simple. Not only should the 5% threshold be removed, but it should be clearly stated that the presence of such thresholds is undemocratic. As such, not only will there no longer be one but precedent is set for there never to be one in the future. Even better, we could scrap the farce that is democracy entirely – but that’s a topic for another essay.

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

Does New Zealand Need Commieblocks?

New Zealand was founded on the idea of being a land of opportunity, where enough hard work would see a person rewarded with a standard of life unattainable in Britain. Part of this involved owning your own small house – referred to as “the quarter-acre dream” – but that dream is dead. We may now have to face up to an awful question: is it time for New Zealand to build commieblocks?

The opportunity inherent in New Zealand was mostly about getting away from the horrific overcrowding of England. At the opening of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, millions of workers were forced off the land and into the cities for the sake of supplying manpower to the factories. This new way of life proved hellish for a number of reasons, in particular the disease and pollution that came with the overcrowding, but also because of the unnatural life away from Nature.

This life was miserable enough that many of these millions chose to abandon Britain entirely for an uncertain life in the colonies. So badly did it suck to live in overpopulated filth, these people were willing to trade it all for an uncertain life as a settler on a large island – full of cannibals – on the other side of the planet.

In Europe, where the population density is many times higher than it is in New Zealand, and where workers will protest before they accept living in a car, a solution to the sudden need to house these masses arrived in the form of ‘commieblocks’. The name refers to the mountainous, blocky, concrete-and-steel structures that were a favourite of post-war Communist nations making good on their promises to house the masses.

These enormous buildings were able to contain hundreds or even thousands of apartments in the same space that would have been occupied by a few dozen villas. This meant that the price of the underlying land could be divided up among a multitude of people, minimising the cost of housing. It’s essentially battery farming for humans, and it has the psychological effect on people that battery farming could be expected to have, but it’s unavoidable once the population density increases past a certain point.

New Zealand managed to avoid this nightmare scenario by keeping the population density low. A low population density means that every person can have a certain minimum amount of space to themselves, and so there is no need to wallow in each other’s shit and piss like the populations of Europe, India and East Asia. When this was the case in New Zealand, we had no need for commieblocks.

Unfortunately, the greed of New Zealanders meant that we were unable to maintain a population in proportion to our ability to build houses for it. Helen Clark opened the borders to cheap labour from the Pacific Islands, and then John Key threw them open to the whole world. Now we have so many people here that our ability to grow outwards to give them all space has hit its limits. It might be time to admit that the quarter-acre dream is dead.

Is it commieblock time?

As a previous VJM Publishing article showed, the average New Zealand wage would have to be over $79 today if workers were to have the same chance of owning their homes as workers 26 years ago. This is clearly impossible – New Zealand employers will not pay that much money. Therefore, a majority of the current generation of young people are effectively locked out of home ownership unless they are lucky enough to inherit.

Immigration from sources of cheap labour has been so liberal, and capital investment in worker productivity so meagre, that our wages have plummeted far below the level at which owning a home and supporting a family on a working-class income is possible. With women and a large number of Third Worlders now in the labour pool, any hope of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work is gone. Wages will not rise to $79 within the next half a century, and house prices will not come down unless a large number of new ones are built.

We might have to face up to the reality that a large (and growing) proportion of the workforce will simply never be able to own their own home, unless we build large numbers of commieblocks. If a new KiwiBuild home costs $649,000, and if this is supposed to be a cheap alternative to buying a house on the market, then it’s really time to bite the bullet. We need to accept that wages in New Zealand are too poor for everyone to own a villa, and this means that it’s time to build commieblocks.

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Meets the Industrial Needs of This Century

For better or worse, humans will always use drugs to help them cope with the demands placed on them by the daily need to survive. Whether to help focus, relax, kill pain or to see beyond, people will always find reasons to want to change their perceptions so as to best meet the demands placed on them. This article will argue that cannabis law reform is superior to prohibition when it comes to meeting the industrial demands of our time.

During the Age of Exploration, the drug of choice was alcohol, usually rum in particular. Rum had a high alcohol volume and was easy to keep. For men spending months or years at sea in ships, rum offered the best bang for the buck. Wherever European sailors took harbour, the rum trade followed. Names like Port Royal and Kororareka became synonymous with drunken debauchery and destruction.

In the first half of the 20th century, we ran out of places to explore and started killing each other over what had been discovered. This required a combination of drugs, and these – because of the necessities of wartime – were indulged in without shame or sanction. Alcohol was still used to a great extent, particularly for its ability to give men the courage to face enemy gunfire, but use of opiates and tobacco were also widespread, the former on account of its use in physical medicine and the latter on account of its use in psychological medicine.

In the second half of the 20th century, the focus shifted from killing the enemies of liberal capitalism to making money. During this time, people were mostly tasked with social office work. This required more tobacco, but also more caffeine. It was here when the idea of becoming “caffeinated” to deal with the pressures of the day came from. The idea was that the buzz from caffeine would make the inherently safe and secure office jobs less boring.

So far this century, a lot of this work has become antisocial. This has necessitated the rise of caffeine, in order to concentrate for longer periods of time despite low levels of stimulation. This rise has been aided by the increasing unfashionability of tobacco smoking, so that caffeine has now become the go-to drug for anyone wanting more yang energy.

It’s not easy to forecast the precise details of the future, but if one understands the basics of a subject it’s possible to forecast general trends. What seems apparent, in the case of the Western World, is that cannabis has come to replace some of these other drugs as the one that best helps people meet the demands of the workplace, and will continue to do so.

Because of automation, it’s no longer as important for the workforce to be attentive, alert and focused. This is still important for certain roles, but those roles have become an ever-diminishing proportion of the workplace. The roles that have become an ever-increasing proportion of the workplace are those in the creative professions, and the demands of these roles are compatible with cannabis use.

It’s widely known and accepted that much of the world’s production of quality music is made by people on drugs, and this is true to a lesser extent of literature as well. Cannabis (especially cannabis sativa) helps with the process of creativity by breaking down old conditioned pathways of thought and replacing them with novel ideas. This has made it a favourite substance of people in many creative occupations – not just music and writing but also design, cuisine, hospitality and programming.

In order to meet these industrial needs, we will not only need to legalise cannabis, but to go further. At a minimum, cannabis will need to become legal so that people who need to use it for the sake of their work can do so. For the sake of creative occupations, it will need to be gently encouraged in the workplace in the same way that coffee is encouraged in offices, and tobacco is encouraged in factories, already now.

The world is changing faster and faster, and as a result of this people find themselves confronted with original situations ever more frequently. These original situations demand original ways of thinking. The desirable qualities for employees of the future will be flexibility, originality and breadth of thought, instead of the obsessive focus and repetition that has characterised the workplaces of the past. These qualities are well enhanced by cannabis, which makes it a good choice for the workplace of the future.

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.