The Cannabis Legalisation And Control Bill: A Weak But Realistic Compromise

The Government released news this week about the exact form of the cannabis referendum question at next year’s General Election. The Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill, currently in draft form, will serve as the basis for next year’s referendum question. Long-time cannabis law reform campaigner Vince McLeod, author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, gives his thoughts on the proposal.

The proposed law is weak, but it’s a realistic compromise with the forces of evil.

Most importantly, it makes the possession of up to 14 grams of cannabis, a small homegrow and licensed retail cannabis sales all legal. As far as the cannabis-using community is concerned, this achieves most of the long-stated goals of cannabis legalisation. It’s broadly in line with what other states and territories in North America have introduced.

Section 18 of the Cannabis Control Bill will allow up to 14 grams of cannabis to be possessed in a public place, and for cannabis to be smoked at home. People are allowed to possess more than this if they are transporting it from one person’s home to another. There appears to be no limit on how much cannabis one is allowed to possess at home.

This will mean that it will no longer matter if a Police officer smells cannabis on you in public or while during a visit to your house. Evidence of cannabis will no longer, by itself, be a sufficient cause for the Police to attack you. Even if the case of smoking cannabis in public, which will still be illegal, the punishment is only a $200 infringement fee.

Section 15 of the Bill will allow for two plants to be grown at home per person, and up to four plants to be grown per household.

Two plants is not a lot. However, if you grew four plants in a small grow tent under a 600W light you could get ten or twelve ounces per grow. Assuming that you’re able to get hold of clones, this would mean ten or twelve ounces every eight to ten weeks. In other words, a household could meet its demands for recreational cannabis easily enough by growing it themselves.

Moreover, there is no proposed restriction on the size of the two plants, as has been the case in some North American jurisdictions. This suggests that people will be allowed to put down a couple of honking sativas in an outdoors greenhouse and get them both up to ten feet tall. Such an arrangement would make it legal to grow a year’s worth of cannabis in one season, sparing the need for the environmentally-unfriendly grow tents.

Section 19 of the Bill allows for recreational cannabis sales. Purchases will be limited to 14 grams per day, but this is at least two weeks’ worth by any reasonable measure. Aside from this, it appears the proposed model will be fairly similar to the cannabis cafe model that has existed in the Netherlands since the 1970s.

In other words, it appears that the proposed model is intended to allow for recreational cannabis sales in cafes in a similar fashion to how alcohol is already sold in pubs. Section 49 of the Bill makes reference to “consumption licences” which will allow certain premises to allow people to consume cannabis in public. Such premises will not be allowed to also sell alcohol, and will therefore follow closely to the Daktory model that Dakta Green has already established in New Zealand.

Despite these major wins, the Bill has a number of flaws from the perspective of the average member of the cannabis-using community.

Nowhere in the Bill has provision been made for running a mother plant that clones can be taken from. If one household can only have four plants, it makes having a mother plant that one can take clones off difficult. Against this criticism, however, is that it appears the Bill will allow for retail sale of feminised seeds.

It’s also a mistake to set the legal limit at 20. For one thing, it implies that cannabis is more dangerous than alcohol, which is entirely false. For another, it means two years where young Kiwis will be legally allowed to drink booze but not smoke weed, which will mean two years of exposure to the more destructive of the two drugs. Legal cannabis has been shown to lower rates of alcohol use overseas, and the sooner an alternative to alcohol was available the better.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Bill doesn’t address our right to use cannabis for spiritual purposes. Absolutely zero acknowledgement is made of the fact that cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, but this is not unexpected if one considers that New Zealand has been ruled by completely godless people since the turn of the century, and that for their sort spirituality is mental illness.

Also predictably, there is no provision for an official Government apology for conducting a war against them without their consent. The War on Drugs has been the worst human rights violation to occur in the West since World War II. The Government’s role in this war has involved decades of lying to the public about the effects of cannabis and putting people who defy them in cages. Their conduct has been obscene, and an apology should be part of legalisation – but it won’t be.

Perhaps worst of all, the Government is still committed to minimising cannabis use from the standpoint of cannabis use being inherently harmful. It’s possible that they have calculated that legalising cannabis would make it possible to strangle cannabis culture through ever-increasing taxes and red tape, as they have almost successfully done for tobacco. More likely, however, is that they have shifted thinking so that cannabis is now (rightly) grouped with alcohol and tobacco and not heroin and methamphetamine.

There are many possible criticisms of the Bill, but ultimately it is definitely worth supporting. All of the legitimate criticisms relate to aspects of cannabis law that could best be fine-tuned after the referendum has been passed.

Realistically, what the proposed Cannabis Leglisation And Control Bill means is an end to the fear. It would be taking away that dark, nauseating feeling that comes with being marked as a criminal. People smoking or growing cannabis at home will no longer have to fear saying the wrong thing or inviting the wrong person to their house, and the net result will be a reduction in the suffering of the New Zealand people.

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.

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Hard Eugenics And Soft Eugenics

In the aftermath of World War II, certain ideas came to be blamed for the war, and so became extremely unfashionable. Anti-Semitism, supremacist nationalism and eugenics were among the foremost of these ideas. However, much like slavery after the American Civil War, some of these ideas just changed form rather than disappear.

When the Industrial Revolution swept over the Western World, it brought with it a godless kind of materialism. It taught us that the way to wealth and power was mastery of the material world and its laws, and that spirituality was merely a distraction. In the wake of this came an entirely new set of moral values that had not previously existed.

One of these new moral values was the idea of productivity. This meant that the people who did more work for their masters were prized higher than those who did less. This idea of productivity meant that the world became divided into the deserving productive and the undeserving unproductive. The idea of getting rid of people who weren’t productive enough followed in short order.

Within a few hundred years, this latter idea had evolved into what was called eugenics. This is the deliberate effort to improve the genetic stock of the nation by encouraging the breeding of those considered to have good genes, and discouraging the breeding of those considered to have bad genes. The idea is that the lazy, dumb, infirm etc. will become fewer in number if those likely to produce them are coerced into breeding less.

The breeding restrictions that come with eugenics are motivated by a variety of reasons, but what those reasons boil down to is an appeal to the greater good. Usually this means that the continued existence of the person killed would have been a detriment to the greater good because of the waste of the resources necessary to keep them alive. Sometimes it is suggested that it’s cruel to keep people alive when they appear to be suffering.

Although the idea of eugenics is most typically associated with the Rassenhygiene of Germany before and during World War II, the idea was first popularised in America just after World War I. Adolf Hitler even referenced the work of Americans such as Margaret Sanger as an example of how Germany ought to carry out eugenics programs against their own population.

In Germany, the Aktion T4 program saw the sterilisation, and then the extermination, of several hundred thousand people who were deemed to be either physically or mentally defective. This occurred in a variety of ways, from lethal injection to gas chambers (the idea of exterminating people in gas chambers was first thought up for use on schizophrenics).

This approach can be described as hard eugenics. This is when the Government kills you outright.

As mentioned above, hard eugenics became extremely unfashionable thanks to the German loss in World War II. But the desire of the ruling classes to commit eugenics on their populations did not go away. The fundamental desire to be in charge of a productive population, rather than an unproductive one, didn’t change.

It was observed, after hard eugenics became unfashionable, that the people who had been slated for extermination all had one quality in common: they were poor. Being mentally or physically infirm makes it all but impossible for one to trade one’s labour for a decent wage. In all but the most exceptional cases, it guarantees a life of impoverishment on society’s fringes.

Therefore, it was possible to institute measures that didn’t directly kill people, but which made their lives so miserable that they killed themselves. All that was necessary was to institute measures that made it hard to be poor. The modern way to do this is by applying constant stress over housing, healthcare and job security.

Soft eugenics, then, is when the Government makes your life so shit that you either kill yourself or withdraw from attempting to reproduce.

Like hard eugenics, this is also achieved in a variety of ways, although the fundamental element to it is the weaponisation of despair. Life is made to appear so hopeless, so meaningless and so pointless, that withdrawal from it seems like the only reasonable option. Despair is used as a weapon, to drive people whose survival is already marginal to suicide.

This has the same eugenic effect as hard eugenics without all the drama.

Soft eugenics has become so fashionable today that average life expectancy is now starting to decrease in America. This decrease is because of the sharp increase in what are called “deaths of despair”. Many of these deaths are suicides by gunshot, and many are quasi-suicides in the form of opiate overdoses. Their common factor is a person who gave up on life.

Making people give up on life is how soft eugenics works. This is primarily achieved by paying shitty wages, so that workers are always in a state of financial precarity. It’s also achieved by destroying communities through mass immigration, so that no-one knows their neighbours. A further tactic is a democratic political system that transparently doesn’t give a fuck about anything other than lobbyist dollars.

The tendency to give up on life is accelerated by a popular culture that only permits discussion of the lowest common denominator of thought. In our current society, anyone who thinks for themselves will be ostracised to such a degree that proper human function becomes very difficult. It’s only permissible to march in lockstep with the hordes of morons – the alternative is to get bullied towards suicide.

Political correctness plays its part in soft eugenics, especially nowadays. The more politically correct a society becomes, the greater the cognitive resources that each individual member of it must devote to self-policing. This means fewer cognitive resources left over for actually living. Therefore, the more politically correct a society is, the more heavily it practises soft eugenics.

Cannabis prohibition has been a central plank in governmental efforts to get the more vulnerable elements of their populations to kill themselves. Many people on the margins have found that cannabis is an essential tool for dealing with the depression that comes with a tough life. Making it harder to get hold of this medicine only serves to push vulnerable people towards suicide. This is the plan.

In the case of New Zealand, we do not practice hard eugenics but the practice of soft eugenics is very strong. New Zealand is a paradise for the wealthy, but a hell for the poor. Our practice of soft eugenics is taken to an extreme degree here, which is why we have the highest youth mortality rate in the entire OECD, even ahead of places like Mexico and Turkey.

We no longer kill the mentally and physically infirm – now we just make their lives so shit that they kill themselves. Because we’re not directly responsible for the suicides, we can claim that it isn’t a form of eugenics. But it is – it’s just a softer form of what the Nazis did.

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Next Year’s Referendums Will Pit The Church Against The People Of New Zealand

At the time of next year’s General Election, there will be at least two referendums. One will relate to cannabis law reform, the other to euthanasia. Both of them are likely to be fairly divisive, pitting large sections of the New Zealand population against each other. One of these conflicts, as this essay will examine, will be the Church against the people of New Zealand.

The Church is commonly perceived to be conservative. This is a mistake. People make this mistake because the Church opposes all kinds of social reform. But they don’t oppose all social reform – the Church is happy to open the borders to masses of illiterate Third Worlders who cannot be integrated. They only oppose some social reform, and there is a pattern to it.

The common thread to all the Church’s actions is that they all increase the power of the Church by increasing the suffering of the New Zealand people.

Christianity has always preyed on desperation. The more desperate a person is, the more willing they will be to subject themselves to the predation of the local vicar or priest. The more pitiful and wretched the man, the more likely they are to find salvation in a book of fairy tales about a magical Jewish carpenter. And when they do, they tend to write the Church into their wills.

It has always been a maxim of Abrahamism that misery will cause people to turn to the God of Abraham out of desperation. Happy people don’t need the God of Abraham – ample evidence comes from the declining rates of Christianity among the wealthy nations of Europe over the past hundred years.

If you’re the Church, happiness is bad for business. Therefore, the more misery they can create, the more powerful they grow.

In the same way the Church opposed the anti-smacking law (because they know child abuse leads to suffering) and they opposed homosexual law reform (because they know persecution of homosexuals leads to suffering), so too will they oppose cannabis law reform and euthanasia law reform. Their desire is to force New Zealanders to suffer, in the hope that our suffering causes us to give up on the material world and turn to Jesus.

The Church has never liked cannabis, for multiple reasons. This is strange if one considers that the Christian Bible states that God put cannabis here for our benefit (see Genesis 1:29). It’s not strange, however, if one understands that the Church is really a political entity and not really a spiritual one. Their primary objective is to grow in Earthly power, not to alleviate the spiritual suffering of New Zealanders.

One reason the Church has always supported the persecution of cannabis users is because cannabis is a spiritual sacrament that connects people to God, and the Church can’t earn money if people are connected to God by their own actions. The Church can only earn money by acting as an intermediary, and to that end they foster the need for an intermediary. This is why they have made such an effort, historically, to destroy all genuine spiritual and magical traditions.

Another reason is because cannabis is a medicine. As mentioned above, the Church gains power from people’s suffering and misery. Opposing cannabis law reform is the same thing as promoting anxiety, depression, insomnia and stress. All of those things create the kind of desperation that drives people into the arms of the Church or a particular congregation.

It’s for these reasons that cannabis is opposed by the Church and by Christians such as Bob McCoskrie.

The Church has never liked euthanasia either, as evidenced by the upset shown by Christian fundamentalist Alfred Ngaro at New Zealand First’s unwillingness to block the referendum on the issue. They have always known that the immense suffering that usually precedes death makes the dying person vulnerable to all kinds of trickery – in particular, a person is most likely to change their will to bequeath something to the Church when dying.

From the Church’s perspective, then, it’s best for the suffering of dying people to be drawn out as long as possible.

Fundamentally, what the Church wants is control. They don’t want us to have control over our lives – they want themselves to have control over our lives. They want to decide what we’re allowed to call a spiritual sacrament and when we’re allowed to die, much like they used to decide who we were allowed to love and when we were allowed to drink alcohol.

To this end, they will oppose both referendums because both offer to return control back to the people of New Zealand.

It’s clear to every thinking New Zealander that there would be less suffering if we had legal cannabis and euthanasia. Therefore, the Church is promoting the misery of the New Zealand people. They’re not doing it out of conservatism, or backwardness – they’re doing it because the Abrahamic cults are predatory ideologies of hate that gorge themselves on human misery.

Make no mistake – the Church is the enemy of the New Zealand people. They consider our suffering to be to their benefit, knowing that it will turn some of us, in desperation, to their arms. Anyone who opposes the evil that is Abrahamic religion and the political interference that the Abrahamic cults make in our lives is all but obliged to stick it to them next year.

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If The Nazis Had Won World War II

Trade is a human universal and, as such, is more fundamental than trivialities like who exterminated who

The common perception of World War II is that, had the Nazis won it, the world would now be a wasteland of rubble and burning wreckage. It’s true that the world would certainly be different in some major ways to the timeline we currently live in, but there are many things that would be recognisable. This essay asks the question: what would our societies look like today if the Nazis had won World War II?

If the Nazis had won World War II, and united all of Europe under one Reich, our political leaders would have found an accommodation with it. If the Nazis had knocked out the Soviet Union and made peace with Britain, our political leaders would have shrugged, said “fair enough” and started to do business with the new bosses.

Some might doubt this, but an examination of history and human nature make it very clear. If the Nazis had won World War II, our political class would be lining up to whore themselves out to them.

If the Nazis had won World War II, and established a Lebensborn project to populate Poland with German settlers, and if this had led to an excess population such that many of these Germans sought to emigrate to other countries, our political system would tell us that this was a good thing. We would be told that we had to accept it otherwise we were evil.

Politicians all around the world would be clamouring to curry favour with the Nazi Empire by forming trade and diplomatic links with Nazi territories, or by agitating in favour of further immigration from Nazi territories or by attacking those who criticise Nazi actions. These politicians would dismiss anyone who accused them of siding with evil as conspiracy theorists, bigots and haters.

Politicians of German ancestry would be climbing onto social media saying that it’s hate speech to mention the Hungerplan, or that the Hungerplan didn’t really happen, or that the Poles deserved it because of genocidal attacks on Germans in Polish territory in the lead up to World War II. As with the Armenian genocide, a sufficiently strenuous denial would cause people to either doubt or to not care.

Many outside Europe would have ended up marrying Germans once the war tensions cooled off (as they have done in this timeline). They would say “Yes, the Nazis are evil, but Ulrike/Heike/Beate is against all that stuff.” Some of the fathers of these brides and grooms would be Nazi Party functionaries, and would have done some horrific things, but their sons and daughters-in-law would operate on a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” basis.

If the Nazis had won World War II, it would be an accepted fact that the Nazi Empire was too big to not trade with. People would say “Yeah I know that they starved a hundred million people to death but you can’t just not trade with an entity that comprises X% of the world’s GDP.” Even if they still had millions in concentration camps this would not matter.

No doubt the Nazi Empire would have established a competitive advantage in some economic manner, such as vehicle manufacture. It might be possible that the whole world would be driving German-made cars, or flying in German-made aircraft. In such a case, most people wouldn’t think anything of using such goods. Some might make jokes about the tens of millions who were exterminated to make it possible, but this wouldn’t prevent trade any more than the North American genocides prevent trade.

Had the Nazis won World War II, there would be politicians and pundits trying to curry favour with them by talking about Naziphobia. An excessive dislike of Nazis would be likened to a mental illness by politicians and by media enterprises chasing the Nazi advertising dollar. There would be mutterings that hate speech legislation ought to be introduced to prevent people from being too open about their dislike of Nazism.

If the Nazis still had people in camps, their plight would be ignored, save for the propagandising of a small number of social justice activists. These activists would widely be seen as obsessed or unhinged. In much the same way that the imprisonment of many Uighur people is dismissed as an outcome of the Uighurs’ religious fanaticism, so too would the imprisonment of the Jews be dismissed as an outcome of their predations.

If the Nazis had won World War II, our entire education system would be different. Naturally, we wouldn’t be taught that Germany started World War II by invading Poland. We would instead be taught about the German Revolution of 1918-19, and who was behind that revolution. We would be taught about the Holodomor, and how the Holodomor influenced anti-Communist attitudes in central Europe in the 1920s.

Nazism more general would be seen as an anti-Communist movement that arose in response to the horrors of Soviet rule. The role of the British and the French in forcing the Versailles Treaty on the Germans after World War I would be emphasised. The psychological effect of hyperinflation would be explained at length to all schoolchildren.

Perhaps it may even have been necessary, had the Nazis won World War II, to accept that many of the actions of the British and French Empires in colonising the world were effectively criminal. Perhaps conquering 40 million square kilometres of territory and then declaring war on Germany was a bit hypocritical. Winning the war meant we never had to face up to this charge, but losing it would have meant that we were forced to.

None of this is to say that the world would have been any better if the Nazis had won World War II. The fact is, however, that a Nazi victory in Europe would not have changed human nature in any way. Humans would still be opportunistic, acquisitive and dishonest. The winners would still write the history books, and they would still do so in a way that absolved them of all guilt.

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