High in the news at the moment is the story that six young people have killed themselves in three months in the town of Kaitaia, population 5,000. Kaitaia is in the search for solutions; so far suggested is a youth space and more streetlights in some back streets.
Predictably, no-one in the New Zealand ruling class has the courage to suggest the legalisation of cannabis.
According to a study by Montana State University, suicides among men aged 20 through 39 years fell roughly 10% after medical cannabis was legalised compared to those states that did not legalise.
The study says that the lower rate of suicide in states that have legalised medicinal cannabis “is consistent with the hypothesis that marijuana can be used to cope with stressful life events.”
This is something that almost every young person in New Zealand knows! Almost 100% of New Zealand youth know that cannabis should not be illegal. They’ve seen most of their parents smoke it and they know it’s less dangerous than alcohol. I personally can credit the use of cannabis with saving me from a desperately dark psychological situation.
But the ruling class puts young people in prison for this medicinal plant that saves lives, and then says the problem is a lack of streetlights! The fact that the ruling class is so appallingly out of touch is another reason why it’s so difficult to be a young person in New Zealand.
How stupid are they? Why don’t they ask the young people with mental illness what they want, instead of assuming that because they are mentally ill they can’t possibly know?
85% of Kaitaia live on some kind of benefit. If you are on the benefit in New Zealand and don’t have cannabis, then insanity is never far away. Being a young person in New Zealand is difficult, due to the almost total absence of stimulation.
Being a young person on a benefit in economically depressed small-town New Zealand is an extremely difficult psychological challenge.
If a person doesn’t understand that, then they don’t have the empathy necessary to be involved in the process about how to solve our mental health problems.
Mike King has it right when he said “If we’re going to put a dent in these appalling numbers we have around suicide then we’re going to have to start listening to communities,” he says.
Well, at least 90% of these young people want the right to relax, to calm down, and to stimulate their artistic and creative endeavours by smoking cannabis. Are you going to listen to that?
This is what the community is saying: smoking cannabis takes our suffering away. Cannabis prohibition takes away a mental health medicine that we could be using to make our lives better. It’s even backed up by the statistics.
Young people are dying because you’re not listening.
