The Establishment is wheeling out all manner of propagandists in their last-ditch efforts to continue the War on Drugs, and after booze-sozzled losers like Mike Hosking and Paul Henry have had their say, the barrel is truly being scraped.
The latest pisshead Baby Boomer to do a King Knut impression is Karl du Fresne. His attempt to defend the indefensible is called “It’s the underbelly of society that lives with with drugs’ consequences.”
As you will see, only someone whose brain has been damaged by alcohol could write a piece of drivel like this.
The only one sentence that makes sense in the whole piece is the first one: “My generation has a lot to answer for.” Du Fresne was born in 1950, and thus is part of the generation responsible for the War on Drugs. Not for drugs, nor for drug use, but for the War on Drugs.
His entire article gets this simple truth arse about face.
“Drugs were one way of rebelling against a society they found dull and stifling.” Du Fresne accidentally makes an ironic point here – the generation of people who are young in 2016 take drugs specifically because the mainstream cultural narrative of New Zealand is set by people like Karl du Fresne.
“Many of the people whose jobs disappeared in the 1980s sought escape in cannabis, glue and later, methamphetamine.” Many people did, after all, there were a lot of them. But none of the cannabis users came to the attention of the coroner – unlike the heroin users, which du Fresne neglects to mention (perhaps severe long-term alcohol abuse has damaged his long-term memory?).
Nor the pissheads, who will never get mentioned. The vast majority of people who became substance abusers on account of the economic policies of the 1980s became alcoholics. In terms of actual damage done, alcohol outstrips cannabis by 1,000 to 1. But du Fresne, like most alcoholics, sees the bottle as his little darling, never to be questioned, never to be sullied, above all criticism or blame.
“…it was the middle class that introduced society to the mind-expanding delights of drugs, but it’s mainly the underbelly of society that has had to live with the consequences.” With typical pisshead logic, du Fresne here blames the damage wrought by the War on Drugs on the drug users themselves. The middle-class hasn’t been as damaged by drugs because they haven’t been attacked by the Police or the Justice system to anywhere near the same degree as the working classes have.
It’s been known since du Fresne’s time that if a Police officer finds cannabis on a white middle-class person who speaks with a University accent chances are he’ll let them go with a warning, but if it’s a Maori or poor white person they get the hammer. So the “consequences of drugs” he talks about are the consequences of the Drug War, and nothing else.
Du Fresne’s delusional attitude to alcohol (the sure sign of an addict) shines through when he accuses the Drug Foundation, which presents factual research about the effects of drugs, of taking a “shrill line against alcohol”.
Never forget: to every pisshead, speaking the truth about the effect of alcohol is an unreasonable thing to do.
“But while there are valid arguments for decriminalisation of cannabis, and especially for its medicinal use, the reformers can’t ignore the baneful effects of drug use.” Why the fuck would any cannabis law reformer care about the baneful effects of methamphetamine, heroin, legal high, nicotine etc. use? None of those drugs have anything to do with cannabis whatsoever, so why are they lumped in the same category? And alcohol left out? It makes no sense at all.
“Neither can they ignore the risk that liberalising the cannabis laws will send the dangerous message that drugs are OK. They may be okay if you’ve got a university degree and live in a good suburb, but they’re not so liberating if you’re a hungry kid living in a freezing state house where any surplus money goes on P rather than food or heating.” Yes, that sentence really was that stupid. Du Fresne essentially argues here that cannabis law reform is bad because some poor people spend money on P. It makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever.
“A good starting point for the debate might be a more honesty.” An honest conversation about the damage done to New Zealanders by drugs would start with one word.
Alcohol.
Why is this not mentioned?
The answer is this: Karl du Fresne is a complete and utter fucking whore, and the alcohol companies that advertise in Fairfax media are his pimps (he has many pimps, reflecting his total lack of shame). He propagandises for putting medicinal cannabis users in cages by using rhetoric that would be illegal if it was applied to Maori or gay people. All the while knocking back gallons of the drug that does more damage to New Zealand society than all others combined.
We don’t need boozeroos setting the cultural agenda for young people in this country any more. New Zealand needs to give a voice to the stoners and trippers among the young, and put Karl du Fresne, and his entire worthless generation of drug warriors and out-of-touch geriatrics, out to pasture.
