BUZZ ABOUT THE HOUSE

The air has been thick with claims and counter-claims concerning the need
for a law change to enable MPs and former MPs to smoke marijuana, The
Dominion writes in an editorial.

Nandor Tanczos continues to retail atrocity stories of his real-life (as it
were) contretemps with police on the subject.

Deborah Morris has submitted to a parliamentary committee a plea for a new
deal to assist the run-of-the-mill political dope smoker.

ACT NZ leader Richard Prebble has taken a mockingly hard line in response.

All of which prompts the question: why would a member of Parliament ever
find it necessary to smoke a narcotic drug?

Surely just being in Parliament would satisfy the most intense cravings in
that direction.

We are told, for instance, that users of marijuana ineluctably waft off
into exclusively luxurious sensations and their accompanying states of
mind. These include feelings of floating way above all the nagging troubles
of the workaday world, like getting up or zipping one's fly.

There is also an overpowering sense of achieving at a much higher level of
accomplishment than is, in fact, the case.

Dope inhalers report that they can listen to execrable rap music,
excruciating poetry and patently horrid oratory and see in them a
brilliance that eludes the sober observer. It is also said that ingesters
of the weed have intense cravings for food and drink that far surpass their
real metabolic needs, with the result that they wake up bloated and with a
prize hangover.

Often marijuana addicts will claim loss of memory, asserting that they
never said what scores of other people in, say, a ministerial office
clearly heard them say.

Furthermore, the ecstatic effects of the narcotic can stay with the user
for many months after the furtive toking took place.

So again we ask: if you are a member of Parliament, why smoke the stuff at
all? You're already getting the buzz - and for free.

Research has shown that MPs who have been indulging in routine
parliamentary behaviour for any appreciable time, such as two full terms,
will have become so dissociated from external reality that they cannot chat
with an ordinary constituent without seeming to be away on another planet.

Members will claim to be "right on top of things" just as opinion polls
show them hovering on a 3 per cent rating.

In the chamber one member after another rises to deliver the most
outrageous drivel, causing others to clap inappropriately or giggle
incoherently, much to the bemusement of the public gallery.

As for the rampant gorging, imbibing and groping that go on round the
place, the less said the better.

For the good of further research into these matters, it is to be hoped that
Mr Tanczos manages to stick with Parliament for three terms. At that point
the Health Ministry might well be able to proclaim Tanczos's Law.

This would state that despite behaviour which suggests the contrary, the
quantity of real narcotics smoked by a New Zealand list MP is inversely
proportional to the amount of time that person has been a member of the House.