JUDGES, POLICE, MPS USE CANNABIS, SAYS TANCZOS

Some judges and police officers smoke cannabis, says Green MP Nandor Tanczos.

Mr Tanczos, who openly admits using cannabis, told more than 300 University
of Canterbury students yesterday that he was not the only MP who had used
the drug.

He said millions of dollars were being spent on cannabis prohibition when
the police did not have the resources to respond to real crimes, like
burglaries and violence. The cannabis law was creating a taxpayer subsidy
for organised crime because prohibition artificially inflated the price of
the drug, he said.

The law will be reviewed this year, and Mr Tanczos urged students to get
involved in the issue by writing to their MPs.

"We have to get real about this issue. The way we are approaching it is not
working."

New Zealand now had the highest arrest rate in the world for cannabis
offences, and had among the highest cannabis use rates in the world.

"If the point of the law is to stop people using cannabis, it's clearly not
working," he said.

Mr Tanczos said after the speech that he had spoken to police officers who
had used cannabis. He also referred to a 1997 newspaper article in which
some politicians admitted they had used the drug.

He could not expand on his claim about judges using cannabis other than to
say that a former head of a commission had admitted to using the drug.

"I'm not actually clear whether he was a judge," he said. Mr Tanczos could
not remember his name either.

However, he said the point he was trying to make was that cannabis use was
widespread across society.

Last week Mr Tanczos claimed in Parliament that some MPs had been "drunk in
charge of the country".

He later said he had been referring to one MP.