IT'S TIME TO GET SERIOUS ON CANNABIS

THE haste with which Parliament booted out the Green Party's Misuse
of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Bill this week was a sign of the
apathy, and hypocrisy, in the debate over the insidious weed.

Or, more to the point, the lack of debate.

Given that the Greens had been puffing away at this for three years,
this was a grand opportunity to finally debate this issue in full,
and blow cannabis off the scene altogether.

Simply, cannabis - or more specifically the misuse of it - is a
chronically dangerous blight on our society, and it is high time we
moved to knock it on the head.

The whole cannabis issue has been seriously clouded by the argument
over whether it should be legalised, ignoring the argument that by an
overwhelming weight of evidence it should be made even more illegal than it is.

Or should that be more illegal than what the legislation says, for
what has happened is that the acceptance-of or lack of strident
opposition to cannabis has, by some form of default, legitimised it.

At least, it seems more legal than both alcohol and smoking tobacco.
As one example, it's not uncommon for people to be fined $400 for
breaching liquor bans, by having on their person as little as a
part-bottle or can, but the going-rate for a joint in your pocket is
somewhere less than $200.

You lose your driving licence almost automatically and get fined
hundreds of dollars for driving with too much alcohol in your system.
Yet, if you smell of dope when you're stopped at a checkpoint, but
don't have any of the offensive material on you or in the vehicle,
and haven't been drinking, apart from being searched, you're
pretty-much free, man.

And we all know about tobacco smokers. Those horrible people who
we've kicked out into the rain because of their selfish disrespect
for the health of anyone else by puffing all that passive smoke
around the place. Yet dope-smoking seems to be treated as simply
something that some people do. Perhaps it's more acceptable just
because they make the choice to go out in the rain.

Odd decisions like "choosing" to smoke in the rain are, however, a
minor consequence of cannabis use, for it is painfully obvious to
those who work at the back-end of life's problems that cannabis is
extremely dangerous, particularly in the wrong hands.

For example, a senior police officer is reported this weekend in
Hawke's Bay Today confirming what a lot of people already know.

Vast numbers of burglaries are being committed in Hawke's Bay by
young people solely to pay for dope - ahead, even, of their daily
bread. They will pinch your $2000 laptop, and trade it for a $20
tinnie, and maybe chuck-in your digital camera so the dealer will
wipe the $60 off the tick-list.

Young people, many themselves victimised by common cannabis use by
parents and others at home, are becoming a lost generation in a cloud
of cannabis smoke, which is either a symptom of or a cause of their
problems, depending on your take - a word I use in both the English
and Maori sense.

Two months ago Napier was pitched into absolute horror, when a man
shot the police officers who came to search his home, because it was
being used for dealing cannabis. The shooting would not have happened
if people weren't dealing dope, if people weren't buying it, if
people weren't using it.

It is all very well to blame, but the debate on what to do about it
has to consider the history of cannabis use in this country. Who
introduced it here? It was, after all, once upon a time, almost
exclusive to the academia and surfies. Universities of the 1960s were
awash with it, apparently, and the odd VW Combi had more smoke coming
out the window than the exhaust.

Its heaviest use in 2009 is at the other end of the spectrum, often
habitually toked from dawn to dusk to fill in the day for the
unemployed and relatively helpless.

But an interesting thing happened the other day, and a few boys were
given the boot from a well-performing school, for smoking cannabis.
Happens in every school, someone said. But shouldn't society be
getting its heads out of the clouds, and doing something about it?