GROUP WANTS MARIJUANA RETHINK

A NATIONAL parliamentary group on drug reform has urged the South
Australian Government to rethink its proposed ban on hydroponically-grown
cannabis.

Federal Labor MP Duncan Kerr said it again would create a situation where
the courts were clogged with minor offenders.

Mr Kerr, the former Labor spokesman on Justice and Customs, is co-chair of
the Australian Parliamentary Group for Drug Law Reform.

He said the marijuana decriminalisation laws introduced by the Bannon Labor
government in 1987 had been "pretty successful" in separating pot smokers
from users of such other illicit drugs as heroin.

"Our background concern is that this has been a very effective way of
taking people who use personal amounts outside the criminal justice system
and not convicting them and treating them as criminals," he said.

"It's a model which has been pretty successful in its application and
which, I understand, has not increased the consumption of cannabis in SA
above that of the national average."

Mr Kerr said neither he nor the group were advocating smoking pot but it
had to be acknowledged many had smoked it at least once and many continued
to do so.

"We can't treat everyone like that as criminals," Mr Kerr said.

State Attorney-General Michael Atkinson said yesterday hydroponic cannabis
- - grown indoors under lights - was not the "giggle grass" some in political
and policy circles might have sampled in their youth.

"There's a tendency for those whose experience of marijuana in the 1970s
was to treat it as giggle grass and not realise hydroponic marijuana has
seven-to-eight times the amount of active ingredient THC," he said.

"Far from hydroponically grown marijuana to facilitate an evening's
merriment and conviviality, it's more likely to put the person who uses it
into something of an unsocial trance."