DRUG LAW REFORM

Right through this election campaign, almost all the political parties have
proclaimed they will be "tough on crime", agree with heavier sentences for
serious crime, or, in the Labour Party's case, claim to have responded to
last election's overwhelming referendum vote in support of such measures.

As every election campaign demonstrates, this is a traditional exercise at
such a time, wheeled out to pacify the evident frustration in the community
that politicians, once elected, fail to insufficiently deliver.

In one area of existing crime policy, dealing with illegal drug use, most of
the parties have resisted discussing what they plan to do, if elected, to
reform the legislation. Yet this is one area of criminality that has been
given much attention by legislatures in Europe and in the United States,
some of which have considerably liberalised laws prohibiting minor drug
offending.

The Labour Party, according to public opinion polls, seems most likely to
lead a coalition for the next three years, yet its leader, Helen Clark, made
no mention of drug law reform in her passing references to crime in her
leader's address at the beginning of this campaign. Stalled in the process
when Parliament rose was the Select Committee on Health's inquiry into drug
law reform, and there were a number of MPs covering the party spectrum in
that Parliament who were prepared to liberalise prohibitions against
cannabis use.

In the United States, 12 states have stopped arresting people who are caught
with marijuana in public. In others, such as New York, reverse policies
apply. The so-called "broken windows" system of punishing all crime (which
has been adopted by some of our minor parties), resulted in 743,000 people
being arrested for marijuana offences in 2000, according to the most recent
statistics available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; 88% of them
for simple possession. This has meant a very considerable increase in the
cost of administering justice to these defendants. Before the "broken
windows" crack-down, fewer than 800 such arrests were being made each year.

Our politicians have acknowledged the considerable costs of drug prohibition
in the consequences for health as well as for the justice system. The
existence of a large, organised underground network of drug production,
marketing and selling, and the wave of crime, especially property crime,
carried out to finance many users' means of payment, burden all taxpayers in
real terms and in the loss of untaxed revenues. The select committee was
told there are an estimated 300,000 current users, and in 2000, just 4550
were arrested for possession.

In Britain, Tony Blair's Labour government announced a week ago that,
instead of arresting people caught with small amounts of marijuana, the
police in most cases will confiscate the drugs and give the offender a
warning. The intention is to free police to concentrate on more serious
crime. Britain is getting more in step with the rest of Western Europe,
where just a handful of Scandinavian countries still treat marijuana smoking
as a crime. In Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands, marijuana users
are not arrested, and in Spain and Portugal, not even hard-drug use is a
crime.

New Zealand politicians have in past years delayed or deferred serious
consideration of drug law reform by hiding behind a series of international
treaties which were promoted by the prohibitionist United States when an
ally during the Cold War. These made it difficult for national parliaments
to legalise commonly-used recreational drugs. Their effect means that New
Zealand and some other allies would need America's agreement to do other
than "decriminalise" the possession and use of some banned drugs.

Few of our politicians seem willing to call for changes in drug policy, even
when given a "conscience" vote, for fear of being called soft on drugs and
soft on crime. Yet when voters go to the polls on July 27, they will most
likely also effectively be making a decision on cannabis law reform by
virtue of whom they vote for. It behoves electors to ask their candidates
and party leaders exactly where they stand, and whether they intend
following a trend that appears to be gathering strength in other western
legislatures.