PRESS RELEASE: Cannabis Election 24 July 2002

Massive Payoffs for Green Policy implementation: Mild Greens

Greens, Alliance, Act, Future United need to pull up socks on law and order-cannabis debate say the Mild Greens, as the battle ground heats up for the Saturday 27 July General Election.

Citing a Boston University Study analysing evidence of the link between prohibition, homicides and the general problems with law and order, and the Otago Daily Times recent pro-reform editorial, the Mild Greens say the 2002 election is the time to stop crime and LEGALISE.

The Mild Greens say that the Nandor and the Greens must "do much better" in order to retain credibility on the Party's claim it is committed to Cannabis law reform. The Greens need to expose the obfuscation of evidence and due process in accounting for New Zealand phoney "harm minimisation" model - say the Mild Greens.

The reformers say the Prime Minister's repeated statements that "the Select Committee should consider the benefits of the South Australia partial decriminalisation model" are ignorant. The Mild Greens say that Labour members of the Health Committee at the first Public hearing (May 29th 2001) of the now-lapsed "Select Committee" roundly dismissed this model saying they had received analysis critical the policy was "not much of an improvement" on prohibition's abysmal triple bottom line.

Health Minister Annette King promised in passing of her Government's Misuse of Drugs Amendment's #4 in 2000, that drug classification would hence forth be a matter for science, not politics, a statement which now clearly stands as fraud.

The Mild Greens recommend instant post election action on safer communities with "moderated" enforcement and innocuous R18 cannabis cafes as detailed in Chris Fowlie's on the spot reports from Europe and North America in this election's edition of NORML news.

Massive pay offs for health and safety come with legal regulation and full decriminalisation, but honest and conscientious people need to be in Parliament for this to happen.

Green MP Nandor Tanczos said on community radio Plains FM this month that he believed there was widespread abuse of civil rights in NZ police enforcement of prohibition, and "worst of all there is no oversight". Mr Tanczos also said that participating in the cannabis health promotion inquiry had turned him in favour of the "regulated café approach".

Politicians aspiring to support common sense community safety and family values would do well to modify their cannabis reform agenda accordingly.

VIOLENCE, GUNS, AND DRUGS: A CROSS-COUNTRY ANALYSIS
JEFFREY A. MIRON Bastiat Institute and Boston University
[The Journal of Law and Economics, vol. XLIV]
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLE/journal/issues/v44nS2/012211/012211.html

Summary: Study found that weaker firearms prohibitions were associated with lower crime, while strong drugs prohibition was associated with higher crime. The author of the paper, Jeffrey Miron of Boston University, points out that over three-quarters of the homicides in a sample of precincts in New York City in 1988 were due in some fashion to drug-related causes: disputes over drug territory, drug debts and so on. Murders committed when either victim or perpetrator was under the influence of drugs or alcohol occurred in a minority of cases. He concludes that "differences in drug prohibition enforcement explain differences in violence, which in turn explain differences in gun ownership that correlate positively with violence but do not cause that violence."

Relevent NZ analysis - Auckland Council for Civil Liberties, 2000
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0008/S00086.htm

===================30==================

Kevin O'Connell - Research and Policy Analyst.
Blair Anderson PCP Coalition - Mild Greens - Wigram Candidate

Mild Green Initiatives phone ++64 3 389-4065
Web site http://www.mildgreens.com

"Blairs Brain on Cannabis" PlainsFM 96.9 every Wed 10:00pm

© Scoop Media