Is this debate about drugs, or capitalism?

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., January 10.)

Oh, dear. Ross Bell of the New Zealand Drug Foundation, after years of agitating for relaxation of the drug laws, is fretting that liberalisation might open the way to corporate domination of the cannabis trade.

Hmmm. Perhaps he should heed the old saying about being careful what you wish for.

Bell has long advocated a permissive approach to so-called recreational drugs. His argument is that drug use should be treated as a health issue rather than criminalised. So you’d expect him to be thrilled that the government has promised a binding referendum on decriminalisation of cannabis.

A crucial first step has already been taken with the passing of the Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill, which essentially legalises the use of cannabis by people with a terminal illness.  

You can take it as read that the activists’ ultimate goal is decriminalisation of the drug altogether, and perhaps other drugs too. That’s how advocates of “progressive” social change advance their agenda: incrementally.

It’s a strategy that relies on a gradual softening-up process. No single step along the way, taken in isolation, is radical enough to alarm the public. Change is often justified on grounds of common sense or compassion, as the legalisation of medicinal cannabis for terminally ill people certainly can be.

But each victory serves as a platform for the next. Once change has bedded in and the public has accepted it as the new normal, the activists advance to the next stage. The full agenda is never laid out, because that might frighten the horses.

In this instance, presumably to reassure us that Labour and the Greens aren’t totally soft on drugs, the passage of the medicinal cannabis bill was closely followed by an announcement that the government will crack down on dealers of the synthetic cannabis that has been causing mayhem.

But there should be no doubt that what we’re observing is decriminalisation by stealth, which the National Party gave as its reason for not supporting the medicinal cannabis bill.

Now, back to Bell’s misgivings about where the cannabis referendum might lead. 

It’s not decriminalisation that worries him. Why would it, when for years he’s been using his taxpayer-subsidised job to lobby for exactly that outcome?

No, what upsets him is the thought of the drugs trade being contaminated by the profit motive. A liberal drugs regime is all very well, just as long as the trade doesn’t fall into the hands of wicked corporate capitalists.  

Bell’s vision, obviously, is of something much purer and more noble, although it’s not entirely clear what model he has in mind. A People’s Collective, perhaps.

It will surprise no one that Professor Doug Sellman, the director of the National Addiction Centre, has expressed similar misgivings. Sellman likes the idea of legalising cannabis but doesn’t want companies making money from it.

I suspect Sellman and Bell are at least partly motivated by hostility toward capitalism. They certainly share a dislike - which in Sellman's case could be classified as obsessive - of the capitalist liquor industry.

Given that cannabis and alcohol are both potentially dangerous mind-altering drugs, why do both men display a more forgiving attitude to the former than to the latter? In my opinion the reason is at least partly ideological. It’s the capitalist business model, as much as anything, that they object to.

But (news flash!) New Zealand is a capitalist economy, and it generally works pretty well. It’s not perfect, but no one has come up with a better alternative.

If Bell wants the cannabis trade made legal, what difference does it make whether the drug is marketed by DopeCorp Inc, operating from a Queen Street high-rise, or by a dreadlocked stoner from Golden Bay?

It could be argued that a public company, subject to corporate and consumer law and with directors who are accountable for what they grow and sell, might be a safer purveyor of cannabis than a backyard dealer.

To put it another way: if a safe, regulated cannabis market is the way to go, and corporates are best-placed to deliver that outcome, what’s the objection? It can only be ideological.

The much bigger issue, of course, is whether we should decriminalise cannabis use in the first place. There are strong arguments running both ways.

The parallels with alcohol are obvious. Both can cause great harm to a minority of users, although activists like to play down the adverse consequences of drugs other than alcohol.  We don’t hear much, for example, about the devastating effects cannabis can have on the young or the mentally unstable.

But if we're going to have an honest national debate about cannabis, the important thing, surely, is that it should focus on social wellbeing rather than being distorted by covert ideological agendas.

The lingering consquences of idealistic 60s liberalism

(First published in The Dominion Post, August 19.

My generation has a lot to answer for. Recreational drugs, for example – or as former Wellington coroner Garry Evans preferred to call them, “wreckreational drugs”.

Mine was the generation that rebelled against the values of its parents. We were smug and spoilt, with plenty of time on our hands to reflect on how wrong our elders were about everything.

We rejected their dreary, conformist moral values. “If it feels good, do it” became the catch-cry of a generation.

And it did feel good – for a while. But then the casualties began to pile up. Drug abuse, serial relationship failures and, most tragically, emotionally damaged offspring are part of the price society has paid for idealistic 1960s liberalism. 

Initially, drugs seemed very much a middle-class hippie thing. Most of the dope smokers and trippers I knew in the late 60s were arty types and intellectuals. Drugs were one way of rebelling against a society they found dull and stifling.

Quite a few ended up permanently damaged, but others succeeded in managing their drug use. They were smart enough to ensure that it never seriously interfered with their lives or careers.

Most were well-educated and came from relatively prosperous backgrounds, so were buttressed against any disadvantages that might have come from drug use. But the same could not be said of the people who were caught up in the drug culture once it spread out into other sectors of society.

In fact there’s a segment of society that, from the 1980s on, was hit by a disastrous double-whammy.

The first blow came when economic upheaval wiped out many of the jobs that had previously provided poorly educated workers with a livelihood. The second came with the increasing availability – and social acceptability – of drugs.

Many of the people whose jobs disappeared in the 1980s sought escape in cannabis, glue and later, methamphetamine. Tinny houses sprouted like mushrooms in low-income areas.

Unlike the comfortable bureaucrats who now advocate liberalisation of the drug laws, these people were not insulated from the harmful effects of drugs by a good education and secure, well-paid careers. So they, and their children and grandchildren, are doubly disadvantaged.

To put it another way, it was the middle class that introduced society to the mind-expanding delights of drugs, but it’s mainly the underbelly of society that has had to live with the consequences.

It’s against this backdrop that we need to consider the current pressure to liberalise the cannabis laws. The people promoting liberalisation are from the educated middle classes. They probably live a long way from the suburbs where drug abuse causes misery.

The reformers advance persuasive arguments. They say drug use should be treated as a health issue rather than one of law and order.

The taxpayer-subsidised Drug Foundation, which is leading the charge for cannabis law reform (but which betrays an ideological bias by contradictorily taking a shrill line against alcohol), cleverly plays on public sympathy for terminally ill cancer patients such as former trade union leader Helen Kelly.

But while there are there are valid arguments for decriminalisation of cannabis, and especially for its medicinal use, the reformers can’t ignore the baneful effects of drug use.

Neither can they ignore the risk that liberalising the cannabis laws will send the dangerous message that drugs are OK. They may be okay if you’ve got a university degree and live in a good suburb, but they’re not so liberating if you’re a hungry kid living in a freezing state house where any surplus money goes on P rather than food or heating.

Many of the reformers seem blind to much of the damage done by drug use. But Garry Evans saw it in his 18 years as a coroner. He told this newspaper on his retirement that the term ‘recreational drug’ was a misnomer; put a “w” in front of it, he said, and you’d be closer to the truth.

Evans would know, and so do the people who conducted Otago University’s famous longitudinal study of 1000 people born in 1972. Drug abuse is a consistent factor among those in the study who went off the rails.

These are reasons to proceed with caution. As Massey University drug policy expert Chris Wilkins says, any change needs to be carefully thought through. “We can’t treat cannabis like we do any other commodity in the supermarket.”

A good starting point for the debate might be a more honesty. “Alcohol wicked, dope okay” – the line promoted by the Drug Foundation – suggests some ideological decontamination might be helpful.

Face it: Australians are different

(First published in The Dominion Post, July 12.)

THE ONLY surprising thing about the end of Robbie Deans’ career as coach of the Australian rugby team was that it took so long for the axe to fall.

Australians are far more stridently nationalistic than New Zealanders, and it must have riled Ocker rugby fans that a Kiwi (or should I say Koy-woy) was in charge of the national side.

The Australian attitude toward New Zealand is essentially one of indifference, but they can be prickly about their small neighbour and hate to admit we can do anything as well as they can – still less better. That’s why, when New Zealanders succeed across the Ditch, Australians deal with it by claiming them as their own.

The relationship between the two countries is complex. We have a lot in common, but no one should make the mistake of thinking we’re alike.

Their history, politics and culture are different from ours. Some historians would argue that the two countries took fundamentally divergent paths because one was settled by convicts, sent there against their will, while the other was founded by free people motivated by a desire for a better life.

Paul Henry found out to his cost how different Australians are. Hugely popular (if polarising) here, he tanked on Australian breakfast television.  They just didn’t get him.

Australians will tolerate and even embrace successful New Zealanders, but only on their own terms. It helps if you’re prepared to become more Australian than the Australians, as in the case of New Plymouth-born broadcaster (and now naturalised Australian) Derryn Hinch, who adopted their larrikin ways with gusto.

Deans’ dismissal by the ARU probably had less to do with his win-loss record – which wasn’t so bad once you exclude defeats by the All Blacks – than with his nationality. No matter how many games the Wallabies won under him, he would have struggled to win acceptance.

Now they’ve got a dinky-di Australian in charge, Earth is back on its axis and national honour is restored.

* * *

ONE OF THE most interesting aspects of the recent upheaval in Australian politics was the way in which sexual politics intruded on media coverage.

High-profile female commentators such as Anne Summers and Kerry-Anne Walsh conspicuously lined up on the side of the deposed Julia Gillard. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that they saw Gillard’s overthrow by Kevin Rudd as part of a gender war.

As with the 2011 media coverage of Alasdair Thompson, the Auckland Employers’ Association chief who was mercilessly savaged because he made a politically incautious remark about women workers, it seems that some women journalists abandon all semblance of objectivity the moment gender issues crop up.

* * *

DON’T YOU LOVE the way sanctimonious academics and health commissars demonise alcohol while sanitising, and even promoting, cannabis?

The head of Australia’s Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education – yet another of those tiresome taxpayer-funded anti-liquor groups with grandiose names – popped up on Jim Mora’s radio show a couple of days ago, essentially arguing that dope causes less damage than alcohol and should therefore be decriminalised.

This highly debatable proposition is frequently heard from smug, middle-class baby-boomers who are safely insulated from the pernicious effects of habitual cannabis use.

Such people are typically well-educated and have high-paying jobs, usually in the public sector. A spliff at the weekend does them no harm. They are far removed from the pestilential effects cannabis has among unskilled workers and those on welfare.

The pro-dope, anti-liquor evangelists still buy into the 1960s-era delusion that cannabis is grown and sold by harmless, dreamy hippies, whereas alcohol is foisted on a helpless populace by bloated, rapacious beer barons. Hostility to capitalism is often at the heart of anti-liquor lobbying.

“Dope harmless, booze wicked” is the wowser’s equivalent of the robotic chant “four legs good, two legs bad” from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Their propagandising is highly effective, entrenching myth as truth. Only this week my fellow columnist Dave Armstrong, an intelligent man, fell for the familiar wowser line that “we live in a binge culture as far as alcohol is concerned”. But anyone who remembers the 1960s and 70s knows that binge drinking was far worse then that it is now.

* * *

WAS THERE ever a more useless piece of advice than that offered in a radio ad I heard recently on what to do in the event of a dog attack?

If you’re attacked while riding a bike, the ad suggests, you should dismount and place the bike between you and the dog.

This would be an excellent suggestion but for one thing. It would require the dog to desist from attacking while you slow to a stop, get off and manoeuvre the bike into the defensive position.

It’s possible there are pitbulls trained to observe such Queensberry rules, but somehow I doubt it.