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 truly scary thing about Barraco Barner

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 2.)

 

HEARD OF Barraco Barner? Possibly not. But according to a 20-year-old English beautician, he’s the president of Britain and he really shouldn’t be getting involved in Ukraine’s problems.

Here, starkly laid bare, is the one of the downsides of social media and the digital information revolution. Instant opinion, zero knowledge.

Gemma Worrall from Blackpool wrote on Twitter that it was “scary” that “our president Barraco Barner” was tangling with Russia. But the truly scary thing is that someone who thought that Britain had a president, and that his name was Barraco Barner, could so innocently display their rank ignorance for the world to see.

Ms Worrall’s tweet shines a light on the existence of people whose view of the world is formed not from the printed word, but from whatever they happen to overhear.

If she had seen Barack Obama’s name in print, it’s unlikely she would have been so gravely misled as to how it’s spelled. But clearly, she’d only ever heard it – perhaps from customers chatting in the beauty parlour where she works, or from a TV set playing in the background.

Add to that Ms Worrall’s obvious belief that the world needed to hear her considered views on Barraco Barner and Russia, and you have a lethal confection of foolishness and conceit.

On the other hand, these things are self-correcting. As her gaffe was re-tweeted worldwide, thousands gleefully pounced, sneering at her error.

You might say this is a good thing. A mistake was promptly exposed and corrected. But in the process, another unlovely aspect of social media was laid bare: namely, the propensity for abuse and bullying by anonymous cowards.

Never in human history has it been easier for someone like Ms Worrall to express their thoughts so instantly or freely, without the moderating intervention of someone who might save them from embarrassment. And never has it been easier for others to join in mob nastiness.

You could argue that this is all very democratic. But is it progress?

* * *

 

I HAVE DOUBTS, too, about the explosion in online opinion, even when it’s written by people who know very well who Barack Obama is and how his name is spelled.

University of Otago political scientist Bryce Edwards collates online political comment every day and emails a summary to people who are interested in politics and curious to know what others are thinking.

What’s notable is that the volume increases with every week, to the point where it has become almost indigestible.

On Monday I counted 67 commentaries on the subject of Shane Jones’ departure from the Labour Party. These ranged from generally dispassionate comment in mainstream media to partisan rants by bloggers from both sides of the political fence. The previous Thursday, Edwards disseminated 51 commentaries on the same subject.

As political comment proliferates and the tone becomes more trenchant, so the temptation to tune out – or at least to exercise greater discretion about how much of it one bothers to read – increases. The law of diminishing returns kicks in.

In the early days of the Internet, someone cleverly said that trying to keep up with the flow of information it unleashed was like drinking from a fire hose. I don’t know what you’d compare it with now.

Having one’s say has never been easier, but the clamour and static sometimes threatens to overwhelm reasoned debate.

* * *

IN THIS paper a couple of weeks ago, Ross Bell of the Drug Foundation claimed New Zealanders are “comparatively high” users of both marijuana and alcohol.

In fact OECD figures for 2011 show per capita consumption of liquor in New Zealand was 9.5 litres. That’s exactly the OECD average – hardly something to get in a panic about, especially when you consider that some countries on the table, such as Turkey and Israel, have low levels of consumption because of religious factors.

New Zealand was placed 10^th of the 19 OECD countries for which statistics were available. More complete figures for 2009 show we drank less, per head, than comparable countries such as Britain and Australia.

What’s more, Ministry of Health figures show that drinking across all New Zealand age groups is in steady decline, and “binge drinking” by young people – contrary to what panic merchants like Mr Bell will tell you – has fallen off sharply over the past 10 years.

These facts appear not to matter to the neo-wowser lobby, which continues to promote the myth that we need to be protected from the machinations of wicked “booze barons”.

And there’s another thing. Just who are these booze barons? The term might have meant something in the 1930s, when men like Sir Ernest Davis controlled the brewing and hotel industries, but these days it’s just a crudely emotive propaganda tool.

 

Feeling sorry for Australia? Yeah, right

(First published in The Dominion Post, March 7.)

 

IT MUST BE tough being Australian right now.

Think about it. They’re shutting down the factories that produce the Holden and the Ford Falcon – cars that, for generations, have helped define what it meant to be Australian.

The Holden and the Falcon are Australia on wheels, but the country’s guilty secret was that the two automotive brands were able to survive only with massive taxpayer handouts. Economically speaking, they were crocks.

Australian governments spent an estimated $30 billion over the past 16 years propping up the car industry and the workforce it employed. Now Tony Abbott’s government has decided the subsidies must end – a bold move, given the Holden’s sacred status in Australian culture.

It’s worth pointing out that New Zealand went through this painful process more than two decades ago, when our politicians realised it made more sense for cars to be built in their country of origin.

The phasing out of protection for the domestic vehicle industry is one reason why a new car in New Zealand now costs the equivalent of 30 weeks’ salary rather than 90 weeks’, as was the case in the 1980s.

In this, we were ahead of the Australians – but then we often are, though the average Aussie would sooner undergo multiple limb amputations than admit it.

Arguably even more traumatic for patriotic Australians than the collapse of the car industry is the crisis engulfing Qantas – Australia’s best-known brand internationally, and hence an even more potent nationalist symbol than the Holden.

Last week, on the same day as Air New Zealand celebrated a record half-year profit, Qantas was announcing a $271 million first-half loss and the shedding of 5000 jobs.

This was accompanied by renewed wailing from Qantas about the unfairness of competition. It seems the first instinct of the Australian carrier when it’s in trouble is to run to Mummy government complaining that the playing field isn’t even.

Australians are famous for their swaggering self-confidence, but you have to wonder whether, underneath that tough veneer, they are actually fearful and insecure. Just look at how they fought to keep New Zealand apples out of the Australian market on spurious pretexts, and how they recently stripped New Zealand products from their supermarket shelves.

Perhaps reality is starting to bite for the Lucky Country. The mining boom helped insulate Australians against the global financial crisis and may have convinced them they were invincible – a view to which the typical Ocker is highly susceptible.

Don’t you feel sorry for them? No, I don’t either.

* * *

WATCHING the rebirth of ACT, and in particular the performance of its new leader Jamie Whyte, is like watching a high-wire artist crossing the Niagara Falls.

Mr Whyte is an intelligent man who, unlike the impostor John Banks, believes in ACT’s original credo and promises to take the party back to its ideological roots.

His big problem is that he seems honest. Once journalists latched on to this novelty, they realised there was some sport to be had.

A question about incest, which Mr Whyte answered with the ingenuousness of a political novice, was quickly followed by one about polygamy.  Result: a media furore.

As long as he responds to questions like a philosophy lecturer (his previous calling) rather than a politician, the media will continue trying to trap him into saying outrageous things which can then be used to ridicule him. It doesn’t help that these are philosophical positions that can’t easily be explained in a sound bite.

Whether this will harm him politically is another matter. It’s possible the commentariat was more excited by his statements than the public, which very likely recognised it was Whyte the pointy-headed philosopher speaking.

To get back to the high-wire analogy, Mr Whyte has managed to stay upright so far. But each curly question is like a gust of wind that causes him to teeter precariously before regaining his balance.

Will he make it safely to the other side, or will he topple into the torrent below? Either way, ACT’s true believers may be in for a few more heart-stopping moments.

* * *

NEW ZEALANDERS drink to get drunk, declares the ever-censorious Ross Bell of the New Zealand Drug Foundation. “One of the ways Kiwis drink is we drink to get drunk,” he told the Dominion Post this week. “People plan their whole weekend around it – what’s the next drinking occasion and how much can I drink.”

Really? This doesn’t describe any New Zealander I know. Mr Bell’s description may apply to a small and troublesome minority of binge drinkers, but he didn’t differentiate. According to him, we’re all hopeless inebriates.

As long as the wowser lobby resorts to ridiculous hyperbole in an attempt to whip up hysteria over alcohol, it forfeits the right to be taken seriously.