Lawmaking is serious business. It is how we as a community, through our elected representatives, set the bounds and frameworks for our behaviour, allowing our community to function. Laws shouldn’t be made, things shouldn’t be banned, for the hell of it. So why is Parliament passing a law that everyone, including the PM, thinks is pointless?
Here’s the article:
Key doubts drug utensil ban will work
Prime Minister John Key doubts provisions in a government bill aimed at cracking down on implements used for taking drugs will have much impact on the use of methamphetamine.The Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill has been reported back by Parliament’s health select committee, with no significant amendments.
Its main purpose is to make medicines which use methamphetamine precursors ephedrine and pseudoephedrine available only on prescription, but it also contains a clause which makes it an offence to sell, supply and import utensils used to smoke methamphetamine and bans the import of parts of those utensils.
The Labour Party put in a minority report on the bill, saying no evidence had been presented on the merits of further restrictions on drug utensils.
The Green Party said the same thing, arguing there was “no evidence whatsoever that the changes would reduce drug use even slightly”.
Key was asked his opinion today, and said the question was whether the provisions would actually work, and whether drug users would simply resort to home-made implements.
He said he had seen similar recommendations in the past.
“As a general rule no, my experience has been that they haven’t worked very well,” he told reporters.
The committee said in its report on the bill most of the submissions it received were opposed to the utensils clause.
“Many argued that prohibiting drug utensils would be ineffective and would increase the harm suffered by drug users because they would make their own utensils or would buy them illegally,” it said.
“It was also claimed that the importation of utensils would become clandestine, so that the Customs Service would no longer know who the importers were.”
It noted those views but decided by majority not to change the bill.
So, the Nats are going to add yet more items to the long list of banned behaviour, despite the fact that even Key doesn’t think it will do anything. It’s going to be illegal to possess anything that the cops decide is part of a utensil for using P. It’s like they’ve looked at the P ‘epidemic’ (P use has actually been declining for years) and decided – ‘lets do something that won’t fix the problem but will give the Police a vague, potentially huge, power and be an administrative nightmare’.
Don’t they have anything better to do? Or is their instinct just to make more and more things illegal?
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