Ten reasons to vote against the proposal:
1. It’s In Your Professional Interests
You – and your employment – become unsafe for driving or for work under the influence of THC. The government tried to clean up this mess with a law enabling testing of drivers. It failed.
And to make it really clear, every employer who tests you and you are found doped up and they are employing you to drive, operate equipment, build, use tools, mine, or work in any processing plant, will send you home and not invite you back. Both NZTA and NZPolice know the legalisation move is wrong:
2. It Contradicts Our Smokefree 2025 Policy
Helen Clark, patron of Smokefree 2025, says that “We have only 7 years to achieve the Smokefree 2025 goal.” By enabling growing marijuana at home, the proposed bill encourages smoking. In 1996/97 our smoking rate was 25% in adults and it’s down to 15%. We’ve been working on this major health policy for three decades, it’s working, so why legalise a product that encourages smoking?
And of course, it’s bringing smoking into the home again, into family life, around pregnant mothers and newborns again … just when we’re trying to eradicate smoking there.
NZTA, Police, and Health: our three most powerful government entities for behavioural change show making this drug available for everyone to use is a really bad idea.
3. It’s a Much Harder Drug Than They Tell You.
It’ ain’t the 2% THC of Nambassa. The NZ government have indicated that they want to allow 15% THC content in products like vapes. In Colorado, average THC of all tested flower in 2017 was 19.6% and for concentrated extract products 68.6%.This isn’t some bucolic wilderness herb. And it won’t stop. When the potency is legally limited, the black market is simply empowered to produce higher THC products demanded by users.
4. We’ve Been Lied To Before And They Will Lie To Us Again
Tobacco companies lied to New Zealanders and to the world for more than a century about the dangers of smoking. It all looked so glamorous in the 1950s, 60s, and 1970’s. Just like marijuana looks so cool now. And to sustain that fantasy and smother any thought of harm they just lied in unison. Philip Morris and Altria (Marlboro) have already bought in big to marijuana. Let’s not re-open that door.
There is every motivation for big marijuana companies to get us to trust them, when we know we shouldn’t.
5. Marijuana is Addictive
According to virtually every scientific review, including a World Health Organisation report and a 2017 U.S. Academy of Sciences study, marijuana is addictive and harmful.
Drugs such as alcohol and tobacco are under greater and greater legal control, not less, because corporate-weakened law didn’t work, even though they generate such damage.
6. This Law Has Nothing To Do With TCH’s Medicinal Benefits
The WHO has proposed reclassifying this plants’ extracts for medicinal use.
New Zealand law agrees now that there’s got to be better alternatives to all codeine derivatives, and all of them including Panadeine will be prescription-only from November this year. Take the drops and sleep easy.
There may well be excellent reasons for medical use of THC in regulated products. There’s a different law for medicinal THC use already. This referendum is different.
7. It’s Not Fixing A Criminal Problem …
In the last 3 years, only 16 people in total were given a prison or home detention sentence for cannabis possession – and these were all sentences influenced by their previous offending history. It’s not hauling the innocent off the street.
8. … And Will Likely Make It Worse
Not too long ago Canada went down this track even deeper.
Now, only 29% of Canadians buy all of their product legally. 81% get some or all of it from illegal and unregulated dealers. Portugal has seen a 23% rise in psychoactive substance abuse including synthetic cannabis.
We don’t have to be stupid like that.
9. There’s No Justice Issue Solved Here
No one in Black Lives Matter advocates for more legal drug use. They get it.
Smoking marijuana, like smoking tobacco, gets to New Zealand’s Maori and Pacifica the highest by a significantly high proportion.
In a similar trend to the placement of alcohol outlets and pokie machine venues in New Zealand, minority and low income groups are Big Marijuana’s targets for drug use and abuse. Stop them. Vote against this bill.
10. Suicide
We have one of the worst suicide rates in the world.
Researchers led by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (including New Zealand researchers) found that people who started smoking cannabis daily before the age of 17 are seven times more likely to commit suicide.
Legalising the purchase and possession for each person of up to 40 joints per day will increase this major mortal risk to our people.
Vote against this referendum question.
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