Pubdate: Mon, 04 Apr 2016 Source: Dominion Post, The (New Zealand) Copyright: 2016 The Dominion Post Contact: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2550 TIME FOR CALM DEBATE ON DRUGS Are we hearing the first murmurs of a more calm and rational approach to minor drug offences? Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne, the Government's go-to man on drug regulation, is sidling cautiously towards some meaningful changes. His national drug policy, released last year, puts a new emphasis on treating drugs as a health issue. Among other things, the policy calls for a review of drug paraphernalia laws, as well as options for "minimising harm in relation to the offence and penalty regime for personal possession" of drugs. Would that mean decriminalising possessing small amounts of cannabis? "I'm not going that far . . . yet," Dunne said last week. Police Association president Greg O'Connor has begun carefully saying that if New Zealand does want to relax the law on cannabis, it ought to legalise the trade, like the US state of Colorado. "We should balance the damage that is likely from the inevitable short-term increase in the amount of drug use from legalisation of drugs," he told the Drug Foundation, "against the damage done to society by the same drugs being illegal, and supply and quality being left in the hands of unregulated criminals." Neither Dunne nor O'Connor explicitly calls for change. Perhaps they are undecided or perhaps the politics are too tricky. But they have begun a useful debate anyway. O'Connor is exactly right to frame the problem as a balance of competing harms. On the one hand, there are real health concerns about cannabis. Its effects on young people's brains are plainly damaging. It has been associated with the onset of serious mental illness for a small minority. More lenient laws would surely increase its use at a time when major efforts are going into cutting the availability of other drugs (tobacco, especially). On the other hand, the current prohibition eats up police resources, makes criminals out of many people for a voluntary, relatively low-harm act, and enables a lucrative illicit trade, run mostly by the gangs. And it doesn't even work: despite decades of punitive efforts, 80 per cent of New Zealanders try cannabis by the age of 21. One in 13 smokes it monthly. In some ways, the landscape has changed without the law: one study found that police arrests for cannabis possession almost halved between 1994 and 2008. AUMR poll released last week found that as many New Zealanders support a law change as oppose it. (A clear majority, meanwhile, backs legalising cannabis for medical purposes.) So there is plenty of cause for an adult debate, and Dunne is right to gently prod it along. Whether he can is another story. Many of his fellow MPs are scared. Some will be mindful of 2014's painfully handled "legal high" regime. Others fear any mention of "drugs". They would seem to include Health Minister Jonathan Coleman, who dismissed talk of changing the law on cannabis. "I think we've got too many drugs in society," he said. He should reflect harder than that. The drugs that worry him are here in spite of the laws as they stand. Reasonable people can disagree about what to do, but it's unreasonable to shut the debate down before it gets started. A system that's been failing for 40 years needs more scrutiny than that. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom