Categories
Cannabis Capitalism Democracy Not A Party, not a problem The State

Should the others vote?

The state is a safe space, that’s its job. From inception, bringing six constables to the shores in 1840 those organising a state on the islands of New Zealand have used variations of creating “law and order”, economic stability, integrated cultural conformity, gender normalisation and security to justify intervention in the lives people living in Aotearoa. If not overtly mentioned by those calling for, maintaining, and defending the state these goals are largely expected by those who vote to be delivered in some way in exchange for their taxes.

Today’s New Zealand has not achieved this at all. Unknown and untested chemicals flood across the borders causing unknown short-term and long-term damage to those who use them and those who love those users. The state continues to target cannabis plants with generations of anecdotal knowledge and decades of scientific research behind its use giving clear and known risks. In the interests of public safety and economic stability it’s easier to get methamphetamine than cannabis in New Zealand, with the most damaging drugs of all available for purchase in most supermarkets and yet change is angrily resisted.

This is far from safe and can be seen as related if you understand protecting our profit earning overseas by signing trade deals and allowing streamlined entry of goods into the country. So you can buy cheap products online, while police are “protecting the public” with violent raids on anything grown on our own soil, this means synthetic drugs and their precursors will always be cheaper and easier to get and produce than an actual weed that will grow wild.

Not A Party has argued for a “don’t vote” strategy in previous elections and I want to encourage the party to change tack entirely for the reformist coalition leg of bipartisan dictatorship. We have in office the party that oversaw the 15 October 2007 “Operation Eight” raids. Aside from the horrifying fallout of neo-colonial troops armed with assault weapons yet again on the confiscation line in Te Urewera, searching school buses and elderly at gunpoint in the interests of “national security”. The police apologised for that.

The police also on that day raided multiple addresses of political activists, taking computers and documents and proving absolutely no one was actually guilty of any terrorism at all under the law adopted on US government request by New Zealand, the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. The outcome of court cases aside, pay attention to what the police believe the most dangerous threat to security is. Activists who target and protest the actions of corporations and anyone who feels their people should have dignity, self-determination and freedom on these islands from the post-colonial settler state government.

In Terror In Our Midst Brendan Hokowhitu explains what has happened since adopting this law, based on a perpetual war against “terror” in Western society.

Essentially, the discourse promoted by the Bush administration, in cahoots with other western governments such as Britain, was fostered on the grounds “others” had fewer rights than the normal population. Interestingly, the transforming morality is regressing in part due to the pre-enlightened discourses espoused by the Bush administration especially. Discourses based on ‘the will of god’ and ‘good and evil’ have quickly positioned the Other as ‘evil’ and the self as ‘good’. The moral retrogression has served those in power the mandate to enact absolute sovereign-like justice.

The “terrorists” are defined by the state in the first place then labeled instantly the other, the “bad” because the state is always “good”. So we have a drone war summarily executing the others in the middle east with robots to provide us all with the illusion of security and a “defence force” that attacks the mental health of journalists like a state sanctioned internet troll before being forced to admit the SAS did raid the village in Afghanistan killing civilians as outlined by Jon Stephenson and Nicky Hager in Hit and Run. The police have raided journalists repeatedly since the inception of our war on terror with following legislation passed at the urging of the Obama administration by John Key reducing the rights of journalists when doing the job they should be of holding a microscope to society. No terrorists have yet been found amongst us, the others, and as we know the state does not see what it does as terror.

Far from delivering us from the real threat of the day, the introduction of this legislation and resulting raids did not create a safe space to stop the 2007 GFC causing a retraction of the economy, a rise in suicide rates, and paving the way socially for a massive increase in the “legal” flood of synthetic drugs into dairies and stores destroying many working families. Also directly affected were those who the then incoming PM described as an “underclass”, an “other” that once he got into office were to be given less rights than the “good” Kiwis. Drug testing and invasions of beneficiaries’ privacy up to the then Minister of Social Development releasing personal details of her critics to media while suing anyone threatening to release hers.

Why does any of this mean you should vote in the next election or any referendum? Just because John Key is out and GenXers run most wings of our pluralist dictatorship the ‘underclass’ he othered into economic doldrums have not gone anywhere. The level of control over others the police are willing to exert has not diminished. The hold-out NZ First still lead by the old guard, has for 24 years been seen as “picking the winner” in many a media talking head pluralist analysis prior to elections and has actually played this role three times. Forget your electoral colleges, we have Rob Muldoon’s apprentice picking our governments. Two pieces of legislation jump out to me as furthering the othering of some minority groups, neither is the upcoming New Zealand cannabis referendum. One is the waka-jumping bill that gives enormous power to the “good” party leaders over their “bad” disgruntled MPs who want to leave their party, possibly to do something from inside the Parliament on behalf of their perceived voter base to represent them.

The second and more important in my mind is to make all referendums binding. This most certainly has the ability to be misused to push a majority agenda brutally down the throat of those who disagree with it or are born different from its enforced norms through state sanctioned terror and violence. I hear the concerns of some groups and inside Not A Party and counter we already have that now. It happens now from birth to the grave. The state is using coercion, fear, and violence on us “others” to protect its “good” self. Direct democracy may lead to direct oppression of minorities, some of those minorities being party leaders.

Representation relies on the person you voted in interpreting how you would vote on issues introduced for discussion in Parliament. The party leaders can now interpret how they will as long as their caucus supports them and fringe opinions can be othered out of Parliament entirely to be replaced by a new representative. Having to get the majority to back your rights in a referendum will be no easy feat, the alternative is to see party leaders take the last tool your representative has to rebel (whether you voted for one or not) which is quitting the party and fighting out the term on behalf of either their own naked self-interest or from their perceived opinions of those like yourself who put them in Parliament.

If you made it this far you are already an other to the state somewhere, I’m guessing. Environmentalists have been othered by the state forces since their inception despite having a party inside the government proving they are in fact no longer others but members of the state attempting to create a safe sustainable space for their children in the future. Most of us never become so othered by the state that they will raid our communities like we are housing enemy combatants in the perpetual terror war. Or be othered so much we are detained and forced into medical treatment we don’t want. And it’s mostly to preserve the “good” state. By holding a population at gunpoint as if the entire community is a threat to the “good” state or targeting activists to be removed carefully (although not quietly) from their “good” communities the police have shown how they intend to enforce the terror laws here. The subsequent raids to collect evidence from journalists Heather Du Plessis-Allan and Barry Soper after Du Plessis-Allan showed you can now buy firearms online without a licence as if the problem is yet another case demonstrating glaring flaws with their safe space neoliberal state model. It is as if the real threat to state internal safety of the population does not lie with large corporations producing chemicals for “research” that turn out just to be poisons or addictive synthetics. Or banks producing CDOs that turned out to bankrupt working people with bad mortgages, no job and an eviction notice. Or that success stories like Trade Me are wide open to unsafe use by violence minded people. The corporations and banks are always cast as “good” in this environment and their victimised and lied-to consumers the “other”. Those of us who point this out are now the truly bad and may well become “terrorists” in the eyes of police whose primary job as they see is to protect the “good” from us “the others”. Many of you will at some point be othered by the police for political views alone, and if you get challenging enough your othering will lead to terrorisation BY the police of your community while removing you from it.

Pushing for cannabis law reform shouldn’t need to be argued here, but I will, in that it removes a tool the police can use to harass and oppress us others with very real threats of violence for failure to comply. Forcing CIR to be binding will be another othering tool in some hands, but it could be the leaders of those parties we can other with it. If not, this will get worse, it probably will anyway despite the Labour Party’s noises about child poverty, a 24% increase in house prices corresponding with less than half that in wage growth during the first six months of Jacindamania. We can expect that, like Helen Clark’s promises of universal student allowances or John Key’s promise of wages climbing to Australia’s level, we will see the young, the non-white immigrants, Maori, LGBTIQ, and anyone whose politics isn’t “good” enough for state security forces to be othered economically and blamed for our outcomes by enthusiastic supporters of the state. This administration complete with Winston Peters telling us capitalism has failed many of us spent its first six months signing among other things the CPTTP thus strengthening the very concept of corporate rights as good and local independence as the other which has failed so many Kiwis already.

If only we could run a binding referendum that Prime Ministers do the unthinkable and are forced to enact serious economic reforms they have promised to on the campaign trail?

Categories
Cannabis Don't Vote Government Health & Safety

The Government Giveth; The Government Taketh Away

bribery and corruption

There was some excitement in the New Zealand cannabis community this week after the news that the Government would remove restrictions on doctors who wanted to prescribe cannabidiol (CBD) in the form of an oil. It was the first admission from the Government, ever, that cannabis actually had medicinal value, and for this reason it was significant.

Those of us who are not enamoured of politicians are naturally eager to point out that, after twenty years of sick Kiwis being completely ignored when it came to the cannabis question, progress is only now being made in the foreshadow of a general election.

Neither are we surprised to see hordes of Green Party hacks swarm the battlefields of social media to play down the magnitude of this change. The consensus tactic appears to be describing the changes as “not medicinal cannabis”, despite the fact that CBD is the component of cannabis that has shown by far the greatest medicinal promise.

After all, it’s important for the Green Party – now that the will of Kiwis for some cannabis law reform is undeniably clear – to craft a narrative of having been at the forefront of cannabis law reform all along.

Politicians being what they are, the Greens will deny at all costs the truth: that they sucked up cannabis law reform votes from 1999 and gave back nothing but contempt, until a few months before Peter Dunne (of all people) changed the law himself, without Green Party input.

All of this shitfighting distracts, and is intended to distract, from the fact that if the Greens do get into Government and change the cannabis laws to something intelligent and reasonable, they will, at the same time, make some other aspect of legislation stupid and unreasonable – and this is the necessary flipside of the deal.

The Government giveth; the Government taketh away. This is the nature of politics. The Government never simply gives freedoms back to the people it manages.

We are losing rights now, and will continue to lose them into the future, because the Government and all parties running for Government are in agreement about taking away our rights to use tobacco.

Many people have been able to predict that we will get legal cannabis at the same time as we lose legal tobacco. The rhetoric from the Government is for a “Smokefree New Zealand” by 2025, and we know that they will pursue this futile goal (previously described by this column as a sadistic idea dreamed up by morons) with the same mindless zealotry that they did the goal of making New Zealand cannabis-free.

And it will be equally as futile. Tobacco may be less fun to smoke than cannabis, but people still do it – not because they are “addicted”, as our moronic mental health establishment would have it, but because tobacco has a strong medicinal effect to people suffering from a wide range of mental problems, in particular psychosis and/or excess anxiety brought about from complications of trauma.

Statists and control freaks everywhere are mewling: “But we used to think tobacco was medicinal, but now science has advanced and now we know better.”

But this was exactly what they said when they made cannabis illegal.

Cannabis has been widely used by humans for centuries, and the propaganda against it early this century was all based on a two-pronged attack: first, deny any and all benefits of the substance, no matter how obvious; and second, attribute any and all detriments to the substance, no matter how peripherally related.

And so, in much the same way that we just had nearly a century of hearing that cannabis causes psychosis and schizophrenia and brain tumours and amotivational syndrome and blah blah blah, and how all of the positive effects that people had noticed from cannabis use were really just delusions brought about by the psychotogenic effects of the plant, now we’re going to hear all the same rubbish about tobacco.

Mental health patients will continue to tell politicians and doctors that tobacco use significantly alleviates their suffering, as it has done for mentally ill people for centuries, and they will increasingly be ignored as the devotion to the righteousness of the crusade against tobacco overrides all logic and reason.

We’re sure we banned the right thing this time!

Of course, at some point in the future we’ll get legal tobacco back, because the suppressed mental health benefits of its use will at some point be rediscovered, and then another campaign of spending decades trying to talk basic commonsense to goat-stubborn morons and brainwashed doctors will begin.

And when that process ends, we will lose legal alcohol, probably on the grounds that it causes too much violence and brain damage. At this point, the massive social and emotional benefits of alcohol will be suppressed and forgotten.

The Government giveth; the Government taketh away.

Categories
Cannabis Health & Safety The State

The Police Will Kill to Enforce Any Law, No Matter How Trivial

There are many power-worshippers in the world today who think it would be just great if their area politicians passed a law banning this or that – some minor irritation that probably does not affect the quality of their life in any meaningful way but which they believe ought to be stamped out for the sake of maintaining good order at the very least.

These people are as dangerous as any fanatic that put a dictator into power.

The reason for this is that the Police, who are tasked by politicians with enforcing laws, will go as far as killing any citizen to enforce any law that they have broken, no matter how trivial.

A lot of people balk at this assertion, usually because they have neither encountered Police officers in operation nor thought the whole process through as a thought experiment.

But if you think it through as a thought experiment, the meathook clarity of it cannot be denied.

Take the case of a medicinal cannabis user. If you have a psychological condition such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or if you have pain related to terminal cancer and do not want to take opiates, you might end up as another of New Zealand’s hundreds of thousands of cannabis users.

Now let’s say that the Police come to your house with a search warrant, on the grounds that they have reason to believe that you have cannabis in your possession or a cannabis operation in your house. They are going to arrest you, and you know that you face up to seven years in prison for the offence.

You might well protest that you are fully within your rights to use cannabis as it is a medicine which legitimately alleviates human suffering, whether physical or psychological. And so the search warrant is not valid, because it was granted on the grounds that a crime had been committed, and none has.

This is perfectly reasonable – after all, you have harmed no-one. But what will happen at that stage is violence. The Police will escalate to violence at this point, probably by forcing their way into your home.

Let’s say that they are unsuccessful at doing so, either because you manage to lock the door in time or because you brandish a weapon in an effort to show them that you are willing to respond to their violence with violence of your own in order to defend yourself and your home.

In that case, you can probably assume that the Police officers will withdraw – and come back with the Armed Offenders Squad. They will call the AOS on the grounds that you threatened a Police officer with a weapon – the fact that you were only doing so to defend yourself against an immoral attack will not help you at all.

The AOS will then lay siege to your house, as they did to Jan Molenaar. This may even involve, as it did in Molenaar’s case, the Special Tactics Group – formerly known as the Anti-Terrorist Squad.

Jan Molenaar ended up shot dead at his own hand, probably in full awareness that escape was impossible.

Note here that this pattern of escalation of violence all the way to your death will happen if you don’t submit to the Police for any reason, no matter what it is.

It doesn’t matter what the crime is. It could be a hundred counts of serial murder, or it could be a parking fine. The inescapable rule is that you must submit to any state-allocated legal punishment for any offence you have been deemed to have committed, no matter how vindictive and cruel the punishment or how petty and victimless the offence, or the Police will kill you in the enforcement of it.

This is why there is cause to think very deeply before deciding that something should be illegal. Constable Len Snee would not have been shot dead if cannabis had not been legally prohibited, as Jan Molenaar would have been left in peace to treat his mental condition in the way that he knew best.

Anyone who supports a law also supports the consequences of enforcing that law. Those consequences might involve the Police shooting up a house with no-one in it, as happened in Napier last year.

In the case of cannabis prohibition, this means also supporting the expense of $400,000,000 per year and the occasional death of a Police officer – is it worth it?

The Police Will Kill to Enforce Any Law, No Matter How Trivial

Categories
Cannabis Education Government Health & Safety

Why are the Tribal Huk More Effective Than the New Zealand Government?

jamiepink

Frustrated by the feeble responses from local law enforcement to requests for help cleaning out crystal methamphetamine dealers from their community, a street gang made up of mostly underprivileged youths takes the problem into their own hands with immediate and complete success, decommissioning a dozen meth houses within 24 hours. Something from the fringes of a dystopian cyberpunk novel like The Verity Key, set in the 2070s? No – this is the small rural Waikato town of Ngaruawahia, population 5,000, in 2016.

Achieving this was possible because the locations of and locations from which the dealers sold were all known. All it took was a public meeting organised by Tribal Huk President Jamie Pink (pictured above), at which he stated that crystal meth dealers had 24 hours to leave Ngaruawahia or they would be physically removed from the town.

This throwing down of the gauntlet has apparently resulted in a town free of dealers of the drug. The question then becomes: why could the Police not have done this?

The least secret reason is that the Police are the army of the rich, and the residents of Ngaruawahia do not make large tax contributions to the upkeep of the New Zealand Police force. Like all poor communities, therefore, they are of the lowest priority for protection by law enforcement.

Moreover, the rich generally do not have problems with P dealers making offers to their sisters and daughters as the rich drink alcohol.

The main reason, however, is this. The Tribal Huk actually has more community support among the disadvantaged than the New Zealand Police. This is a fact widely known and accepted by the poor whose neighbourhoods house the crystal meth dealers, and is much less understood by the wealthy.

The Police are not considered by the poor to be on their side because they put the poor in prison for cannabis offences, and because they give the poor car fines to keep the roads clear for the rich.

The opposite situation occurs in places where cannabis is not illegal and where the Police are properly funded through adequate taxation, such as the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, cannabis users (the proportion of whom in the population is less than 40% of the New Zealand figure) have no inherent reason to distrust the Police as their possession of cannabis is not a crime.

In New Zealand the Police are like an occupying army if you are a cannabis user. Distrust is the natural consequence of the accumulated fear brought on by the possibility that the Police might aggress against you in the enforcement of cannabis laws.

This community support might be a result of the Tribal Huk’s successful ongoing efforts to feed over 500 Waikato schoolchildren, something that the Ministry of Education has not been able to achieve. The Tribal Huk deliver their sandwiches to 25 different schools within the region.

There are no national food in schools programs in New Zealand because we don’t want to pay taxes to feed other people’s kids. There is not sufficient solidarity in New Zealand for such a thing to be acceptable.

Pink himself, in the article linked above, refers to the link between feeling hungry and feeling angry, something that is obvious to any poor child but is a lesson from another dimension to the crusty, distant old men who make decisions in this country.

Anyone with any sense knows that if you are a hungry child, being told to sit down in a classroom on concentrate on anything other than food is going to make you angry. Few adults could handle such a thing without anger.

And yet, despite a full stomach being absolutely necessary if a child is going to learn anything meaningful from school, the New Zealand Government has failed to provide something as simple as sandwiches.

Perhaps the Tribal Huk should have some Police and Ministry of Education funding diverted their way?

The conclusion appears to be that government works best when there is sincere mutual support with the people it governs, and the precise structure or ideology of that government is, next to this, unimportant.

Another way to put this is that government will only work when there is sufficient solidarity between the people being governed and the people doing the governing, and this is true whether the power structure involves the State or a local street gang.

Why are the Tribal Huk More Effective Than the New Zealand Government?

Categories
Cannabis Don't Vote

The Solution to Low Voter Turnout is to Have Politicians that Aren’t Cheating, Lying Pieces of Shit

ballot_box

There were local body elections in New Zealand last week. You probably didn’t know because no-one gives a fuck except for the control freaks that are fighting for power. They care so much about the low turnout that some of them want to make it illegal to not vote.

This means that if you choose not to vote you must either pay a fine or the Police will put you in a cage (and kill you if you resist). This seems extremely aggressive to those of us who do not benefit in any way from voting.

Take, for instance, my personal situation with medicinal cannabis. John Key will not change the cannabis laws and Andrew Little believes that cannabis use causes brain damage. So, no matter who I vote for, I will have a Prime Minister who thinks it’s fair for the Police to come and smash my head in and put me in a cage for using a medicinal plant they don’t approve of.

It’s much better to not vote and, by doing so, withdraw my consent to be governed by a political system that conducts a War on Drugs against its own people. Especially when the only people who have a chance of taking power under this system have already promised to continue this war to destroy people like me.

This I do not only for myself but out of solidarity with all of the people dispossessed by the current New Zealand political system. If my only choices are to give my power to a cheating, lying piece of shit waving a blue flag or a cheating, lying piece of shit waving a red flag, then I will keep my power for myself!

Dr Bryce Edwards, a Massey University politics lecturer and a heavily indoctrinated and brainwashed man, says “[low voter turnout] is a terrible thing. I don’t think there’s really anyone saying lower voter turnout is a good thing”.

Meanwhile, outside of the ivory tower, paedophiles get lighter sentences from the New Zealand “Justice” System than medicinal cannabis growers.

I’m saying that low voter turnout is a good thing, because it is a sign that the population does not consent to the abuses committed against it by the ruling class.

Is it any wonder we’ve lost faith in a political system that gives lighter sentences to paedophiles than it does medicinal cannabis growers? Why should we continue to vote and give our power to the same political system, and to the same clueless old narcissists that brought this atrocious state of injustice about?

Much better to not vote, and in doing so delegitimise the entire system. This is why the control freaks are ultimately afraid of – a population that does not fall for the illusion heavily enough to give away their power to the control freaks.

Not voting doesn’t just mean not voting – it means having the gumption to solve the social problems that politicians exploit to swindle power before that power is swindled. This means looking after vulnerable members of your community before the control freaks start making laws to ban everything that they have not explicitly given permission for.

It means mowing an old person’s lawn. It means smiling at the crazy guy with the haunted look. It means making a donation of time or money to the RSPCA. It means talking honestly with people you know about what’s really going on in the world.

If we all stopped falling for the lies, we could have a world in which the control freaks would dissipate into the gutter like the filth they are.

The Solution to Low Voter Turnout is to Have Politicians that Aren’t Cheating, Lying Pieces of Shit

Categories
Auckland Mayoralty Cannabis

Why Adam John Holland is the Only Sensible Choice For Auckland Mayor

Auckland, North Island, New Zealand skyline

Adam Holland is the only one of the 18 Auckland mayoral candidates whose candidacy doesn’t have some kind of gross defect. If the mayoral campaigns were embryos, most of them would be terminated by the mother after the doctor made clear that there was no chance of viable offspring. Holland stands out from this rabble in a number of ways.

The first is that he is the only one interested in using his position as mayor to enrich Auckland, instead of just enriching himself. Holland has promised to “donate every last penny of my salary to various charities as suggested to me by the people of Auckland“. Considering that the salary of the Auckland mayor is NZD250,000+, this represents a considerable sum of money that charities need.

Coupled to this is the likelihood that the mayor would make it fashionable to donate salary money to charity, which is what this ever more unequal society needs. Considering how shallow and trend-conscious Aucklanders are, magnanimity on the order of Holland’s gesture might be worth tens of millions to the various charities of New Zealand.

Many politicians are fanatically devoted to an ideology and are happy to destroy everything in their path in order to force that ideology upon everyone else. Holland is the opposite of this – his suspension of judgment is so strong that he doesn’t know if he is representing Not A Party or Legalise Cannabis Auckland. Perhaps it is both, or even neither.

Holland is the only candidate with genuine philosopher-king credentials. He says “I won’t do a single thing as mayor just as I haven’t done a single thing for the past seven years of my retirement. Decisions shall be left up to the people, not an elected official in a farcical ‘democratic’ ceremony.”

Here Holland is referencing Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, in particular the passage that covers the five forms of government. For those who have not read The Republic, the belief of Plato was that government begins as an aristocracy and degrades over time, passing through the less perfect stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and eventually tyranny.

The astute listener would interpret Holland’s words here as a warning to us about the further deterioration of our society, especially in this age of greed. Once democracy degrades further, it becomes tyranny. It’s possible to read Holland’s words here as a warning against the darker side of human nature, one that has almost surfaced thanks to the short sighted mismanagement of the Key Government.

Auckland is fortunate to have such an extraordinarily educated individual run for mayor.

adamholland

If the above is somehow not convincing enough, consider the state of the field that Holland is running against. Each candidate was offered a free shot of publicity here, and all of them bar Holland disqualified themselves with their responses.

Mario Alupis – professional wrestler. Attached photo suggests a large number of serious knocks to the head. Can’t be trusted to remember what he’s doing.

Aileen Austin – probably too old to survive the term as mayor. Also, Auckland would never vote for a hippie – this isn’t Nelson, dear.

Penny Bright – “Crooked” Penny Bright is running for mayor to distract the public from her impending imprisonment for dodging her rates bill. Auckland doesn’t need a mayor that shifts their debts onto the public.

Patrick Brown – Couldn’t be bothered supplying a photo. Also a communist.

Tricia Cheel – Another old hippie. Will split Aileen Austin’s votes and vice-versa, meaning that a vote for either is a waste.

Victoria Crone – has claimed to “bring 20 years’ experience running major New Zealand companies to the Auckland mayoralty.” What this means is that Auckland will be sold to the Chinese and everyone working in Auckland will be paid $5 per hour.

Phil Goff – no good unless he has Helen Clark telling him what to do.

David Hay – yet another old hippie, Hay is a former Green and thus probably a communist.

Alezix Heneti – serial failure. Eccentric name sure-fire sign of a rampant narcissist.

Stan Martin – couldn’t get it together enough to supply a photo, clearly not up to being mayor.

Bin Thanh Nguyen – couldn’t get it together enough to supply a photo, clearly not up to being mayor. Almost literally nothing is even known about this guy.

Phil O’Connor – Bible-thumper. Hates women. Vote for this guy and you can kiss goodbye to being allowed to buy alcohol on Sundays in Auckland.

John Palino – American, thus disqualified on the ground that we need a Kiwi to be the mayor of our biggest city.

Tyrone Raumati – couldn’t get it together enough to supply a photo or to respond to social media advances, clearly not up to being mayor.

Chloe Swarbrick – probably the next most sensible choice apart from Holland, wants to use the mayoralty as a platform to reshape the world in her image though and therefore cannot be trusted.

Mark Thomas – a plastic candidate in the John Key/Aldo Miccio mold. Soulless.

Wayne Young – basically a complete bum who would have been euthanised in a less tolerant society.

Many, many people have been saying that these reasons make Adam John Holland the sensible choice for Auckland mayor on 09 OCT.

Why Adam John Holland is the Only Sensible Choice For Auckland Mayor

Categories
Cannabis Don't Vote

I tried voting but it didn’t work

insanity_is_doing_the_same_thing_over_and_over

My pet issue has always been cannabis law reform. I’ve always voted for cannabis law reform.

In 1996 I voted in the first New Zealand general election held under the MMP voting system. Naturally, I gave my party vote to the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, who gained 1.66% of the party vote. Their result was simultaneously disappointing and encouraging. Disappointing, because it fell well short of the 5% threshold required to gain seats in Parliament under MMP. Encouraging because it was a solid base of support on which to build.

So in 1999 I voted for the ALCP again. But this time their share of the party vote fell by about half a percentage point to 1.10%. Instead of voting harder, people were realising that a vote for the ALCP is a wasted vote under MMP. But in a sudden plot twist, former ALCP candidate Nándor Tánczos entered Parliament as a Green Party MP and started making noises about cannabis law reform.

Clearly, I hadn’t been paying attention. Here was a party with a serious cannabis law reform policy that was actually in Parliament. So in 2002 I voted Green. Nándor was returned to Parliament and the Greens gained two more seats. Meanwhile, the ALCP’s share of the party vote fell again to 0.64%.

DSC04401

Then I discovered what seemed to be my natural political home, the Libertarianz Party. I became their Spokesman on Health and stood for Parliament for the first time on the Libertarianz Party list in 2005. We gained a solid 0.04% of the party vote. Meanwhile, the ALCP’s share of the party vote fell to a record low of 0.25% and Nándor lost his seat. The Greens had lost interest in cannabis law reform and the dreadlocked skateboarder was now being seen by some as increasingly out of favour. He’d been moved down to 7th place on the Green Party list and the Greens were now down to 6 seats. But Green Co-Leader Rod Donald died tragically in late 2005 which meant that Nándor got to re-enter Parliament for one final term, during which he achieved the cannabis law reform movement’s one and only small success, new licensing rules for industrial hemp.

After the 2005 election I came out fully as a drug user and became the Libertarianz Party’s Spokesman on Drugs. In 2008 I stood again on the Libertarianz Party list and also as the Libertarianz Party candidate for the Mana electorate. I got 64 votes. The Libz gained 1% of a percentage point, skyrocketing to 0.05% of the party vote. Meanwhile, the ALCP rebounded from their record 2002 low and got a 0.41% share of the party vote. Nándor quit Parliament and went away to cleanse his soul. After the 2008 election I jumped waka and joined the ALCP.

pot_shops_ready_for_historic_opening

In 2011 I stood for Parliament again, this time on the ALCP list and as the ALCP candidate for the Mana electorate. Of course, by this time I fully realised that my chances of ever getting into Parliament on a cannabis law reform ticket were close to zero. I now regarded what I was doing as an exercise in educating the public and getting the cannabis law reform message out there, and my electoral results as a barometer of my success in that regard. I was simply taking a stand and speaking out against the injustice of the War on Drugs. I’d figured that I’d get more bang for my buck, as it were, campaigning under the ALCP banner instead of the Libz banner, and I was right. I got 334 votes as an ALCP candidate, up from 64 votes as a Libz candidate, and the ALCP’s share of the party vote went up 0.05% to 0.51%, its best result since 1999. The Libz once again barely registered with a mere 0.05% of the party vote, and soon after called it quits and disappeared from the New Zealand political scene.

Significant and sensible cannabis law reform started to happen elsewhere in the world. On 1 January 2014 cannabis law reform activist and Iraq war veteran Sean Azzariti became the first person to legally purchase cannabis for recreational use in Colorado. I was sure in my own mind that this could only bode well for the ALCP’s electoral prospects here in New Zealand. In 2014 I stood for Parliament again, again on the ALCP list and as the ALCP candidate for the Mana electorate. I got my best result yet with 403 votes as the ALCP candidate, but the ALCP’s share of the party vote dropped back down to 0.46%, much to my surprise and chagrin. And, also much to my surprise and chagrin, John Key’s National Party was returned for a third term. Worst of all, National’s lapdog Peter Dunne was returned as Associate Minister of Health, thereby ensuring that there would be no cannabis law reform for a further three years.

d_is_for_dunne

I’ve become very cynical. To me it doesn’t seem like a very big ask to be allowed to grow and use a harmless medicinal herb. I’ve been advocating for safe, sane and sensible drug law reform for three decades and seen nothing happen except some farmers who were prepared to jump through bureaucratic hoops being allowed to grow industrial hemp.

I’ve participated in our democracy, at some considerable financial and emotional cost to myself. And achieved precisely nothing in terms of legislative gains. Meanwhile, arch-prohibitionist Peter Dunne, in league with Satan, pushed through the Psychoactive Substances Act. Instead of drug law reform, New Zealand got landed with peak prohibition. What a total fustercluck.

I’ve always voted for cannabis law reform but I’ve never gotten what I voted for. Insanity is voting for the same thing over and over and expecting a different result every time. But I’m not crazy, just a bit of a slow learner. I tried voting but it didn’t work. So now I don’t vote. I’m plotting to overgrow the government instead.

overgrow-the-government