Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Greens sign cooperation agreement with Labour, Ardern to make cabinet announcements today, and where to now for drug reform after referendum falls? Green party delegates have ratified a deal with Labour that will give them ministerial portfolios, but mostly outside of cabinet where the big … Read more
Later this year New Zealand will vote on whether to legalise cannabis, but it’s far from a new idea, as a 1975 study reminds us. Alice Webb-Liddall looks at the views of two Otago University academics, 45 years apart. In 2013 Uruguay became the first country to fully legalise cannabis for recreational and medicinal use. … Read more
US justice reform activists Deborah Small and asha bandele say white supremacy and colonialism are at the heart of punitive drug laws. They spoke to Teuila Fuatai about how drug reform can reverse their effects on minority communities. Deborah Small sees Donald Trump as the US Dorian Gray. “He’s the physical manifestation of what America … Read more
The cannabis referendum debate is deeply personal for some people. Nicole Skews-Poole details the agonising role weed played in her father’s life. My earliest childhood memory is opaque and soupy. The more I try and focus on its details, the more they wriggle away. But in my mind’s eye, if I stand back and pretend … Read more
A new bill to increase the penalty for drug supply and distribution has passed its second reading in parliament. Green MP Chloë Swarbrick looks back on a decade of harmful drug laws. We are at a crossroads on drug policy in New Zealand. There is a real risk we take a backward step, further entrenching … Read more
As a minister in a National-led government I was proud to speak at the UN against pursuing an outdated and overly punitive approach on drugs. Now the bipartisan focus on drugs as a health issue seems to have been tossed aside by Simon Bridges’ party as a political inconvenience, writes Peter Dunne Just two years ago … Read more
Stuart Nash says it was just ‘a metaphor’, but that’s not good enough: for too long the drug debate has been blighted by wild and counterproductive hyperbole, writes Don Rowe Police Minister Stuart Nash’s comments that synthetic cannabis users are smoking “fly spray and grass clippings” are a continuation of a myth that fuels dangerous … Read more
New Zealand was poised for drug reform in 2007, but reform never came. Why do we still adhere to drug prohibition, which will be remembered as one of the most arbitrary, barbaric and brutal systems of oppression in human history? ‘Drug’ Prohibition is an archaic system of control conceived in the 1950s that’s had a devastating … Read more