Mental Health Minister Mary Wooldridge
By January 1st 2012 bongs and other cannabis related paraphernalia will be banned from being displayed or sold in Victoria, Australia.
Fuck me… have we nothing better to do with our time than worry about this sort of stuff? Are we really wasting our time, energy and tax payers dollars on banning the sale of bongs? Have people stopped starving in Africa, have we nothing else left in the world to address…?
Mental Health Minister Mary Wooldridge is at the front of this latest ‘nanny state’ wave,
“The changes being introduced into parliament will bring Victoria’s position on cannabis smoking paraphernalia in line with other states, which all have some restrictions in place,” Ms Wooldridge said.
She states that the research indicates that cannabis use is associated with the increased risk of developing mental illness… what about it’s medicinal use with regards to
Ms Wooldridge is worried that the sale of cannabis paraphernalia sends a ‘dangerous’ message that cannabis is a soft drug. Ummm… but it is? It’s non-addictive, it’s toxicity is 1000s of times less than alcohol or nicotine, it’s potential for physical harm is also much less. It’s safer than caffeine and aspirin for fuck’s sake, how soft can you get? Feel free to reference and quote the 100s of studies showing cannabis’ medicinal uses, for treatment numerous disease from aids to MS, and the curing of, and even protection against, cancer.
A categorization of hard (red), soft (yellow) and borderline drugs (orange), by Nutt et al.
I’d argue people like Ms Wooldridge are sending the fallacious message that alcohol and tobacco are “soft drugs”. Both are incredibly more dangerous for you than illicit substances like cannabis, MDMA and acid.
Maybe it’s about time our Health Ministers started implementing legislation based heavily on fact instead of personal opinion, bias and misinformation. If you really want to make the community a better place, just banning everything isn’t going to change anything. You’re just further impinging on the freedoms of your citizens…
These politicians are never scientists, they never look at the facts and fiction to separate the two and then bring in helpful laws and regulations based in truth. They just react to the loudest voices from the public arena, like so many other areas of our government.
This sort of legislation will do a great deal more damage in my opinion because you’re going to further brainwash the public into hating a substance which doesn’t deserve to be hated.
Until are laws and legislation are based on facts and good science instead of fear and fiction, we’ll be the ones to suffer.
Reference : Nutt, D.; King, L. A.; Saulsbury, W.; Blakemore, C. (2007). “Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse”. The Lancet 369 (9566): 1047–1053.
I might add, the above first author Prof David Nutt used to be the chief drug adviser to the UK government until he wouldn’t back down on his position that cannabis and MDMA should be in the lowest classification of illicit drugs. So the government sacked him and found someone else who’d back their position up.
