High Headliners!
Rumour has it they’re serving only vegan food at the NSW Drug Summit to align with Premier Minns taking all the meat out of it when he declared there’d be no decriminalising going on—before it even started—no matter what the “experts” say.
There are other options, needless to say, like an amnesty on personal cannabis use, including home grown. Of course most people won’t grow their own, like very few brew their own beer, so we need to trial a marketplace too. It’s existed in Nimbin for fifty years, driven simply by supply and demand, and it sorts itself out with minimal fuss.
Hence I was impressed by the 30,000 strong Royal Australasian College of Physicians recommendations being led by a call to establish regulated cannabis markets. Followed by expanding diversion programs, reviewing sniffer dogs and driving laws, improving homeless housing and more support for traumatised indigenous peoples. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Hopefully Premier Minns actually takes the time to listen to the speakers over the two day summit. He might hear, for example, that cannabis can be the drug to get off other drugs with, and the drug to stay off them with as well. All the country towns being ravaged by meth., they could be learning how to grow their own medicine instead.
I just read the Premier’s Drug Summit speech and there it is again, like I felt in Lismore, that tone and implication there is something wrong with me using cannabis and they’re here to help cure my addiction. Plenty of funding for rehab. and of course legal pharmaceuticals are what’s recommended for pain relief. Cannabis only when all other options are exhausted. No one is questioning the drug war and how’s it actually going. They’re even still feeding the stigma with their ‘saviour complex’.
Michael Balderstone
Nimbin HEMP Embassy Head
