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MEDIA RELEASE Oct 28 2020…HEMP recommends Legalise Cannabis Queensland to voters for compassion & common-sense

A Joint Press Release from Legalise Cannabis Queensland (LCQ) and Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP): two political parties speaking on behalf of the many thousands of people who are daily impacted by the brutal, irrational and unjust war on cannabis users.

“Global attitudes to cannabis use are changing fast as people recognise we have banned one of the Earths most useful plants. And one of the safest medicines in nature. No one has died from using pot in ten thousand years of use, it just cannot kill you.” So says Michael Balderstone president of the Australian HEMP party sitting alongside Deb Lynch, vice president of the newly formed LCQ party.

“It’s a fantastic effort from a small bunch of dedicated locals to get the LCQ party registered giving Queenslanders an opportunity to make a mark for cannabis law reform in the anonymity of the polling booth. So no chance of losing your job!”

“There are 23 LCQ candidates running across the state and I applaud their courage,” says Michael. “The appalling stigma still shadowing cannabis users reminds me of the BLM protests. Prohibition is rooted in racism and our jail figures reflect it like in America. This issue will not go away while we continue the war on drugs. And who is left disagreeing drug use is a health issue? The people know it, the politicians just need to act and stop listening to vested interests like Big Pharma and the police.”

“I urge Queenslanders not to miss this opportunity to make a mark for cannabis law reform.”

“The cannabis laws in Queensland are arcane, unjust and unpopular,” says Ms Lynch. “The vast majority of Queenslanders want to see cannabis made available for people who need it for a medical reason. The majority also want to see the use and supply of cannabis for recreational purposes decriminalised and regulated. Just like it is in Canada and most of the USA. Just as it is about to become in New Zealand.”

However, what has been the response of the Queensland government? The aspirations of the population at large have been utterly ignored. Both of the major parties in the state have forever doubled down on the ‘drug war’ against cannabis. Instead of responding to the wishes of the population at large, incrementally, the penalties attaching to the cultivation and supply of cannabis in Queensland have been gradually increased until they are now comparable, or even more severe, than those that attach to crimes such as murder or manslaughter.

Many people may respond by commenting that these drug laws are simply a hangover from the distant past; that these various laws are simply an echo of the ‘drug wars’ of the last century. Yet this is simply not the case. The requirement that a minimum mandatory sentence be handed out to a cannabis trafficker is a result of changes that were made by the Labor Government only four years ago. The ‘drug war’ is not a distant memory in Queensland: it is still raging. 

Every year in Queensland hundreds of people are sent to jail for doing nothing more than smoking and growing a bit of choof. They are being punished and their lives and livelihoods are being destroyed, because the politicians in Queensland remain wedded to the lie that cannabis is a ‘dangerous narcotic’. That cannabis is so dangerous that Queenslanders need to be protected from its harmful effects. Which everyone, even the politicians, know is simply a farcical notion

Legalise Cannabis Queensland [LCQ] is a political party that has been formed to give a voice to the many thousands of people who are daily impacted upon by the brutal, irrational and unjust war on cannabis users. LCQ has been formed to demonstrate to the politicians in Queensland that they can no longer ignore the will or the voice of the majority of their fellow citizens.

It is time to end the war against cannabis users. It is time to remove cannabis from the criminal law and to regulate it’s production and distribution like we do with any other therapeutic or recreational agent. 

Many other jurisdictions across the globe have entirely removed the criminal sanctions associated with cannabis and the results have been uniformly positive. It is not an overly complex thing to do, nor does the regulation of the cannabis marketplace present any particularly novel difficulties as soon as the ‘drug war’ rhetoric has been set aside. Cannabis is far less hazardous than aspirin or paracetamol and demonstrably less toxic than tobacco and alcohol, so, as soon as we get beyond the ‘moral panic’ and simply dismiss the silly lie that cannabis is a ‘dangerous narcotic’, it is a relatively easy process to simply regulate the production and distribution of cannabis. 

The vast majority of the population of Queensland see every cent that is spent on the war on cannabis users as wasted money. They perceive the people who are being arrested, fined and gaoled for cannabis offences as being victims of unjust laws; not as miscreants. LCQ has been organised to help Australia catch up with the rest of the enlightened western world and begin to dismantle the crazy war on cannabis users that persists in this state. 

This brutal, irrational and unjust war on cannabis users must cease. Legalise Cannabis Queensland stands with the majority of the population of the state, on the right side of history. Cannabis must be legalised, regulated and taxed like any other product. Every minute that we needlessly tarry yet another poor Aussie is having their lives ripped to shreds for no discernible social, personal or medical benefit.

For more info go to legalisecannabisqld.org.au or contact Deb Lynch directly on 0401979092

Campaign diary of the South Brisbane electorate 2020 from the outsider-insider view of a journalist running as an independent candidate.

Dr John Jiggens 

Two weeks ago I nominated as an independent candidate for the seat of South Brisbane in this year’s Queensland election. As a citizen journalist, the election provided me with an alternative public platform to my weekly radio reports and, despite covid, it has proven to be a more public connection and a valuable extension to my role as a citizen journalist. 

The two main stories I have covered this year have been the Julian Assange extradition hearing and the crisis in Queensland’s justice system, and by standing for parliament I have a platform to advocate for important justice reform issues, such as legalising cannabis.

I’ve done two meet-the-candidate zoom meeting and at the first Zoom meeting, Clem Grehan, the LNP candidate replied to my case for the benefits of legalising cannabis by saying he supported decriminalisation. “Yes, I would like to see marijuana decriminalised immediately,” he said.

I stood for South Brisbane because I expected it to be very closely watched and the next day Channel 7 confirmed this by leading their election coverage by reporting on our South Brisbane meeting. Cannabis, they said, had been a hot issue. They confronted LNP leader Deb Frecklington with what Clem Grehan had said.

Unfortunately, the media were content to play their Gotcha! game with Clem, who was noticeably absent from the next Zoom meeting, by characterising him as another LNP candidate causing trouble by advocating a soft-on-drugs message. Annoyed, Deb Frecklington replied by saying she was a very strong advocate against drugs.

The Greens Amy MacMahon, who is the favourite to win South Brisbane, also spoke in support of changing the cannabis laws and said that the Greens policy was the decriminalisation of cannabis. Ms MacMahon is favoured because the LNP have decided on a strategy to preference against sitting members, so all the sitting inner-Brisbane Labor members are under threat from the Greens.

The other contender, the current member for South Brisbane, the ALP’s Jackie Trad, conspicuously said nothing about cannabis law reform. Ms Trad is the former Deputy-Premier and her fate is one of the main reasons for the intense interest in the South Brisbane electorate.

Jackie Trad is intensely hated by the Murdoch Press, who refer to her, in true Trumpian style, as Dodgy Jackie. They have written scores of articles alleging, on the flimsiest of evidence, that she is corrupt because she spent her own money buying a small investment property in her electorate. In contrast, Murdoch’s marauders are devoted to He Who Was Renamed, Scomo, despite the evidence that the Morrison government spent hundreds of millions of taxpayers money during the last election in the Sports-Rorts scandal, an affair that reeks of corruption. There is an apocryphal story about Rupert Murdoch trying to influence a WA politician and saying, “Look! You can have a headline a day or a bucket of shit!!” And the Murdoch press who own all the major newspapers in Queensland give the Morrison government the headline-a-day treatment, while Jackie Trad gets an intensive bucketing. Effectively, this has led to a silencing of Trad because she is the one politician the Murdoch press are most desperate to play Gotcha! with.

At the start of the election, former PM Kevin Rudd launched a petition calling for a royal commission into the abuse of media monopoly in Australia, particularly by the Murdoch empire. He spoke of the danger of the sheer concentration of media power in Queensland, a state which often swings elections, and where Murdoch owns almost all the newspapers. For the sake of democracy in Queensland and Australia, it was vital to maximise media diversity in Queensland, Kevin Rudd said. He described the Murdoch press as a cancer on democracy, an especially arrogant cancer, a vehicle to blatantly support one side of politics over another, having an unmatched power to determine governments by running negative campaigns, even smear campaigns, against the ALP and favourable narratives for the LNP. Murdoch has loss-making newspapers, said Rudd, but he keeps them and he buys even more to maximise his political power to pursue his ideological agenda like climate change denial, or his commercial interests as in the NBN. Finally, said Rudd, it was the sheer arrogant, swaggering, and bullying behaviour by Murdoch and his editors against anyone who dares to stand up to them that he most deplored.

I couldn’t agree more. Although I am running against Jackie Trad and hope to take votes off her, her relentless bullying by the Murdoch press appalls me.

This is Dr John Jiggens, citizen journalist and Independent candidate for South Brisbane, courageously taste-testing the dubious ingredients that make-up Queensland’s democracy sausage.

Dr John Jiggens is an independent candidate in the seat of South Brisbane. He is a writer, former academic and a journalist, who was the founding editor of the Westender and The Cane Toad Times and who has been a ZZZ journalist over several decades. His PhD was Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture and the Americanisation of drugs policy in Australia. The Joke, a rewrite of his thesis, will be published shortly. 

HOW MUCH WOULD QUEENSLAND BENEFIT BY LEGALISING CANNABIS? 

Dr John Jiggens 

The legalisation of cannabis is happening world-wide! Canada legalised cannabis in 2018, while eleven US states have also legalised cannabis. In Australia, the ACT legalised cannabis this year. In the US in 2018, the fledging legal cannabis industry employed 82,000 people and paid over a billion dollars in state taxes. According to a recent Queensland Productivity Commission report, legalising cannabis would provide a net benefit to the Queensland economy of about one billion dollars annually. 

In their report on Imprisonment and Recidivism, the Queensland Productivity Commission (QPC) estimated that Queensland’s imprisonment rate grew at five times the rate of the population over the past decade. Consequently, Queensland’s prisons are overflowing and are operating at 130% capacity. Given the sky-rocketing imprisonment rates, Queensland will need to build two new prisons to house the increasing prison population over the next five years, at an estimated cost of $3.6 billion.  

A significant factor in these skyrocketing imprisonment rates is the War on Drugs and the futile police effort to arrest their way out of the problem. There are over twenty-thousand cannabis offences prosecuted in Queensland every year at a cost to the public purse of about $300 million dollars in police, courts and prison time. These prosecutions do far more harm than cannabis, which in contrast does enormous good as an effective medicine for so many illnesses for so many people. The removal of cannabis prohibition would significantly reduce the growing rate of imprisonment. 

We should be treating drug abuse as a health problem. Over the last century, from alcohol prohibition in the US in 1919 to 2020, the world failed to learn the lesson that Prohibition doesn’t work, and we are only now slowly awakening from prohibition’s narcotic stupification. Locking people away has a century-long history of failure. It costs $111,000 annually to lock one prisoner away and each of the high security cells we house them in cost $600-$800,000. Locking people up is expensive and is a scandalous waste of money when its main purpose becomes to hide social problems away, not treat them. If you have a drug problem today in Australia, it is far easier to find a drug dealer than to find help. 

Statistics from: The Queensland Productivity Commission report on Imprisonment and Recidivism, QPC 2020, https://www.qpc.qld.gov.au/inquiries/imprisonment/ 

Dr John Jiggens is an independent candidate in the seat of South Brisbane. He is a writer, former academic and a journalist, who was the founding editor of the Westender and The Cane Toad Times and who has been a ZZZ journalist over several decades. His PhD was Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture and the Americanisation of drugs policy in Australia. The Joke, a rewrite of his thesis, will be published shortly.