Tips for writers opposed to cannabis reform

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Re: Marijuana lies, July 8 letter.

Tips for correspondents on cannabis legislative reform sharing their opinions and masquerading them as facts:

1. Try to ensure your arguments have some internal coherence and logic.

2. If you use statistics, it is always better to include a reference to independent, peer-reviewed published research that validates your claims — otherwise they are likely to be considered as the ridiculous scaremongering most of it actually is.

For example, this week a new study was published in JAMA Paediatrics. It looked at cannabis use trends by over 1.4m teenagers before and after cannabis legalisation and concluded that “consistent with the results of previous researchers, there was no evidence that the legalisation of medical marijuana encourages marijuana use among youth. Moreover, marijuana use among youth may actually decline after legalisation for recreational purposes. This latter result is consistent with the argument that it is more difficult for teenagers to obtain marijuana as drug dealers are replaced by licensed dispensaries that require proof of age.”

3. Using emotive hyperbole may be an effective tactic, so keep doing that — unless you want to have some actual integrity in your efforts, in that case you need to start back at point 1.

Also, if you know of a source for 35 percent THC plants, please put us in touch — this would be at the biological upper limits of the plant and worth commercialising immediately.

If you’re worried about potency, you might flip out to know flowers for smoking are declining as a preferred form of consumption in favour of extracts and isolates that can reach 99 percent cannabinoid purity. Indeed Dronabinol has been on the market since 1986, it is pure THC and rare cases of a recorded severe overdose resulted in lethargy, slurred speech, decreased co-ordination, and hypotension. So even 100 percent pure THC is hardly a dangerous drug compared to the plethora of opioids and other synthetics so easily accessible — perhaps they deserve a little more attention from yourself and Mr McCoskrie?

Let me know if you’re seriously interested in the “health and wellbeing of our people” and we can compare more empirical evidence on how harmful continuing cannabis prohibition is compared with properly regulated adult access that New Zealand will get from a “Yes” vote in the referendum next year.

Manu Caddie