In this entire episode of legal highs "in" or legal highs "out", there has been a woeful absence of credible science. We're treated instead with anecdotes, inferences, assertions about psychotic episodes, grave declarations about "addictive" properties and "long-lasting effects" - without a tiny shred of real evidence.
Anecdotes, with their appeal to the listener's emotions, may be illustrative, but they make for bad policy arguments. Their implicit claim is that the one speaks for the many.
We are treated to the spectacle of admission by the Ministry of Health's adviser on these substances that no prior testing had been done to establish their safety.
A Poisons Centre official warns of addictive propensity on the basis of chemical bonding to brain sites, a speculative hypothesis at best.
We have Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne making a fool of himself on Campbell Live, claiming one week that banning these substances was not a good idea because it would foster a black market, then turning around and declaring a ban would be passed under urgency, apparently to head off Labour's intended announcement.
How does the saying go: marry in haste, repent at leisure? The Government married itself to some 40 drugs whose stated purpose appears to be intoxicative. Now they're repenting at haste too.
And all to avoid the legitimate discussion of whether New Zealand should take the rational step of legalising cannabis - or at least debating it. Incredibly, Dunne admits to having smoked marijuana, but he dismisses its import by saying that happened a long time ago. It must have been very long ago - can you imagine a stoned Peter Dunne?
The dizzying reality is that quite a few of our parliamentarians have used cannabis. The most serious long-term effect is that they're still in Parliament.
If government were to apply broadly the standard that manufacturers of drugs must first prove safety, then it would run into problems with the class of psychoactive drugs legally prescribed (and sometimes over-prescribed) for severe mental illness.
For the United States FDA approval scheme, companies need only provide testing data for short-term effects. The long-term effects were never part of the approval process and we now know that side effects like weight gain and diabetes type 2 may occur from long-term use. Yet no one's thinking of banning these drugs, and their judicious use with careful monitoring remains acceptable.
Synthetic cannabis compounds may have serious side effects and may be addictive ... maybe. But we don't know. The data isn't available in that these drugs haven't been around long enough for their effects to be known in scientifically meaningful terms.
By contrast, cannabis has been around for an estimated 4000 years. The exhaustive studies done by governmental and scientific agencies in India in 1894, in the US in 1944 and again in 1972 have concluded that marijuana is rarely harmful, doesn't lead to other drugs and may have medicinal benefit.
Currently the two states in the US and the country of Uruguay, which have legalised cannabis, are providing a social experiment. The least we can do is have a debate based on reason and science and devoid of puritanism's moral judgment.
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
