The following lead story and Editorial from Saturdays (4th July 09) Hawkes Bay Today is a classic example of 1930s style of ‘reefer madness’.
As long as our media continue to peddle police nonsense when discussing cannabis, we will continue to suffer the fate of second class citizenship.
HAWKES BAY TODAY
LEAD STORY: Burglaries drug driven, say police
Laptop computers worth up to $2000 are being traded for $20 cannabis “tinnies” in a near-record wave of Hawke’s Bay burglaries police believe is being mainly driven by drug dealing.
Experienced Napier policeman Detective Sergeant Dan Foley said the “bargains” were part of an underworld which was evident when three juveniles ditched about $11,000 worth of jewellery stolen in the burglary of a Greenmeadows woman’s home last month.
The jewellery has been returned but not two laptop computers, a digital camera and an iPod. Mr Foley believed those types of items were often stolen to trade with drug dealers, sometimes for a $20 cannabis “tinnie” (oil-wrapped cannabis). Despite the boys being caught, the goods have not been recovered.
Mr Foley, who has spent 19 years of his 30-year police career in Hawke’s Bay, with significant experience in drug and “break” squads, said: “The most valuable property is often of little value to them, unless they can turn it into drugs straight away.
“A lot of drug dealers will trade stolen property as a form of currency. Our young offenders are simply flicking off stolen property, and the book value doesn’t really have any bearing on what they get,” he said.
“They might trade your $2000 laptop for $20, but then, a lot of drug dealers are forever operating on credit and a tick list. They might owe $60 and it might be a big flat-screen TV.”
Police said in the two-month May-June period, 404 burglaries were reported in Napier, Hastings and Central Hawke’s Bay, compared with 343 in the corresponding period last year.
Most dramatically, statistics provided yesterday for Hawke’s Bay Today showed there were 92 residential burglaries in the Hastings and Central Hawke’s Bay area last month, an average of just over three a day. There had been 87 the previous month.
In Napier, the apprehension of several young people over recent weeks is credited with cutting back the number of burglaries, from 89 raids on homes, businesses, schools and other properties in May, to 55 last month.
“Laptops are the big item at the moment,” said Mr Foley, adding not even the likelihood of access-blocking passwords appeared to be a deterrent.
After one burglary, a mobile phone stolen along with a laptop was used to call a victim demanding a password on the basis other stolen property would be returned.
Convinced of the role cannabis was playing in crime, Mr Foley lamented: “I don’t think we’ll ever stamp it out. It is a weed, it grows like a weed, and all that can be done is to police it more.”
He said no parents or guardians were any longer immune to the threat of their young people using cannabis, but they could minimise the risks by strongly supporting such things as sporting ambition.
“Cannabis is extremely dangerous, particularly in the hands of young people,” he said.
“It has been referred to as the ‘great thief of motivation’, so, if a kid has talent in sport, they might not want to do cannabis when they realise it will harm their performance.”
http://www.hawkesbaytoday.co.nz/local/news/lead-story-burglaries-drug-driven-say-police/3900954/
Hawkes Bay Today
Editorial
THE haste with which Parliament booted out the Green Party’s Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Bill this week was a sign of the apathy, and hypocrisy, in the debate over the insidious weed.
Or, more to the point, the lack of debate.
Given that the Greens had been puffing away at this for three years, this was a grand opportunity to finally debate this issue in full, and blow cannabis off the scene altogether.
Simply, cannabis – or more specifically the misuse of it – is a chronically dangerous blight on our society, and it is high time we moved to knock it on the head.
The whole cannabis issue has been seriously clouded by the argument over whether it should be legalised, ignoring the argument that by an overwhelming weight of evidence it should be made even more illegal than it is.
Or should that be more illegal than what the legislation says, for what has happened is that the acceptance-of or lack of strident opposition to cannabis has, by some form of default, legitimised it.
At least, it seems more legal than both alcohol and smoking tobacco. As one example, it’s not uncommon for people to be fined $400 for breaching liquor bans, by having on their person as little as a part-bottle or can, but the going-rate for a joint in your pocket is somewhere less than $200.
You lose your driving license almost automatically and get fined hundreds of dollars for driving with too much alcohol in your system. Yet, if you smell of dope when you’re stopped at a checkpoint, but don’t have any of the offensive material on you or in the vehicle, and haven’t been drinking, apart from being searched, you’re pretty-much free, man.
And we all know about tobacco smokers. Those horrible people who we’ve kicked out into the rain because of their selfish disrespect for the health of anyone else by puffing all that passive smoke around the place. Yet dope-smoking seems to be treated as simply something that some people do. Perhaps it’s more acceptable just because they make the choice to go out in the rain.
Odd decisions like “choosing” to smoke in the rain are, however, a minor consequence of cannabis use, for it is painfully obvious to those who work at the back-end of life’s problems that cannabis is extremely dangerous, particularly in the wrong hands.
For example, a senior police officer is reported this weekend in Hawke’s Bay Today confirming what a lot of people already know.
Vast numbers of burglaries are being committed in Hawke’s Bay by young people solely to pay for dope – ahead, even, of their daily bread. They will pinch your $2000 laptop, and trade it for a $20 tinnie, and maybe chuck-in your digital camera so the dealer will wipe the $60 off the tick-list.
Young people, many themselves victimised by common cannabis use by parents and others at home, are becoming a lost generation in a cloud of cannabis smoke, which is either a symptom of or a cause of their problems, depending on your take – a word I use in both the English and Maori sense.
Two months ago Napier was pitched into absolute horror, when a man shot the police officers who came to search his home, because it was being used for dealing cannabis. The shooting would not have happened if people weren’t dealing dope, if people weren’t buying it, if people weren’t using it.
It is all very well to blame, but the debate on what to do about it has to consider the history of cannabis use in this country. Who introduced it here? It was, after all, once upon a time, almost exclusive to the academia and surfies. Universities of the 1960s were awash with it, apparently, and the odd VW Combi had more smoke coming out the window than the exhaust.
Its heaviest use in 2009 is at the other end of the spectrum, often habitually toked from dawn to dusk to fill in the day for the unemployed and relatively helpless.
But an interesting thing happened the other day, and a few boys were given the boot from a well-performing school, for smoking cannabis. Happens in every school, someone said. But shouldn’t society be getting its heads out of the clouds, and doing something about it?
http://www.hawkesbaytoday.co.nz/local/news/editorial-its-time-to-get-serious-on-cannabis/3900948/
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