There is an interesting class war race tension at the heart of the ram raids that no one is talking about.
We have disenfranchised Māori and Pacifica youth attacking business primarily staffed by exploited Indian and Chinese migrant workers while the white middle class fear of this crime is pimped by corporate media crime porn clickbait and exploited by Right wing Politicians.
It’s an immigration friction point clusterfuck.
It has led to a debate by ACT and National arguing over whether or not they put ankle bracelets on 11 or 10 year olds.
The number of serious repeat ram raiders is about 100, 80% of whom are already known to welfare agencies who are the kids from John Key’s draconian welfare reforms that saw kids in cars, state house tenants thrown onto the street for wrongful meth testing and whose parents were incarcerated in our private prison industry.
We know statistically that many of these youth are being abused at home, a home National and ACT want to ankle bracelet them to!
If we want to seriously tackle organised crime, we have to think outside the square because the War on Drugs doesn’t work!
Meth is a highly addictive drug that gives a sense of euphoria many never find in their own lives. Becoming enslaved to that and damaged by it with no off roads other than prison is a failure in social policy of immense scale.
The only way we can blunt the horrifying and mutilating influence of heavy organised crime with links to South American Cartels is by curing the illness of addiction, it’s not by throwing users into prison.
Keep the terrible system of punishment for commercial dealing in place but allow users to get properly funded rehabilitation programs.
And that’s the crunch.
Properly funded meth rehabilitation programs.
Where will we find the money for that?
Hold on, wasn’t there a place where we could find that money?
That’s right, a legal market for cannabis!
Election 2020: Legalising weed could see $675m a year spent on health interventions – report
A legal cannabis market for recreational use could generate $675 million a year for the Government to spend on reducing cannabis-related harm, new economic modelling shows.
It finds the ethical structure of the proposed legislative structure will channel $675million each year into drug rehabilitation programs!
$675million!
We currently spend around $150million annually on alcohol rehabilitation – THIS $675million would fund rehab not only all cannabis addiction, but it would also fund all alcohol addiction AND all drug addictions services!
Regulating the cannabis market would inject more funding into all harm minimisation programs than we have ever had.
This would be a new age of rehabilitation funding, the taxation revenue is just beyond anything NZ has ever experienced in the field of drug rehabilitation.
But it gets better.
On top of that $675million in rehabilitation programs that could fund ALL drug addiction, there is almost quarter of a billion to the State in GST, plus 5000 new full time jobs plus creating over $200million in salaries and wages plus saving millions in the judiciary and tens of millions more in the prison system!
This is how far out of whack we have allowed the moralists and prohibitionists to succeed in this country!
The alternative to the current prohibition is so good that the status quo is utterly reprehensible!
If you are still against legal Cannabis after reading this report, then YOU are the fucking problem, not the stoners!
We should be collectively outraged that we have allowed the State to have this prohibition power for as long as they have. Cannabis is a civil rights issue, the State has crushed hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens for decades upon decades to enforce a law that was always about control and not our welfare.
How dare they and how dare we allow them to get away with it!
Legal cannabis market could fund all the meth rehabilitation programs we could ever need while providing desperately needed jobs and desperately needed public taxation while removing power from organised crime.
This issue must be on the 2023 election agenda – almost 50% of us demanded a legal market!
The status quo can not hold!
The medicinal cannabis market is a joke, we demand a legal market so that we can generate desperately needed jobs, taxation revenue, social justice and rehabilitation funding streams!
We shouldn’t tolerate this moralistic cannabis prohibition one second longer!
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Well said Martyn.
This sensible starting point to distribute the most help, to the most people, is forever disregarded by both the major NZ parties. Something sinister is happening when the first legal cannabis you can buy in NZ comes from Aussie, sending revenue to their economy! What a bad joke.
Sounds like a pretty good short-term plan.
Ultimately this must be accompanied by rapid industrialisation, however.
To permanently eradicate crime, the material basis of crime must be destroyed.
The declassé strata that form the bulk of both petty crime and the syndicates must be eliminated, through a return to the Full Employment Policy.
A return to import substitution and heavy industrial development will see the high wage jobs return. Reversing all tax cuts would pay for increased policing and slum clearance.
The ideological element of crime also requires an economic transformation.
To end the exploitative class system, and to suppress its remnants thereafter, is to destroy the material basis of misanthropic ideology — a basic element of crime.
Non-exploitative economic development raises the cultural level and social consciousness of man. This acts to eliminate regressive ideological trends.
What has happened to all the money allocated to improve the mental health system. Why is the government spending millions on motels instead of proper houses . If these 2 issues were fixed much of the social,problems would go away .
On the marajuana vote in Chch the Labour representatives on th panels of the 3 meetings I went to said medical,marajuana would be freely available at a reasonable price no matter how the vote went. This has proved to be a lie as has many of their promises.
If the people doing the ram raids are young the bracelet should be on them and their parents as they are the real cause of the problem .
But all the White kids already have track and trace devices, they be called smart phones.
Whilst legalising cannabis (especially if it was subject to large taxes) may mitigate some of the other addiction issues we are facing, it wont stop gangs. As long as we have prohibitions (cigarettes anyone) or limitations (guns), the gangs will always be there to move into those markets.
I remain neither for or against legalisation until we get some good long term data from different jurisdictions about what the quantifiable pros and cons are.
The serial ram raiders are a product of lack of parenting, and are looking for some place to belong. They have found this in gangs and in teens just like themselves, who are trying to escape from reality.
Legalizing cannabis and giving freebies is not going to solve poor parenting, lack of education, having unaffordable children, lack of moral values, lack of ambition, and the list continues.
Well said Benny
100%
Well if you did legalize weed productivity would drop further and workplace accidents would increase significantly.
this group tug needs more manpower,
No offense Frank, but rubbish. If mandatory saliva testing was done on construction sites, scaffolding wouldn’t be put up (cause most of those guys are real drug pigs), painters and plasterers probably wouldn’t even turn up, and half of the builders and sparkies would fail.
From what one of my brothers tells me about hospo, they’re even worse.
So would productivity decline? Nah. I doubt there would be any difference.
The last National government flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of largely unproductive migrants including many now dairy, liquor store, takeaway owners. Helen Clark did the same on a smaller scale. These new arrivals are the primary cause of the housing crisis, the need to house displaced local people in motels and the infrastructure chaos that currently exists in this country, ram raiders will be aware of this to some degree but I’m sure they don’t much care for us middle class white folk either.
So yeah it’s a class war but it’s also more complicated than that.
when all you do is smoke weed and avoid senseless drama
Self responsibility anyone?
Hell no. Not the way it is done in NZ. But I guess its a bit tougher for a kid born into a dysfunctional often violent household to be self responsible for his behaviour when all his/her role models are shit. As for legalising cannabis. Hasn’t stopped the gangs from profiting from it in the states in America where it has been legalised as its just means they undercut the legal enterprises because they operate outside the regulatory framework and don’t pay tax.
Gets a bit tiresome
To blame a lost generation on John key. John key did alot of shit that was crap but to repeatedly point the reason for todays problem Children squarely at him is churlish. Subsequent and previous govts have turned to immigration as a pseudo economic growth strategy. John key did ramp it up but we were projected to surpass even his biggest immigration year under Adern had not covid come knocking. One thing is for Certain.. mass immigration is a receipt for disaster. It unleashed the rampant capitalist in all Mum and dad property investors who became superstar property speculators. That of course helps grow the Gap between the rich and the poor. Every Indian taxi driver I speak with in my city has come over in the last 5 years… same as Uber drivers.. why the hell did we need them? Massive strain on the state and resources infrastructure for very little or no bang. The govt should be offering enmasse one way tickets to those who came in recently to Oz Where they would make much better money doing even menial jobs… adopt proper immigration policies..
Let the country breathe again.
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