Three years of hard graft and instead of a well reasoned exposition of law change, the Health Select Committee ended up with a report recommending another report.

But in the current political climate it is probably the best report we could have hoped for. It doesn't recommend no change (although that was in there until draft 12), and we have managed to plant some seeds inside it that could threaten the foundations of cannabis prohibition.

The main finding of the report is that "the aim of cannabis legislation needs to be focused on preventing young people from using cannabis, and protecting them from the harms associated with the use of this controlled drug. However we have not been able to agree on the most appropriate legal status for cannabis, and …. recommend to the House that the Justice and Electoral Committee consider an appropriate legal status for cannabis".

So stopping adult use should not be the aim of the law. It also hands the issue of legal status over to the committee that should have done the inquiry in the first place. Three years ago I had a scrap with the government over that very question, saying that the health issues had already been dealt with in 1998 and that the Justice and Electoral committee needed to look at the legal issues.

The Health committee was just not able to. Remember the long delays calling for submissions? The delays hearing them? Even then the committee never put the inquiry on the agenda and so did not report before the election.

Of course the election result, and the agreement between United Future and Labour to not introduce legislation to change the legal status of cannabis, created a new situation that was very hostile to law change, so it was a victory that the new Health Committee agreed to pick up the inquiry in the new Parliament at all. Since, of the new committee, only Steve Chadwick (Lab), Lynda Scott (Nat) and myself (Green) had been part of the original inquiry, we set up a sub committee to write the report.

It was a hell of a struggle. The first draft was a shocker. It read like it came straight from Peter Dunne's office. It was incoherent and negative. The only discussion of the legal status of cannabis, which was one of the terms of reference, was a brief paragraph saying that United Future and the government had agreed on no change.

Officials had to be reminded that the committee is an independent body of the parliament, not a Government agency and that the report should contain the options for change and their pros and cons. The committee would then decide what, if anything, to recommend.

As well as those things, the report also now includes a Green comment that the Government / UF agreement undermines the select committee process and shows a lack of regard for the evidence.

The difference between draft one and draft 12 is enormous. It is the result of hours of work and was contested every step of the way in the committee by National's Lynda Scott.

The report now contains a lot of useful information and is worth a read. Most significant, in my opinion, is the recommendation that the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs give high priority to its reclassification of cannabis. Cannabis is currently scheduled as a C1 drug. Reclassification to C2 or C3, which is likely to be the result, would make it easier to regulate as a medicine. It would also remove the search without warrant powers of the police.

I believe that if the police are unable to search without a warrant the number of arrests will go down to a fraction of what they are now.

To reinforce this, the committee has asked the Justice and Electoral committee to consider the search without warrant powers of the police, as well as the most appropriate legal status for cannabis. I would like to see that done before the next election.

Since the last election, and the agreement between United Future, we have known that legislative change this term of parliament is unlikely. The report makes useful recommendations about expanding and making fairer police diversion, and also asks the government to follow up on allegations of police racism.

Our job now is to keep the issue alive until the next election. The Greens are launching a renewed campaign on cannabis law reform. We have printed a new leaflet, put up more information resources on the website and challenged a number of prohibitionist MPs to publicly debate the issues with us. We have a number of tactics up our sleeve to keep the issue in the forefront of people's minds.

I believe that we, by which I mean the movement as well as the Greens, must make sure that cannabis law reform is a major election issue in 2005. We need to build awareness of the need for change and we need to make sure that in the next parliament we have enough Green MPs to force the Government to introduce legislation to change the law.

Norml News

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