That is clearly not the purpose of the Assembly. Sinn Fein reps being afraid to legislate in case they get it wrong is on brand for their current iteration though.
The members of the CA were there to give an idea of what the public would like in relation to drug use. They are not lawmakers or legislators.
Decriminalisation of drugs for personal use is a simple concept. Basically, do not criminalise people for personal amounts. Don’t arrest them, and don’t take them to court.
It’s disheartening that this person is unable to understand his role or the role of the CA.
All this Citizen Assembly stuff will lead nowhere. Ireland will only amend our embarrassing cannabis situation when our hand is forced by external factors, that will be a long long time.
Taken at face value this seems reasonable. The recommendation from the CA is to decriminalise, it’s for SF and the rest of the politicians to figure out what laws would need to change. If politicians and the public service have created a morass of laws, that’s not for the CA to untangle.
Ok who does then? How about John Ehrlichman? Since it was Nixon who really pushed for the change both in the US and internationally what does his advisor say about it?
>You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
>We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
>Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did
Also another thing to note is despite all the pushback from Gardai and the HSE how many actual studies have they encouraged or funded? How many studies have they cited in defense of their claim that aren’t literally US anti-drug lobby propaganda? It being classified as the most dangerous level of drugs in the world means you can’t use it for any peer reviewed study, so they can’t cite anything. Their entire opinion is based on a literal unfounded lie, they built their entire system around demonising drug users and now refuse to even see the people that established that policy through the UN policy rowing back on it. It’s garbage and FFG, the HSE and the Gardai should be fucking ashamed. Fuck they have no shame given some of the Gardai have been known to deal drugs directly and use drugs recreationally. Of course the Gardai would be against decriminalisation of drugs and legalisation of weed, some of them literally have it as a source of secondary income for their shitty public sector pay. The whole thing is fucking rotten to the core.
This country is phenomenal at putting together bodies, committees, orgs, meetings, townhalls, reviews, consultations, etc. and absolutely dogshit at actually implementing things until it’s close to election time or things are at a breaking point.
Keep it illegal and continue to stretch our already broken prison system that doesn’t function as a deterrent, punish a lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens who want to use a substance that may/may not harm them (alcohol is A-OK guys), continue to burden our healthcare system with people smoking cannabis who could otherwise be educated on safe use or people seeking dangerous alternatives like spice, and waste the time and money of our underfunded and understaffed police force.
Or legalise it, tax it, build the industry here, put the money towards solving some of the above problems and let a portion of the population enjoy a substance that’s already legal in several EU nations. I don’t smoke but the sooner we move past this the sooner we can stop pretending like this government actually genuinely cares about this issue.
Better yet, remove governmental fence sitting and put it to a national vote and put it to bed one way or the other.
Let’s not forget that magic mushrooms were legal here until the mid 2000s, only following a knee-jerk reaction to a single death did they suddenly became classed as dangerous as heroin and crack. The laws here make no sense and never had the best intentions behind them.
I think of the CA as advanced polling/focus groups on how Irish people will respond to issues when presented with good arguments and data. This works very well with straight forward issues: on issues like attitude to drugs (and even bio diversity) it is less straightforward. Irish politics does not do well with long term plans in my experience and the civil service is very risk adverse.
The main takeaway from CA is that Irish people’s attitude to cannabis is changing, this is backed by lots of research about drug use. A group will need to manage the change and it will be between health, justice and maybe more departments. They will need to look at changing the laws around possession. The guards and health professionals who work with addiction will need to be involved. The big problem is that a lot of parties involved already have ideas about the solution should be and are unwilling to listen to anyone else’s concerns. This makes getting anything done very difficult so nothing gets done.
7 comments
That is clearly not the purpose of the Assembly. Sinn Fein reps being afraid to legislate in case they get it wrong is on brand for their current iteration though.
The members of the CA were there to give an idea of what the public would like in relation to drug use. They are not lawmakers or legislators.
Decriminalisation of drugs for personal use is a simple concept. Basically, do not criminalise people for personal amounts. Don’t arrest them, and don’t take them to court.
It’s disheartening that this person is unable to understand his role or the role of the CA.
All this Citizen Assembly stuff will lead nowhere. Ireland will only amend our embarrassing cannabis situation when our hand is forced by external factors, that will be a long long time.
Taken at face value this seems reasonable. The recommendation from the CA is to decriminalise, it’s for SF and the rest of the politicians to figure out what laws would need to change. If politicians and the public service have created a morass of laws, that’s not for the CA to untangle.
Ok who does then? How about John Ehrlichman? Since it was Nixon who really pushed for the change both in the US and internationally what does his advisor say about it?
>You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
>We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
>Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did
Also another thing to note is despite all the pushback from Gardai and the HSE how many actual studies have they encouraged or funded? How many studies have they cited in defense of their claim that aren’t literally US anti-drug lobby propaganda? It being classified as the most dangerous level of drugs in the world means you can’t use it for any peer reviewed study, so they can’t cite anything. Their entire opinion is based on a literal unfounded lie, they built their entire system around demonising drug users and now refuse to even see the people that established that policy through the UN policy rowing back on it. It’s garbage and FFG, the HSE and the Gardai should be fucking ashamed. Fuck they have no shame given some of the Gardai have been known to deal drugs directly and use drugs recreationally. Of course the Gardai would be against decriminalisation of drugs and legalisation of weed, some of them literally have it as a source of secondary income for their shitty public sector pay. The whole thing is fucking rotten to the core.
This country is phenomenal at putting together bodies, committees, orgs, meetings, townhalls, reviews, consultations, etc. and absolutely dogshit at actually implementing things until it’s close to election time or things are at a breaking point.
Keep it illegal and continue to stretch our already broken prison system that doesn’t function as a deterrent, punish a lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens who want to use a substance that may/may not harm them (alcohol is A-OK guys), continue to burden our healthcare system with people smoking cannabis who could otherwise be educated on safe use or people seeking dangerous alternatives like spice, and waste the time and money of our underfunded and understaffed police force.
Or legalise it, tax it, build the industry here, put the money towards solving some of the above problems and let a portion of the population enjoy a substance that’s already legal in several EU nations. I don’t smoke but the sooner we move past this the sooner we can stop pretending like this government actually genuinely cares about this issue.
Better yet, remove governmental fence sitting and put it to a national vote and put it to bed one way or the other.
Let’s not forget that magic mushrooms were legal here until the mid 2000s, only following a knee-jerk reaction to a single death did they suddenly became classed as dangerous as heroin and crack. The laws here make no sense and never had the best intentions behind them.
I think of the CA as advanced polling/focus groups on how Irish people will respond to issues when presented with good arguments and data. This works very well with straight forward issues: on issues like attitude to drugs (and even bio diversity) it is less straightforward. Irish politics does not do well with long term plans in my experience and the civil service is very risk adverse.
The main takeaway from CA is that Irish people’s attitude to cannabis is changing, this is backed by lots of research about drug use. A group will need to manage the change and it will be between health, justice and maybe more departments. They will need to look at changing the laws around possession. The guards and health professionals who work with addiction will need to be involved. The big problem is that a lot of parties involved already have ideas about the solution should be and are unwilling to listen to anyone else’s concerns. This makes getting anything done very difficult so nothing gets done.