Help End Marijuana Prohibition
to re legalise and regulate cannabis for personal, medical and industrial uses.
to allow for health education, home growing, and regulated sales through registered outlets which will separate cannabis from the criminality of the black-market and end consequent associated corruption.
to allow medical use, utilising cannabis’ painkilling, relaxing, anti nausea and healing properties.
to establish a commercial hemp industry producing fuel, fibre, paper, textiles, food, oil and other environmentally sound products.
to release all those imprisoned for cannabis alone and the removal of all records of previous criminal cannabis convictions.
Reasons to VOTE 1 HEMP.
This was a topic of extreme discussion recently and a range of suggestions were made by an informal think tank.
These are the suggestions received:
- To alleviate the suffering of the chronically or terminally ill.
- To enhance the environment by replacing environmentally unsound products.
- To reduce avenues of fast cash for terrorists, insurgents, arms traders, and security organisations.
- To reduce the flow of cannabis money to criminal gangs.
- To limit corrupting temptations available to Police, Customs Officials, and Prison Guards
- Decriminalisation of hemp would drastically reduce Police workload, and free officers to tackle genuine crimes where it is not as easy to gain high arrest rates.
- To remove an avenue for scaremongering by opportunistic politicians and journalists.
- To hopefully lower the price of hemp or Cannabis.
- To put an end to using dogs as a tool of discrimination against a harmless sector of the community.
- To put an end to the marginalisation of cannabis users, indeed to try to put such petty behaviours to rest in many areas of politics.
- As the Democrats have forgotten all about “Keeping the bastards honest”, and would rather play “Make a deal”, the HEMP Party would undertake to try to keep the bastards honest.
- To allow people to enjoy a spiritual, relaxing experience – legally
Do YOU have any policy or campaign ideas to put the HEMP Party into the hearts and minds of Australia?
From The HEMP Party,
To the Hon. Ms Julia Gillard PM.
REGARDING THE CANNABIS LAWS IN AUSTRALIA.
Ms Gillard,
We welcome your elevation to your current post and congratulate you unreservedly.
With your elevation we are buoyed. We are all aware of your reputation for fighting for the rights of everyday Aussies – and the cannabis law reform debate is all about everyday Aussies. It is a civil-liberties issue that lies at the heart of the current difficulties being faced by many hundreds of thousands of everyday Australians; be they policemen, teachers, parents, pot-smokers or teetotallers.
We have, as a nation, been two-faced about this matter for long enough. Our current state of hypocritical denial only serves to coarsen our society. It doesn’t have to be this way. This is unfinished business.
Before the great wall of Howard was erected Australia proudly led the world in our embrace of civil liberties protections for our citizens. Then, for a long cold decade, we all shivered behind the giant edifice of deliberate Howard indifference. And, of course, the world around us caught up and moved on.
All of the great and laudable advances made by Australian society were soon matched, and even improved on, by many of our international equals. And now Australia has been left behind whilst equal opportunity, gay rights, and cannabis law reform movements elsewhere across the globe have made huge advances.
Now the welcome spring of the Australian Labor Party has passed into glorious summer it is time to recommence this great work that was so rudely interrupted. Cannabis law reform in Australia will be widely welcomed. These unjust and arcane laws negatively impact hundreds of thousands of Australians every day in significant and life changing ways.
For our children’s sake isn’t it time we cut the crap? We all know that the current cannabis laws are not working, but it is more than that; Australian parents know the laws as they stand are actually counterproductive.
How can you explain unjust and arcane laws to children?
How do you urge children to respect the rule of law when some laws are generally considered repugnant and so are widely flouted?
Change in this area is long overdue. Aussies generally agree that victimless crimes should not be a matter of criminal interest. Already in the modern age this Aussie ‘fair go’ has been extended to prostitution, sexual orientation, trans and bi-sexuality, religious affiliation, and lack of affiliation.
As a society we have come to understand that criminalizing a victimless activity that will be engaged in by members of our society (regardless of the legal impositions) will invariably create an unregulated market: a ‘black market’. And an unregulated black market (in anything) is always undesirable. If it is morally repugnant then it should be illicit (i.e. the illegal trade in weapons), but if it isn’t morally repugnant (i.e. cannabis use), please, for our children’s sake, bite the bullet and regulate the trade.
Cannabis prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, should be bequeathed to the dustbin of history.
Further, the need for reform is becoming urgent: the existence of a massive and ubiquitous cannabis black market in Australia is undoubted, and expensive cannabis prohibition strategies have been formulated, implemented, reformulated, and then re-implemented ad infinitum. Yet they have all utterly failed. With what implications for our children?
Right now in our country most every child knows where they can purchase a bag of cannabis in premises where its sale to minors is actively obscured; where the price of the cannabis is inflated; where the quality of the cannabis is unknown; and where all the profits go straight into the hands of criminals.
To continue with this state of affairs is morally untenable and socially corrosive. We urge you to address this issue as a matter of urgency; as it stands the cannabis trade in Australia is a lose – lose situation.
Our society loses cohesion. Our children lose respect.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Balderstone HEMP Party President
HEMP Party: Policy brief.
The HEMP party has no political ambitions. Our sole purpose is to agitate for the re-legalisation of cannabis for personal, medical and industrial use.
currently-
YEAR AFTER YEAR:
¯ The cannabis market grows larger,
¯ police expenditures grow, &
¯ more cannabis arrests are made.
Marijuana prohibition in Australia has failed.
CANNABIS PROHIBITION:
¯ breeds disrespect for the law,
¯ engenders corruption,
¯ endangers our youth,
¯ costs us money,
¯ enriches criminals,
¯ hurts the sick, &
¯ doesn’t work!
1) The re-legalisation of cannabis will protect young Australians.
The black market is of special concern to parents. Many children find it hard to come to terms with discovering that their parents purchase and smoke cannabis illegally. Many parents find it impossible to understand why their children use cannabis. Our current laws constitute a hypocrisy that often poisons the relationship of our youth with parents and authority figures and always makes instilling a sense of respect for our laws a more difficult enterprise than it should be. Regulating the cannabis marketplace by re-legalising cannabis use will assist in preventing children gaining easy access to cannabis, assist parents in building better citizens, and help us all to restore the waning bond of trust between citizenry and police force.
2) The only way to control the currently unregulated marketplace is to re-legalise cannabis.
Prohibition laws do not work. Every year there are ever more users of cannabis despite ever greater numbers of arrests. Despite huge and ever increasing expenditures of taxpayer funds the marketplace grows ever larger and more sophisticated. Helicopters packed with ever better trained paratroopers buzz ever more Australian valleys. And to what end? Every year ‘the war on drugs’ entirely fails to impact the use or supply of cannabis in any meaningful way.Someone once remarked that the definition of madness is to undertake the same act over and over again in expectation of a different outcome.
3) Australians don’t like other people dictating what they can do with our own bodies.
Aussies are a pretty sensible breed. Despite dire official warnings regarding the effects of cannabis being produced and disseminated by the Australian Government for more than fifty years, most Australians know from personal experience that alcohol and tobacco (both legal drugs) pose a far greater risk to individual and societal health. Most Aussies understand that cannabis is illegal because of an accident of history, not because it is dangerous.
- to allow for health education, home growing, and regulated sales through registered outlets which will separate cannabis from the criminality of the black-market and end consequent associated corruption.
- to allow medical use, utilising cannabis’ painkilling, relaxing, anti nausea and healing properties.
- to establish a commercial hemp industry producing fuel, fibre, paper, textiles, food, oil and other environmentally sound products.
- to release all those imprisoned for cannabis alone and the removal of all records of previous criminal cannabis convictions.
THE HEMP PARTY will advocate for the re-legalisation of cannabis.
PROHIBITION = CHAOS
REGULATION = CONTROL
