4:20 News - Countdown to Election 2020 Edition

President Obama recently admitted in an interview that cannabis was no more harmful than alcohol, indicating that he won't be bringing the federal hammer down on the state experiments with legal cannabis sales in Colorado and Washington any time soon. Many miles south of his border, Uruguay has become the first country to legalise cannabis growing and sales.

Meanwhile in NZ, the War on Drugs is alive and well. Our lawmakers continue to remain wilfully ignorant of the high cost of cannabis prohibition, while claiming the moral high ground. Take aspiring Act party leader John Boscawen, for example (HT Lindsay Mitchell):

"We had Don Brash come out and promote the liberalisation of marijuana and while that may have had the support of five per cent of the population..."

According to the Ministry of Health, twice as many NZers use cannabis daily than who voted for the Act party last election (50,800 compared with 23,889). The same source says that 14 percent of the population use cannabis at least once a year. Boscawen knows as much about cannabis prohibition as Katrina Shanks knows about the internet.

Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party's misguided missile, Fred MacDonald, has turned up at Ratana and was savaged by Shane Jones. He's not the most subtle activist, but Fred was on message. Labour's most prolific wanker can only throw a tissue of insults in riposte.

Mac may have broken protocol, but I'm sure he would have had a parlay/korero to explain his actions with the locals later on.

Last election, the ALCP received 11,738 votes, around half the Act party's haul. But can the ALCP get MSM airtime along with the other political minnows? Like hell. ALCP aren't welcome at the TV minor leaders' debates. The MSM can lavish attention on spanners like Colin Craig or Dotcom, but Cannabis Law Reform is the butt of every joke.

Off the record, I have personally yet to meet a journalist who doesn't like to get loaded and have a good time. But put them in a TV studio and on the record, they vomit the tabloid puritanism of prohibition. The mainstream hypocrisy came to a head at Waitangi some years ago when a Close Up crew exploited the hospitality of cannabis law reform activists for a slot they ended up calling Reefer Madness.

I hold high hopes that this media perversity will wane as the baby boomers are replaced by Generation Xers. Conservative or liberal, few Xers share their forebears' pavlova conditioning. The transition has already begun and should be complete by 2020, when the last Muldoon groupie leaves Parliament.