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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Australia: Our legal system does not view cannabis abuse as seriously as it should David Penberthy Herald Sun Monday 05 Dec 2011 It is only a matter of time before he turns up on the idiot box for an exclusive tell-all interview, promoted by whatever ratings-hungry network shells out the cash - as a cautionary tale that no parent and no teenager can afford to miss. It is of course a story that most Australian parents and teenagers can very much afford to miss. The reason is simply that most Australian parents and teenagers would not be so breathtakingly foolish as to land in a country renowned for executing the most minor of drug offenders, and immediately shell out the requisite amount of rupiah for a bag of Balinese dope. Outside of this majority there is a disturbingly large subculture in Australia that has been brought into focus by this case. It's a subculture that has two notable features. The first is the extent to which cannabis use has been normalised, where it is barely regarded as a drug at all but as something most people will smoke without consequence from a young age. So much so that we wind up with the spectacle of a 14-year-old boy standing before an Indonesian court and revealing that he has become addicted to the drug, right under the nose of his parents. The second feature is the fact that some Australians are so accepting of this kind of behaviour that they are even prepared to take it offshore, with no regard for or awareness of local laws or local customs. Whatever people think about Bali - I have been there twice and really enjoyed most of the island - the truth is that the grog-fuelled, dope-friendly, mushroom-munching, sexually charged excesses of Kuta are light years away from what is acceptable elsewhere on the island and in the rest of Indonesia, both morally and legally. It is ironic that as a nation we often bemoan the behaviour of migrants or refugees who fail to abide by our customs, yet think nothing of lobbing in a very private, abstemious and religious society and seeing how much grog we can sink or how much cheap dope we can score. Everyone is allowed to make mistakes in life but making the kind of mistake this boy did, in this country, is remarkably dim given that the first thing you see at Denpasar Airport is a massive yellow anti-drug billboard featuring the last photographs ever taken of foreigners who faced the firing squad. The real issue is that the kind of mistake this boy made is not really regarded as a mistake at all in the subculture in which he has the misfortune of residing. I am not setting out to besmirch the generally good name of the NSW Central Coast, especially as I originally hail from South Australia, where decades of ludicrously lax drug policies enabled the creation of a dope-addled underclass, evidence of which still abounds in the depressed far northern and southern suburbs where the only shopfronts doing a roaring trade are the hydroponics store and the Centrelink office. But for all the retirees and young families who are attracted to the NSW Central Coast for the coastal living and the cheaper home prices, people who lawfully and civilly go about their business, there would appear to be a real problem with a hard core of youths who are permanently off their scones, whose parents have decided they are powerless to act. This problem is compounded by a legal system that doesn't treat cannabis abuse as seriously as it should and the attitudes of parents who are fatalistic or disengaged, regarding dope use by their kids as inevitable - you know, most other people's kids do it, I smoked it a fair bit when I was younger, what are you going to do? The law-abiding people who live in this part of Australia seem to realise that it is a problem locally with disaffected and listless local youths. The local newspaper, The Express Advocate, has done a good job examining the issue. It revealed last month that there had been nine cannabis busts in just 36 days in the Tuggerah Lakes Local Area Command alone. One bust netted dope with an estimated street value of $936,000, with 312 mature plants and 180 grafted plants found in an eight-room hydroponic set-up in a suburban brick home. If you apply supply and demand principles to these sorts of figures, there is obviously no shortage on the demand side. As I said at the start, the tale of Bali Boy is about to become a story no parent and no teen can afford to miss. Whether it appears on Channel Nine or not is an interesting side point. A bit like Bali Boy himself, the network itself was busted as the ink was drying on a $250,000 deal for exclusive television and magazine rights, and then issued breathless denials when it became obvious that the deal could jeopardise his bid for freedom. Nine may now choose not to pursue the deal again, not because it is embarrassed, but because we are now outside the ratings period. When the story is finally told, my suspicion is that the parents and teens who will tune in are those who do not actually need to watch the show at all. The ones who need to watch will be too busy pulling cones or claiming they're powerless to stop their kids from doing so. penberthyd@thepunch.com.au http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/toughen-up-our-law-on-cannabis/story-e6frfhqf-1226214565801
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