This article is part of Weed Week: an examination of marijuana's persistent status as an illegal drug in the lead up to 4/20.It's 2017, and while lawmakers around the world are realising recreational pot will raise tax and reduce crime, Australia's politicians are not. We're making leaps and bounds on medicinal marijuana because, you know, medicine, but the idea of pot-for-pleasure is still coated in stigma. So how can we get past that? How can we solve every part of the problem, starting with legislation and ending with social acceptability?
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To find out, we asked lawyers, academics, lobbyists, and a former political advisor. Then we took their advice and bundled it all together to establish both the problems and solutions. Here's what we came up with:The first thing a politician calculates, on any issue, is whether their decision will play well to their voters. To be convinced, they need the numbers to show a high level of public support. That means getting an organisation like Roy Morgan to organise public polling that shows the people of their electorate aren't going to crush them at the next election for taking a bold position.Once politicians see there is public support for an idea, the next thing the idea needs is a dollar value. Dollars talk, and they speak loudest when backed up by economic modelling from a group with credibility, like global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. What they would need to produce is an inch-thick document with a short, 150 word executive summary and a table outlining how much money a government could make from taxing and regulating weed. To be safe, it would also be worth pointing out how retail sales of recreational marijuana in Colorado hit $1 billion in 2016 and the state is making a killing in tax revenue.
One: it's All About Numbers
Two: the Law Needs Changing
Three: the Hard Bit
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This was also the first thing that Rachel Shaw, a criminal defence lawyer and a partner with Shaw and Henderson said."Transport, packaging, posting it in the mail—all of these things have to be considered," she said. "At the moment, the legislation is all about what you can't do, but my suggestion is that you create a law about what is permissible, what you can do."Dealing with this is not impossible, but the nightmare scenario is just pushing delete without doing anything else. This would create a whole new Wild West of weed production and sale, almost overnight, with no one from judges down to the cops knowing what to do about all the boring, technical stuff.Then there is the bigger picture stuff like health. Smoking weed also means inhaling burning plant matter, just like tobacco. Selling too many brownies to fresh 18-year-olds who don't know better is going to send them to the emergency room. Just like tobacco and alcohol, weed will need to be taxed, controlled, and made uncool.And then there is the environment. Hippies may have given weed an environmentally-friendly vibe, but if left unchecked, the actual production of weed can be landscape-scarring, energy-sucking, water-draining and wildlife-killing, just like any other industrial operation.Both Casey and Rachel suggested that the best way to deal with this is to let medical marijuana do the heavy lifting. Medical marijuana raises all the same issues as decriminalising recreational pot, and places like South Australia and Victoria have recently reformed their medical marijuana law. These could later be expanded to include recreational weed.
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Four: Weed Needs a PR Overhaul
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