On dying under things

First off, if you're interested in such, Love and Pop has my review of HP Lovecraft's The Thing On The Doorstep. It's mostly good but an unfortunate shade of murky green.

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As you're probably aware, even if you're not a New Zealander, we're currently going through a process of referenda on the way to possibly changing our flag. I'm not super keen on this, for reasons that can be tidily summed up by Toby Morris (tl;dr, I think changing the flag eventually is a) inevitable and b) a good idea but I'm suspicious of the current timing, and I'm pretty uninspired by the process).

However, there's one particular argument I hear from people in favour of keeping the current flag, which I think needs to be disposed of - the idea that you can't change the flag, because New Zealand soldiers died under it*.

I'm loath to Godwin myself so easily, but here's a flag people died under:

and here's another:

here's one people are dying under right now:

It is entirely possible for people to commit themselves sincerely to a cause, and its symbols, and be wrong. It is equally possible for people to be misled as to the actual purpose of their actions - this is my view of soldiers who died in WWI in particular. Enshrining symbols and the causes they represent, just because people were willing to die for them is a terrible idea.

*Lest you think I'm overstating this, the NZ RSA wants people to spoil their flag ballots for this specific reason.

Well, fuck.

So the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill went through under urgency last week. For those not in NZ, that means a) all the synthetic cannabis products excluded from the previous version of this legislation (about 40 products from the previous about-a-gazillion) are now banned until they can be proved to be of "very low risk" and b) the government might well have shot a giant gaping hole in what could have been the first thing to approach sensible drug legislation in this country.

Russell Brown has a good post about this over at Public Address, but here's my take on what happened. There are two "official" narratives, one from the government and one from grassroots anti-drugs people which are both wrong, or at least, they're quite selective in the ways that they're right.

The anti-drugs crowd seem to believe that the passing of the original Psychoactive Substances Act put a bunch of synthetic cannabis products on the market as "safe". These products were anything but, and caused massive problems, with addiction and emergency visits becoming rife (see the horrifying photos of queues around the block from legal high stores for evidence). Eventually, in response to public outcry, the government finally acted (after too long) and put a stop to it. The moral tenor of the marketers of these drugs can easily be determined by the fact that they proposed to test this stuff on innocent animals.

The government contend that they were on the right track, but overlooked the risk posed by the synthetic cannabinomimetics that they allowed to remain on sale. They have now rightly removed these products from shelves, and put the burden of proof back where it belongs - with the manufacturers.

Actually, these drugs have been around for a long time. Ten years at the very minimum. The first ones appeared all over the place in little metal single-smoke cylinders, and seem to have been pretty close to inactive. The recipe quickly got refined and they started to sell by the packet. The attraction at this point was pretty clear - these products seemed to fairly closely mirror actual weed (which has a strong social niche in New Zealand culture) and were all legal to buy. It's important to note that all through this story, legality has been the main drawcard with these drugs - along with the ability to get high and still pass drug tests for pot.

Four or five years in, there was the first surge of media attention addressed at these specific "legal highs". I talked about that here. As a result of that, a large number of these products (if you're a New Zealander you'll probably recall the brand names "Spice" and "Kronic") were banned, along with their active ingredient. Because we were still operating under our original drug legislation which required the government to ban individual chemicals one by one, a raft of new products sprang up to take the place of the banned ones.

It's probably at this point that the real damage starts to get done. The evidence suggests that it's at this point that the chemicals on the market start to be seriously habit-forming and people start having panic attacks, heart palpitations and the like. However, these things are available everywhere - corner dairies all over the country stock this stuff, so if you're an addict it's fairly easy to stay under the radar.

When the government passed the Psychoactive Substances Act, they did two things. They gave councils the power to control where these substances could be sold, and they reduced the products available from hundreds to around 40 (considered to be "low-risk") which were allowed as an interim measure until councils finished deciding where their OK zones for legal high sale were going to be. Unfortunately at this point councils decided more or less en masse to throw all their toys out of the cot at once. Many protested at not just being able to ban the sale of non old-white-men drugs entirely and refused to zone, while others zoned as punitively as they could get away with.

As a result, the number of outlets selling these new more habit-forming drugs dropped dramatically. Can you imagine the queues that would appear if, tomorrow, all supermarkets and dairies were banned from selling alcohol and liquor stores were cut down to 2 or 3 per hundred thousand people? Do you think that it might look as though there was a sudden plague of alcoholism all around the country?

I must stress that this is not to claim that this newest batch of cannabis substitutes were good drugs. They appear to be very bad for their users both mentally and physically, and the people who sold them are probably not nice people.

The issue is that we're now back in blanket-ban territory, and these drugs have probably been bought up cheap by people who intend to stockpile them and sell them for vastly inflated prices on the street (they still get around drug tests for pot, and there are still addicts out there - money to be made...) Why? Because we had a media panic. I also want to restate that the reason we have this particularly vicious and addictive batch on our hands in the first place is because the previous safer generation were also banned as the result of a media panic. And we got that generation because we swallowed someone else's media panic about cannabis way back in the '50s. This is not a sensible way to make laws - look at the Sex Offender Registry in the US, and its many many abuses if you want a stunning example.

There are two consolations here. The first is that we do have the Psychoactive Substances Act, which has probably got the government out of playing whack-a-mole with drug designers for the time being. It's been mauled (the government is now in the bizarre position of being legally forced to ignore all data from animal tests, conducted anywhere in the world unless they prove a drug is unfit for sale) and drugs are going to be inhumanly hard to pass through it in the short term, but it's still around - so that's something.

The second is that this whole debacle does seem to have reopened the debate on which drugs should be legal and why. Let's hope we can actually talk about that this time, eh?

This is really not very good.

The National Party (for any non-NZers, that's the government right now) have just done a number of things of serious concern. You can read a fairly comprehensive list (and assessment of the list) by Claire Browning here.

Most alarming in my book, are the pending changes to the remit of the GCSB and the framework for paying family carers.

Again for any non-NZers, the GCSB are the spy bureau responsible for keeping an eye on foreign nationals operating in New Zealand in order to preserve our security and such. They've recently been discovered spying on NZ citizens, and the government's response is to change the law to make this OK. 

I've talked before about why I think this kind of law making is a Bad Idea, and my view hasn't really changed on that. What's alarming is that the underlying attitude seems to bleed through to the framework set up for the payment of family carers. There's a comprehensive explanation of that here, and a to-the-point and sweary one here, but the very very brief version is as follows:

• A bunch of families of people with disabilities took the government to court several times over the fact that they weren't paid for looking after their family members, while a stranger they hired would have been.
• They won, a lot.
• The government's now put into law a provision that lets people who care for disabled family members get paid minimum wage by their local DHB if they and the person they care for meet the criteria contained in the bill. If they don't meet those criteria, the bill actually prohibits them from getting paid and (here's the kicker) prevents them from taking the government to court again if they think this bill is unfairly discriminatory*.
• The law was passed despite the Attorney General saying it's against the Bill Of Rights, and without any of the MPs who voted actually knowing what the impact of the bill would be**.

A while back, Danyl at the Dim Post*** suggested that the National Party have pretty much given up hope of winning the next election, and are simply trying to cram through as much stuff as possible before they go. I suspect he may be right, but I'm getting pretty worried about the damage that might get done in the interim.

Edited to add:
I completely forgot to mention that National have also unlilaterally decided to ignore the recommendations of the Electoral Commission on reforming the way that MMP works. A more diverse and representative parliament would apparently not be in their best interests, which is a concern in and of itself, really.

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* It is.

** This here is the Regulatory Impact Statement they got. No, really.

*** Link just goes to main page - can't remember the specific post.

Talking to Clare Curran about drugs

I recently got into a Facebook discussion with Clare Curran about an opinion piece she'd written for the Oddity.

The teal deer* version is as follows: she says she's "woken up" to the dangers of synthetic cannabinoids and other "legal highs" currently available in dairies in New Zealand, and wants people to challenge dairy owners over selling this stuff.

My response was that a) just waking up to it now is a bit late, as these products have been available in dairies since they first came on the scene four or five years ago; and b) surely a legislative response is more effective here - for example, people who don't think alcohol should be available in supermarkets lobby local or central government to change the law**, they don't attempt to shame supermarkets into not selling booze one by one.

At this point, the comment thread was taken over by the usual opposing choruses of "Think of the children!" and "Legalise weed, man!" and the capacity for useful discussion was largely destroyed. Her final response to me was to ask me for a constructive alternative proposal, and mine was to question what her end goal was vis-a-vis the legality of recreational drugs generally.

After thinking about this for a while, I do have a more constructive solution for Clare Curran and my parting shot has a lot to do with it.

The current situation is clearly not good. There are some very rich people paying some very flash chemists very good money to keep making substances one step ahead of the law. These products have minimal (if any) human testing, and do appear to be causing genuine harm to their users.

But here's the thing - these people aren't supervillains*** - they're meeting a demand that exists in the community by selling the products they're currently allowed to sell. If they could meet that demand with other safer products, they probably would. As it is, the commercial pressure on them is to always have another chemical up their sleeve for when the product du jour gets banned, and not to worry too much about concerns like consumer safety.

There's a commonly-repeated idea that prohibition doesn't work - but that's not quite right. Actually prohibition has worked pretty well in eliminating some drugs from the marketplace in New Zealand. The 2C family, Fantasy and BZP were all popular during their brief windows of legality, but have pretty much disappeared now that they're illegal.

People don't actually want to take bad**** drugs. They tend to do so when  those drugs are legal, because they want to buy them without risking prosecution and all of the other personal and social hassles that come with dealing with the black market. When they're made illegal, committed users return to whatever illegal drug their legal high of choice was emulating and "curious" users shrug and move on. This is why actual cannabis, speed, Ecstasy etc. all persist in the community, while the alternative versions have all faded into obscurity.

So, after all that, here's my reply to Clare Curran. What she seems to see as moral turpitude on the part of dairy owners, I see as a failure of market regulation. People want (and arguably have always wanted) to get high and they tend to do this in whatever way is most easily achieved. Legal highs are easier and safer to get (if not safer to use) than illegal drugs, and there's no regulation saying who can sell them - so dairy owners are free to profit from supplying this demand.

My solution is two-fold:

1. Stop claiming special cases for tobacco and alcohol. These are recreational drugs, and fairly harmful ones at that. The hypocrisy of telling one group of people that their drug of choice is wrong while freely indulging in a more harmful one knocks a massive hole in any attempt at drug education, and seriously undermines public confidence in drug information that comes from government or the police.
   
   "Culturally familiar" is not the same as "safe". This inconsistent approach is what has allowed the current messy and ineffective regime to get as bad as it has.
   
   A more sensible way to decide which drugs are illegal and which are allowed would be to decide on an allowable level of harm*****, and ban (or restrict to medical and scientific applications) drugs more harmful than that. There are already indices that rank various drugs on harm to the user and social harm, so there are clearly metrics for figuring this stuff out.
   
   Alternatively, if as a society we don't want anyone to take any drugs except for medical reasons, we need to be upfront about that. And we need to ban tobacco and alcohol (and arguably energy drinks, coffee, tea, and nutmeg) along with the rest.
   
2. License all the drugs we've decided are safe enough to be legal, and limit their sale to premises that specialise in those products.
   
   One of the things that contributes to binge drinking in New Zealand is very cheap booze from supermarkets. If supermarkets drop their prices on alcohol to lure in custom, they can make that profit up elsewhere. Even if they lose their license, they probably won't go out of business, because they still sell a lot of other stuff that everyone needs. In order to have real teeth, a license needs to be vital to your continued livelihood.
   
   I realise that this means I'll need to buy my beer from a liquor store, but I'm actually OK with that. Liquor stores tend to sell better beer than most supermarkets anyway, and no-one will die if booze or other drugs get priced out of their range.

The current legal-drugs barons would have to fall in line with such a regulatory regime, or go undergound and risk direct prosecution. However, current evidence suggests that no-one would abandon legal cannabis to smoke illegal Kronic.

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* This was recently introduced to me as a different way of saying "tl;dr" and I think it's awesome - so there.

** This is how come you can't buy alcohol from supermarkets in Southland, for example.

*** Just so we're clear - I don't think they're nice, I just think that moustache-twirling villains are less common than one might expect.

**** "Bad" in this sense means both less safe and less pleasurable than the illegal equivalent. This may be disputable in some other cases, but is certainly true of the synthetic cannabinoids - people don't tend to end up in emergency rooms suffering panic attacks and heart palpitations when they smoke real cannabis.

***** I would suggest that sensible questions to ask might include "How possible is it to fatally overdose?" and "What behavioural changes does this drug induce? Do those changes often include increased aggression?" for starters.

Police philosophy, or: what are cops for?

Currently, here in NZ, our government is trying to rush through legislation to retrospectively legalise some illegal behaviour that the police have been engaging in. Like many people, I think this is a Bad Idea. In fact, I think it's a particularly bad idea at this point in time, because it exacerbates a real problem I've noticed of late in the relationship between the police and the wider community.

There seems to be a fundamental confusion in the ranks of the police as to what the purpose of their organisation is. This became glaringly clear with their last recruitment campaign (thankfully now defunct) which suggested that young people should join the police to "Get some better work stories" and "Make more money than your Dad" - they also compared the interest of the police in younger recruits to the sexual approaches of "cougars". This promotes a view of the police as a glamorous and heroic (not to mention subtly sexually fetishistic) organisation who bust Bad Guys and are desired and/or admired by all.

This is a mythic description of what a police force is, let's call it the Superman narrative. There's another mythic description of the police which is reasonably common at the moment. This one inverts all the values of the Superman version, to paint the police as at best dupes and at worst active players in a corrupt system deliberately designed to hurt innocent people. We'll call that the Robin Hood narrative.

When Superman believers hear people complain about the expansion of police powers, or suspect decisions regarding the use of violence, or searches of innocent foreigners, they're liable to shrug those off as an acceptable price for catching baddies or trot out a line like "if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear". Similarly, when Robin Hood believers hear about cops getting hurt or killed in the line of duty, they're liable to consider that their just desserts. Neither of these positions are helpful (or strictly truthful) and, worryingly, they make it very difficult for either side to talk to the other.

So, what are the cops? Well, they're public servants. They're empowered to enforce the law, which is the common ethical code our society has decided on, and their implicit responsibility following on from that is to prevent members of our society harming themselves or others. They do this, by and large, to the best of their ability but occasionally make mistakes. They are also (forgivably enough) subject to mental and emotional fatigue as a response to the relentless stupidity and bloody-mindedness of their fellow humans.

Ideally, a police force run along these lines would take steps to build links with as many communities as possible. There would obviously be the occasional bad call, resulting from the inevitable stress of the job, but they would be very cautious of damaging any relationship by appearing publicly arrogant or self-righteous.

Unfortunately, our police appear to be in love with the Superman narrative at the moment. This can be seen in their response to the complaint from the South African journalist they wrongly searched for drugs. A sensitive police force would have understood that given the man's history, his offence was understandable and apologised for that. It's also obvious from the police response to being told that they'd broken the law in the Urewera "anti terror" case - claiming that holding police to the same standards of law as everyone else will damage their effectiveness, instead of apologising for the breach.

The fact that the government are currently attempting to make everything the police have done retrospectively legal (and in the process make it legal for fisheries officers to bug New Zealand citizens) instead of investigating police practice and updating the law to sensibly reflect modern technology proves that they too are dazzled by the glamour and 4-colour moral simplicity of the Superman version.

The real problem with this is that it only gives the Robin Hood crowd more ammunition - and with enough provocation, they might just start shooting.

Proclaimin' Peters!

The reason my last post consisted solely of a link to a post from The Slacktiverse was not just that I happened to like it, I also thought that it was a really useful explanation of a quirk of political thinking that's been causing me cognitive dissonance ever since I first noticed it.

For people who can't be bothered clicking through (or who did, and found it a massive and intimidating Wall Of Text) the tl;dr summary is as follows. There are two primary ways that law-makers think when making policy, Erl calls them Proclamation and Policy. They can be defined as follows:

• Proclamation:
  Law made to represent the moral stance of society as a whole. Things that we disapprove of collectively are made illegal, to symbolise our objection to this sort of behaviour. It is usually more concerned with punitive response to wrongdoing than with flow-on effects or coherent strategies. Viewed through the lens of Policy law, Proclamation can look like a very blunt instrument, concerned more with slogans and soundbites than actual results.
• Policy:
  Law made in order to reduce the harm from specific behaviours, or to discourage behaviours considered harmful. It is usually made with a view to encouraging safe behaviour, or discouraging unsafe behaviour, rather than making a moral statement on behalf of society at large. Viewed through the lens of Proclamation law, Policy law can appear to be making inappropriate statements of right and wrong on matters that are actually legitimate personal choices (aka the "nanny-state").

Proclamation tends to be more popular at the conservative end of the political scale, and Policy at the more liberal end. Erl is at pains to point out that both approaches have their place, and that some laws (for example, the law against murder) can serve both purposes simultaneously. It's also important to remember that  I'm paraphrasing here, and if you want the full essay you should brave the link (and possibly paste the text into a word-processor to make the page-width a bit more manageable).

Hard on the heels of that post (as if on cue) Winston Peters has made a dramatic re-entrance to New Zealand politics, proposing to cut the benefits of families who refuse to cooperate with police over child-abuse cases at the same time as repealing the "anti-smacking law" if NZ First is elected this year.

On the surface, this looks like nonsense. He's proposing to simultaneously "get tough on child abusers" while removing children's legal protection from assault, as long as the person who assaults them is their parent or legal guardian. However, it's a perfect demonstration in real-world local politics of exactly the way that the diverging mindsets of Policy and Proclamation work.

The "anti-smacking law" is classic Policy-type law. For one thing, the name "anti-smacking law"  is a misnomer, invented by (arguably "Proclamationist") media to sell more papers. The law change didn't actually criminalise smacking your kids, as most people understand it. What it did was to remove the defense of "appropriate discipline" if you got charged with assault as a result of smacking your kids. The distinction is important, because most people who smack their kids don't end up in court being charged with assault as a result. Generally speaking, something has to be pretty horribly wrong before that happens.

The law-change was less about making a "statement" that New Zealand was anti-smacking, though it was (somewhat unhelpfully) portrayed as such, and more an attempt to fix the fact that people were turning up in court having done awful things to their children, and getting off on the grounds that what they had done was done in the name of discipline. It's not a statement of public morality, rather an attempt to tune existing law to make it do what it was initially supposed to do more effectively - Policy law.

However, viewed from the standpoint of Mr. Peters and his supporters (which I would argue is generally conservative and "Proclamationist") this would constitute "social engineering" and governmental meddling in the fundamentally private sphere of family life, and a parent's right to govern that family as they see fit.

As for the second part of his proposal, once we've established that Mr. Peters approaches contentious public issues largely from the perspective of Proclamation-making, that's easy enough to understand. The first factor is that it's punitive. It's not interested in figuring out what contributes to child abuse, or reducing any of those factors once they're established. It's a plan to Smite Evil People. 

The second factor (and I think, the most telling) is the specific tactics and circumstances mentioned in his plan - cutting off the benefits of people who fail to help the police in child abuse cases. That's a direct reference to a specific set of circumstances that happened in new Zealand recently, and caused significant public anger, not an attempt to address child abuse more generally. It also neatly includes a "people on benefits are evil child abusers" subtext, as it's not clear what Winston Peters intends to happen to people who are fully employed and refuse to cooperate with the police.

Of course, explaining why a statement makes sense to the person who made it doesn't actually mean that it does make sense in terms of the real world. So, what are the likely real world effects of Mr. Peters' proposals?

Well, that's where they seem to fall to bits, unfortunately. Let's look at the first part - the benefit cutting. If the dramatic increase in domestic violence after the Christchurch earthquake and the correlation of spikes in family violence statistics with Christmas and major sporting events is anything to go by, people who behave violently towards their families seem to be people who don't deal well with stress or intense emotions, and who terrorise their families at least in part as a way of spreading negative emotions around to "share the load". I would also assume that families being asked to cooperate with the police around a case of child abuse are by definition at risk of further domestic violence.

So what Winston Peters is proposing is to directly target people who respond to stress by attacking the people close to them, and place them under further stress by significantly reducing or completely eliminating their income. This does not seem like a good idea to me. Let's be clear, I'm not in any way attempting to justify the behaviour of domestically abusive people or to claim that they're not responsible for their own actions. However, getting abused people away from the abuser is not as easy as it might seem on the surface, and people stuck in these situations are going to be far worse affected by this kind of measure than the person who's doing the beating.

As for the second proposal - reinstating "necessary discipline" as a defense to a charge of assaulting a child - I don't think it bodes well either. For one thing, it'd mean some abusive parents being able to legally justify their actions if caught, but there's another angle to it as well. Because Winston Peters habitually speaks from a Proclamatory viewpoint, this move needs to be viewed in that way  - in terms of the message he wants it to send. The message in this case, is that "good" child-smacking is OK.

The problem here is that "good" child-smacking (as opposed to child abuse or assault) is not clearly defined. Humans are creatures of habit, and habits are subject to drift. What happens if a person who is in the habit of physically disciplining their child loses their job and begins to drink heavily? Or becomes addicted to another drug, particularly one that correlates strongly with aggression? I suspect that what happens is that the habit persists, but the level of control and perspective becomes skewed - the parent starts to hit harder and with less provocation. As with a growing substance problem, I can see how the person in an example like this could fail to see their behaviour as problematic until it became extreme.

In summary, I think Winston Peters' recent announcements are probably not just a populist power-grab. I suspect he probably does view law in terms of Proclamation, and genuinely feels that sending messages is an important thing to do. That said, I don't believe that changes the fact that his proposals are at best short-sighted, and at worst disastrously irresponsible.