from the Melbourne Herald Sun
The Greens manifesto backs official supply of the dangerous drug ecstasy as well as state-sanctioned heroin and marijuana sales at what it calls appropriate venues.
The ecstasy policy suggests distributing the drug to users while providing official information detailing the dangers of the drug.
About 15 people have died from ecstasy use since it hit Australia in the 1990s. The drug can cause severe psychological side-effects in some people.
Green critic Mike Nahan, of the Institute of Public Affairs, a Right-wing think tank, said the party was the most radical Australia had seen.
“The Greens are loopier than any party I’ve seen, and will be much worse than the Australian Democrats ever were,” he said.
“It was OK while they were playing devil’s advocate, with Bob Brown shouting from the sidelines, but now there is a real prospect of them winning the balance of power.”
Prime Minister John Howard yesterday described the Greens’ agenda as kooky.
“The Greens are not just about the environment,” he said. “They have a whole lot of other very, very kooky policies in relation to things like drugs and all of that sort of stuff and new taxes and whatever, which people never talk about because they try and portray themselves as a one-issue party of just being warm and fuzzy about the environment.”
First of all I’d just like to point out that I’m not a Greens voter, I’m not a socialist, and I think that the majority of environmental movements have been hijacked by anti-corporate political activists and ignorant slogan-chanters. Nor, for that matter, could I be classified as a big drug user. Sure, I know my way around a bong, but I wouldn’t touch heroin in a fit and don’t even drink very often. Drug abuse just isn’t conducive to my personality. Murdoch’s Gerard McManus has drawn criticism by lacking the initiative to even bother to call a Greens Party member and flesh out the policy details with their own perspective in his blinkered little screed. Nor did he bother to take the rigorously objective and skeptical stance, which any real journalist should endeavour to espouse, by considering the possibility that the Greens may be right on the money.
Just because a policy is a controversial and reactionary seachange from the antiquated and heavy-handed traditionalist method of wasting police resources by punishing drug users who can never be a threat to anyone but themselves, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be given due analysis and banished as an over-simplified conservative punching-bag. Given the nauseatingly submissive nature of the Opposition’s attitude towards Howard’s gay marriage ban (although I’m willing to grit my teeth and look past it as a strategy of neutralising it as an election issue at the risk of alienating their large Catholic base), the minority parties of the Greens and the Democrats were the only ones to possess the integrity and sense of social justice to see the bill for what it was: backwards legislative bigotry. Of course I want Labor to banish the drab, xenophobic, fear-mongering, fiscally-obsessed Howard Liberal/National coalition, who have obsequiously proved that they are willing to follow disastrous US foreign policies dictated just as much by Biblical prophecies than by pragmatism and domestic responsiblity at the risk of seeming “anti-American”, to the long-due shallow grave it deserves. However, the willingness of many sections of society to go against the grain on many issues highlights the need for independents and minority parties to hold the balance of power in both houses for the sake of true and thorough democratic process.
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