We all know how it goes. Young people have fun. Old people see young people having fun, shake a stick at them, and demand that Something Be Done about it. And so we have the ugly sight of Peter Dunne - who previously called efforts to ban the sale of cigarettes to children "fascist" - moving to immediately ban Kronic and other "legal highs". But quite apart from questions of whether this is the right policy, or whether its just treating everything as a nail, there is a cost to this ban: extreme violence to our constitution.
Firstly, there's the way its being done: a Supplementary Order Paper to the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill, which from the noise they're making, will be passed under urgency this week. The SOP was made available this morning, and will be debated later this afternoon. For such a complex subject, where policy can make a serious difference to people's lives, you'd expect a little more than that. But no, it's the Brownlee-style steamroller again.
And then there's the SOP itself. The Minister already has the power to schedule any substance as a controlled drug by Order-in-Council. The catch is that that decision must be evidence-based. The amendments short-circuits that process, allowing the Minister to make any substance a "temporary class drug" simply by gazette notice. Evidence? It's for sissies, apparently. As are constitutional safeguards. In another borrowing from the Brownlee playbook, these notices will not be considered regulations, and thus will not be subject to the Regulations (Disallowance) Act 1989.
Dunne says he'll use these powers to ban Kronic and other party pills "by the end of the week". But that's not all he can do. The lack of requirement for evidence means he can ban anything he wants. If he doesn't like garlic, for example, then he can issue a notice, and everyone with more than a single bulb in their cupboard is suddenly a "drug dealer" and facing up to 8 years in prison. No checks, no balances, no safeguards - and certainly no requirement to establish social harm.
Basically, this law will make Dunne an absolute monarch in the area of drugs, just as Brownlee is an absolute monarch in Canterbury. Its rule by fiat, not by law. But I guess law is for peasants, not Ministers.
While there are problems with party pills and legal highs, this is not the way to solve them. Its not the way to solve anything in a democracy. It does violence to our constitution, and violence to the very idea of the rule of law. But hey, we have a killjoy Minister, a moral panic, and an election coming up. Who really cares about such abstract things in those circumstances?
