How Advocates for Drug Reform Just Lost the Battle for a Generation

OPINION: Mandates are fun things.

If cannabis hadn’t been directly on the ballot in these elections, the country could be on the way to legalization right now, or at least further decriminalization. After all, left-wing parties won more than 60 percent of the seats in Parliament and have been pushing for more action on drug law reform for years.

But cannabis was squarely on the ballot and he appears to have narrowly lost. Special votes released next week will toughen things up, but are unlikely to overturn the result, unless seven out of 10 special voters back legalization. This is possible, but very, very unlikely.

Now that the country has spoken directly on this issue, more actions on drug law reform are off the table for this period, and probably for much longer. It could be the late 2020s before the country grapples with this again.

READ MORE:
* Election 2020: One referendum passes, another fails
* Referendum results: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern voted ‘yes’ for both cannabis and euthanasia
* Referendum results: Cannabis legalization narrowly loses votes

Justice Minister Andrew Little was quite clear that when asked about the results, the quasi decriminalization enacted last term appears to be the limit. Doing anything else would appear to deliberately subvert the will of the voters. As with taxes and the housing market, the left has an enormous amount of power but has handcuffed itself to do nothing with it.

It is absolutely fair that advocates of cannabis legalization are furious with Jacinda Ardern, who revealed in the minutes after Friday’s result that she voted in favor of legalization, after months of keeping her vote secret.

The vote was close enough, and Ardern is popular enough, that her intervention could have been decisive, even if it was just her looking through the lens of Facebook Live and explaining the safeguards in the bill. A post-election Curia poll suggests that only 55 percent of Labor voters supported “yes”; many more would have done so with a clear position on Ardern’s part.

Ardern’s position that his vote should remain secret so that he does not influence voters was almost as ridiculous as National’s position that all of his MPs should vote for the party’s stance against legalization. Politicians fall short of secret political positions: just as John Key’s “I Forgot” evasion on the Springbok tour was cowardly, so was Ardern’s clever weave on cannabis.

The point of being a politician is to influence voters. Being prime minister doesn’t lift you out of this messy world of politics, it entrench you in it.

The position became even more untenable when Ardern kept the secret after the polls closed, and instead slipped the news once the result on cannabis was known. It felt like salt in the wound for the defenders, and he feels cynical in terms of his opportunity: the news of his position will be absorbed mainly by all the other headlines today, as the euthanasia advocates celebrate their victory after a fight. decades.

But cannabis advocates and the left in general made a lot of mistakes.

Ardern has proven to be an unreliable ally for the causes of concern to the left. She is capable of great political courage and real action – look at abortion, gun law reform, the oil and gas exploration ban, the pack of families, and the state that halts most of the economy during the closing.

She is not a conservative, not even really a centrist. But he jealously guards his political capital, and the wounds of Labor’s nine years in the Opposition remain fresh in his mind.

More generally, the referendum itself was a mistake. Now that he’s been defeated, the advocates of legalization are further behind than they started. This Parliament will have a strong majority for legalization, but it cannot act on it now.

Cannabis is a complicated subject that doesn’t boil down very well to a binary yes or no answer – many people who voted ‘no’ might be on most of the road to decriminalization, but a little scared their kids will have access high potency edibles. Politicians are elected to be able to examine the complexity and reach compromises on these issues. (The Green Party, which lobbied for the referendum, may not be that angry, however it probably pushed turnout enough to get the Greens some additional MPs.)

Since the decision to hold a referendum was made, the defenders have ruined the campaign. You can see how well the euthanasia campaign was carried out to see that.

David Seymour had some structural advantages with the euthanasia vote, which scored a huge victory on Friday. The first is that older people, the most trusted group of voters in the country, overwhelmingly backed him.

The euthanasia referendum focused on a law that has already been approved, after having been contested for an entire political mandate. This meant that much of the public had a pretty good idea of ​​exactly what was going to happen, including the safeguards in place, and could be sure that nothing would drastically change during a select committee process. This is in contrast to the “draft” of the cannabis bill, which came too late and was poorly understood by the public.

But cannabis advocates did a terrible job fixing these problems in the campaign. The End of Life Choice campaign featured very understanding stories of people in immense pain who wanted a way out, following in the footsteps of the late Lecretia Seales. If the cannabis campaign featured any human stories of lives ruined by minor convictions, it certainly didn’t get a blanket cut. In fact, my main memory of the yes campaign was a bunch of flashy ads of people sitting in a nice house looking at the camera and saying “yes for control.” Control of what?

The right wing of the country was never really courted. There was little discussion about the things that could be paid for with tax revenue or the power that would take away from the gangs. Instead, it felt like a campaign to make people who already wanted to vote yes feel good about themselves, rather than convincing the medium to switch sides. Curia voter polls suggest that just over a fifth of national voters voted in favor, and that older people in rural areas are the most against it.

However, there is some inspiration that advocates of cannabis legalization can draw from the victory of euthanasia. Euthanasia reform failed in both 1995 and 2003. Political conditions will eventually allow cannabis to be reexamined. But it could take a very long time.