Nationals Legal Highs
Candor Trust

Candor Trust supports today’s statement against blatant commercialisation of fake cannabis by Chris Fowlie. The lack of glasnost about drug harm has resulted in perceptions that while analogue drugs may be risque in the Governments eyes, they're not harmful and will be tolerated on Queen St.

The Government continues burying its head in the sand, running a lethal bush drug policy as it spends a third of Police budgets weeding pot with no effect on the 20 minute purchase time for ilicits and 2 minute purchase time for fake pot or the dope toll, says Candor Coordinator Rachael Ford.

The cannabis community has shown it is not highly averse to endemic supply to children as per many reports about cannabis use for baby calming, and high involvement in the youth road toll, and the blase attitude produced by current drug policy and the Governments lackadaisical response to escalating harm, has spread to legal highs.

There is a great danger the present commercialisation of fake cannabis will reduce cannabis involvement in the road toll, which can and has been monitored for a decade, supplanting the pot toll with equivalent or greater harm caused by substitutes that goes undetected.

The ESR tests dead drivers for cannabis but not for Spice or Kronic which is more powerful, so it’s no wonder a chief scientist has said there’s little evidence against fake pot. Synthetic imitations have over time shown a trend to greater potency than that compound which they seek to imitate, a big safety concern.

The presence of fake but licit drugs will also undermine effectiveness of modern road policing methods like random drug testing, once introduced. It is equivalent to releasing a fake but strong booze that is unable to be picked up on breathalyser tests.

A large investment in deterrence based Policing targeted at young males is and certainly would also be increasingly required if more citizens, above the business as usual benchmark, are not to be killed as a result of more use of pot like gear on roads.

Checkpoints would need to develop capacity to test for the analogue drug as users will continue to be pressured to be the non drinking driver that checkpoints will miss. Our teen toll is currently 40% cannabis driven versus 8% alcohol related and this will likely be camouflaged by switches to fake cannabis, allowing decriminalisers to falsely intimate falling harm from the drug class.

There is no credible enforcement framework to prevent even the epidemic cannabis driving crashes; NZ Police told reporters that the roadside impairment test will only detect drug users with “an impairment level equivalent to a blood-alcohol reading of 100mg of alcohol per litre of blood”; well above the legal alcohol limit of 80mg. (No mercy as police begin drug testing - The Nelson Mail 29/10/2009)

Males under 21 have 241x normal crash risk at a blood alcohol level of 100mg (DOTHS809050), so allowing equivalent impairment to just under 0.1BACs when driving wasted on non alcohol drugs, by our unfit drug testing regime, is a big youth toll factor, and more pot poseurs on the scene are not needed.

Spice, Kronic et al should be added to Class C immediately, or else be entered into Class D to enable better regulation so that these substances are not being sold alongside alcohol and/or added to a new “Class E” schedule for traffic risk drugs that Candor Trust has proposed to the Ministry of Health months ago.

We requested of the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs the addition of a new Class E to contain active cannabis in blood over 3ng, JWH (Spice/Kronic) and other traffic risk drugs, including appropriate penalties for bringing about road safety threat reduction. And recommended as per best evidence that poly-drugging should get special treatment similar to extreme blood alcohol levels.

Road risk drugs should alongside alcohol at varying levels be in their own schedule either in the transport law (N.T. has a model) or be listed in a separate new schedule E in the Misuse of Drugs Act, since road risk (the biggest drug risk) is not incorporated into classification rankings eg alcohol is legal and it's co-killer on roads cannabis is only Class C. Cannabis and substitutes and alcohol would otherwise be Class A.

ENDS

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