Cannabis would be available to be bought and smoked at Amsterdam-style cafés or grown at home under a legalisation bill written by the Greens.
Adults would be allowed to grow up to six plants at home for private consumption, and there would be no upper weight limit for possession, according to the bill drafted by Senator David Shoebridge.
“This bill could legalise cannabis in one go across the country with a simple and coherent national scheme for growing, distribution, sales and taxation,” he said. “What we have created with this bill is a core set of principles for an ethical cannabis market that is controlled by individuals and small businesses rather than big pharma, big tobacco or big alcohol.”
The legislation would establish a regulator called the Cannabis Australia National Agency (CANA), which would be responsible for quality checks and labelling. It would also set the standard for licences being legally required to import, export and sell cannabis.
The agency would maintain a register of cannabis plant varieties, known as strains.
Specially licensed cannabis cafés would be allowed to sell cannabis buds or products such as brownies, and would allow customers to smoke the weed onsite, as long as it was in an outdoor area and not a nuisance to the public. Cafés would also be allowed to sell cannabis online.
The bill would not allow advertising cannabis except for certain forms of ads displayed at places where it would be sold.
Shoebridge said the bill was inspired by places abroad where cannabis has been regulated, including Canada: “We have learnt from the experience in other jurisdictions and tried to draw a middle path between the let-it-rip corporate markets in the US and more tightly controlled government supply.
“We don’t want the market to be dominated by a handful of large corporations but we certainly don’t want to be the fun police either.”
The federal legislation would override any state or territory laws that prohibit the use and possession of cannabis. Serious offences under the bill — such as supplying weed to a minor — would be penalised at two years’ imprisonment, 2000 penalty points, or both.
Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) costings previously issued to Shoebridge show a combination of GST, company tax and a 15% cannabis sales tax could add up to more than $28 billion in government revenue in the first decade after legalisation. If the cannabis tax was set at 25%, the revenue would be more than $36 billion. The price of a gram of cannabis would begin at $13, according to the PBO analysis, Shoebridge said.
The Greens will seek consultation on the bill before introducing it to Parliament.
Many countries have legalised cannabis use in recent years, including Canada, Mexico and Thailand. There are also dozens of countries where the use of the drug has been decriminalised.
It is absolutely absurd that we criminalise the use of this plant. If anyone thinks that after over 100 years of the “war on drugs” we’re somehow going to win the war in the future, they must be mad.
A “zero tolerance approach to drugs” is just sticking one’s head in the sand. The human race has felt the need to recreationally use drugs since the dawn of time, to think that urge can be stamped out via legislation, fines and imprisonment is naïve in the extreme.
Making cannabis illegal merely operates to:
(a) deprive the government (both State and Federal) of a lucrative source of taxation;
(b) hands a multi-billion dollar industry direct to organised crime;
(c) and destroys the lives of countless Australian’s by giving them a criminal record for smoking a plant (of course you can smoke a plant if it’s produced by Philip Morris or any other tobacco company).
It’s high time (pardon the pun) that Australia pulls its head out of the sand and moves with the times.
The sky hasn’t fallen in on the ACT since growing of individual supply was decriminalised. Sadly it seems that’s the only jurisdiction – state or federal – willing to have a sensible, grown up conversation about recreational drug use (cf pill testing also). If seems despite wall-to-wall Labour across the mainland, the ghost of Nancy Regan’s voice still looms large in the minds of our predominantly boomer pollies.
South Australia was, as so often last century, in the forefront of progressive legislation, making personal consumption & cultivation (of fewer than 6 plants IIRC..it’s several decades ago and the ole short term memory…wot wus I saying..?) non-criminal – a non concept if ever there were one – long before the ACT.
Even the Evil Empire which cursed the world with this longest, most destructive war a century ago has now made consumption legal in 21 states with another 10 having ‘decriminalised’ its use.
However, all such unreforms, the Devil is in the regulatory detail – in Canada & California the licensing is so onerous that only megacorps can successfully navigate the deliberately complicated restrictions.
Even in the posterchild, the Netherlands, growing & wholesale supply has remained illegal – the supply of the ‘coffee shops’ has remained ona knife edge,always subject to moral panic for political purposes.
Preceding Nancy Reagan were the infamous ‘Rockefeller drug laws’ used to stereotype ethnic communities and lower income groups.
One nation to look at is Portugal, not just about legalisation and/or decriminalisation, but a holistic bipartisan non political approach.
Until 1971 any GP in the UK could prescribe any drug – heroin, cocaine, morphine, amphetamine,tincture of cannabis etc etc – and they would be filled, on the NHS, at the local chemist.
No black market and fewer than 10,000 addicts in the entire country, mostly war veterans, dentists, doctors & nurses.
This was anathema to the USofAs which refused another IMF loan to prop up Sterling unless this policy was abolished.
Overnight the Chinese grocers in Dixon St. Soho stepped up for another mercantile opportunity.
Today the best guestimate for junkies in (just) England is anything up to 1M – with twice that number occasional users en route.
Don’t forget the “one puff and your hooked for life” terror posters, one of which featured a sleazy looking individual passing an innocent looking girl a cannabis cigarette! Stylied in black and white – gives a clue. The horrors depicted were extraordinary and the statements completely false.
There may be a little problem with our cannabis DUI laws, in which the tiniest amount of cannabis in the bloodstream is an offence. This law, as many Crikey commentators have pointed out, is irrational, and serves only as a punitive measure, not as a realistic penalty for actually being unable to operate a vehicle safely. Before a long line of offenders stretches across the length of our capital cities after being busted for a ‘quickie’ at the cannabis cafes, we need to come up with what actually constitutes a dangerous amount of the substance in relation to driving and machinery.
Or perhaps creates a whole new market for Uber……………….
For anyone who uses weed regularly enough, no amount can intoxicate more than a couple of beers’ worth.
I’d like to see drivers being tested for basic competence, without reference to scapegoat substances.
Well, I would like to see that happen.
Just make it happen, the sooner the better. Of course, ALP wowsers and LNP reactionaries will resist to their last breath.