An AUSTRALIAN
CANNABIS LAW REFORM MOVEMENT

Founded 26 January 2000 by Graeme Dunstan.

The Australian Cannabis Law Reform Movement is an association of friends committed to:

* re legalising cannabis,

* ending the War on Drug Users

* releasing the prisoners and supporting the casualties of the War on Drugs

* giving visible and active support to proponents who are calling for a reform of drug prohibition policies.

The Australian Cannabis Law Reform Movement is affiliated to the Nimbin HEMP Embassy, and it aims to carry forward cannabis law reform advocacy state wide, nationally and globally.

For the past eight years, the HEMP Embassy has produced the annual Nimbin "Let It Grow" Mardi Grass, which now begins with a minute-long silence to remember the prisoners and casualties of the War on Drugs and closes with the biggest cannabis law reform rally in Australia. About 10,000 people participate.

The author has been the principal organiser of the Nimbin Mardi Grass and Operations Manager of the HEMP Embassy over the past two years.

Why is our Prison Population Increasing?

Our reading of history tells us that the rise of prison numbers is conjunct with the rise of tyranny - those times when the rich, the powerful and the corrupt go for greed and set themselves apart from any social responsibility for the poor, the planet or future generations.

We associate excessive prison populations with times of oppression such as the gulags of Russia under the rule of the Stalinists, the concentration camps in Germany under the rule of the Nazis, the prison hulks in the rivers of Britain under the rule of the Whigs.

On the 15 February, the number of prisoners incarcerated in the USA exceeded 2 million (there are at least another 7 million on probation) - which makes the USA the biggest jailer of all time! Never before has a nation jailed such a high proportion of its population.

This massive incarceration industry coincides with the rise of the New World Order, and the USA as an absolute world power.

Tyranny is a word less heard these days but it is no less real.

It is timely to recall that New South Wales began as a penal colony during the age of a tyranny by the rich that produced the French Revolution. In that time a "liberal" was someone who wanted to liberate society from tyranny and was reviled in same way as communists and greenies are reviled today.

It is important to remember that the political movement, which produced the democratically elected parliamentary system of government which we have today, saw itself as a struggle to end the tyranny and the cruelty of the convict era.

Two hundred years ago we were a penal colony of British imperialism. Now Australia and NSW have become a penal colonies of US imperialism. But this time we are jailing our own people and paying for it.

Ruling elites always seek to deny or disguise their tyranny. What makes this modern age of tyranny invisible is the absolute dominance of the mass media by the multinational corporate elite. Our tyranny is seemingly so comfortable - no one is starving and everyone is watching TV.

But what cannot be disguised is the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the fear that dominates the discourse about public space, the fear and distrust that people have of their governments and the fact of prisons and the inexorable rise of the prisoner population.

So the short answer to the question "Why do we have an increasing jail population in NSW?" is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

There are more rules for the poor and less for the rich who have put themselves and their profits beyond national governments.

The War on Drugs as a Vehicle for Tyranny

NSW research estimates between 71% and 83% of the 7,500 full time prisoners in NSW are incarcerated for drug related crimes.

What more needs to be said? The War on Drugs is what is filling up and over-crowding our jails.

The War on Drugs is the longest war in which our governments have ever engaged. Drug prohibition laws were introduced at the turn of the century as a means of tyrannising the Chinese racial minority.

In the 70s drug laws were toughened and police forces were bolstered and reorganised to tyrannise the "youthful left" which had been so successful in drawing a line on Australia's involvement in, and support for, the Cold War misadventures of the USA. The youth movement had chosen cannabis as its recreational drug of choice.

Cannabis, a medicine that has been used for 4,800 years, continues to be a central concern of the War on Drugs. In 1998, Australia wide there were 64,000 arrests for cannabis offences. It is estimated that a third of the people entering US prisons are for non-violent cannabis offences, 85% of these merely for possession of what was once considered a sacred herb.

Drug laws were cranked up again in the 80s in the USA when fear of the crack epidemic, which was a spin off from the race-based urban revolts in the poor districts and slums of many major cities, became a theme of the mass media and an obsession of the US Congress.

In the 80s, the era of galloping greed, Australia followed the US lead with sympathetic law and order campaigns by governments responding to the community fear produced by violence, property crime and police corruption. This crime and corruption was created by the virulent drug black market, itself a direct consequence of prohibition laws.

No one these days claims that drug prohibition policies work or can work. But no politician has demonstrated the moral courage to repeal these bad laws or do something different to reduce the miseries of substance abuse.

This is what we know for sure about prohibition:

* It doesn't work - drugs are in prison and in schools. The fact is that we live in a world that always has been, and always will be, filled with drugs.

* It corrupts our police

* It creates a violent black market

* It makes drug use more dangerous

* It spreads AIDS and other diseases

* It creates fear and division in our communities.

* It is expensive.

In NSW we spend more on incarceration of drug law offenders than we do on rehabilitating drug addicts. We now build more jails than we build hospitals or universities. Australian governments are happy to spend about $40,000 per head to prosecute illicit drug users and $30,000 a year to keep them in jail, but can no longer find it within their generosity to fund university scholarships or health services for the poor.

We also know that the War on Drugs has produced a human rights crisis.

* The War on Drugs has locked up 5000 people in NSW alone most of them for victimless crimes.

* It compromises our rights and civil liberties

* It gives police forces arbitrary powers of search and arrest, corrupts them, arms them and makes them feared and dangerous.

* It criminalises harmless experimentation.

* It denies the needy useful medicines.

* It kills people.

And worst of all the War on Drugs has alienated our youth and cursed our future as a community.

The War on Drugs is primarily a war on youth. It is fought in public places and malls when police use drug laws (and knife laws and assembly laws) to harass and intimidate gatherings of young people, criminalising them with drug offences.

Our young people are also disserved by official drug education, which because of prohibition, is based in fear and ignorance. Research has it that well over half of our youth experiment with illicit drugs - most often cannabis. When it comes to drugs our youth know our leadership is lying.

What we sow, we reap. Mass cynicism amongst our youth is a terrible weed to have planted. So is the violence that incarceration engenders and brings back into our community life. So is the consequence of creating a generation of Drug War orphans.

Mass resentment, anger, alienation, depression and suicide are the fruit of the War on Drugs that is being harvested now and will be harvested by future generations. The sins of the fathers ...

So why do we have drug prohibition policies that are so manifestly a costly failure and a social disaster? Because they serve not to control or reduce substance abuse. Rather they serve as an effective means of social control.

They serve as the vehicle for the tyranny of the poor (for it is the poor and the black who are in jail) by the rich in these times.

How to reduce the Prisoner Population?

The answer is easy. Release the prisoners and end the War on Drugs.

But how to end the War on Drugs when our governments are either complicit in the tyranny of the rich or corrupt or lacking the courage or morality to give such leadership?

We of the Australian Cannabis Law Reform Movement have no faith that the NSW Carr Labor government has either the will or the ability or the interest to reduce the prison population or reform the drug laws. At heart it is a law-and-order government and happy to beat up law-and-order issues, create more drug prohibition laws and stiffen sentencing.

The NSW Drug Summit, the sop thrown to the electorate at the last election after the morality and logic of the bipartisan law-and-order auction was challenged by the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, showed the power and passion of the drug law reform lobby and their call for more compassionate approaches. But the NSW Labor Government reined in the recommendations of the Summit and all we got was bandaids and tinkerings at the edges of the problem.

The Carr Government chose caution and timidity. Meanwhile the prison population grows, the suffering of prisoners continues and the violence of our oppression is perpetuated.

If change is not going to come from within the NSW Parliament it must come from without. Only extra-parliamentary, grass root movements of the poor have ever ended or ameliorated the tryanny of the rich.

And that is exactly what the Australian Cannabis Law Reform Movement intends to be.

An Olympic Amnesty for the Prisoners of the War on Drugs On 19 January 2000 I wrote on behalf of the Nimbin HEMP Embassy to the Honourable John Della Bosca MLC, NSW Special Minister of State and Assistant Treasurer, calling for an amnesty for all the NSW prisoners of the War on Drug as an Olympic peace and friendship gesture to the poor of NSW who have paid for the Sydney Olympics with their taxes and cutbacks in services and yet cannot afford to attend.

The amnesty call is now being taken up in earnest by a coalition of interests which include the Australian Cannabis Law Reform Movement, Justice Action, Ohms not Bombs and the Australian Prisoners Union.

How many prisoners in the amnesty, you ask? The Carr government will know soon enough because we intend to put the Cannabus on the road during July and August and go to every prison in NSW and, in collaboration with the prisoners and their families, count them.

The Cannabus will be part cannabis law reform roadshow and part media circus. It will be visiting all major rural centres listening to stories of injustice and suffering, talking up civil rights, medicinal cannabis, and industrial hemp. We will be pitching to the young, the old and the enterprising - anyone and everyone who believes in justice.

And if you think Pauline Hansen touched some vein of rural discontent, wait till you see the rural revolt that will be stirred up by the Cannabus!

We plan to arrive Sydney a couple of weeks out from the Sydney 2000 HEMP Olympix and conduct the Sydney 2000 HEMP Olympix as a Big Day Out style event (expected crowd: 50,000) with music, fun games and cannabis law reform advocacy.

Then we will let the dust settle and negotiate the amnesty with the Carr Government before the Sydney Olympic Games begin.

The War on Drugs is global and the Carr Government is going to have to choose, in the witness of global media, whether to grant the amnesty and present itself as a caring friendly government hosting a caring friendly Olympic Games.

The alternative will be to be seen as an oppressive government of the New World Order promoting sports fascism with corporate logos under the protection of riot squads as per the Seattle World Trade Conference.

We promise fun and games.

We promise that while there is blood in our veins and fire in our bellies, we will not rest until an amnesty for the prisoners of the War on Drugs is won, the War ended and the liberties, for which our forebears fought and won, re-asserted.

Yours sincerely

Graeme Dunstan Director Australian Cannabis Law Reform Movement

When injustice becomes Law, resistance becomes duty.