Pubdate: Thu, 14 May 2009
Source: Dominion Post, The (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2009 The Dominion Post
Contact:  http://www.dompost.co.nz
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2550
Author: Rosemary Mcleod
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)

A WARNING AGAINST CANNABIS

If there's a good side to the incident at Hospital Hill, it's that 
there are decent people in cynical times.

That goes for the people who kept an eye on each other, helped 
police, looked after elderly neighbours, and fed people's pets as the 
hours dragged on. It's reassuring that we still rise to the occasion.

Since everybody's an armchair expert on policing, though, there will 
inevitably be a downside. An intimation of that was the flat near the 
gunman where three kids refused to listen to police, and finally had 
to be arrested and taken into custody for their own good. They were 
charged with obstruction.

On the morning the siege began, the three flatmates were repeatedly 
told to go inside, by their own admission, but kept peeping over 
their gate to watch what was happening, putting themselves at risk as 
bullets flew by.

I guess it's what you'd expect from teenagers, who believe they're 
immortal and usually view police, not themselves, as public 
nuisances, but hopefully now realise how foolish they were.

They're not unique. A lot of kids their age have an attitude to 
police: it's a logical extension of resisting authority that starts 
with weary parents and teachers. It's police, after all, who make it 
hard for them to get drunk in public places, to buy and sell booze, 
to drink-drive, to have loud parties all weekend, and other 
necessities of life, such as urinating in doorways, or smashing 
bottles in the street.

It seldom occurs to them that police intervention is mostly for their 
own protection, just as their parents' attempts at imposing curfews 
and offering good advice are greeted with derision - or at best, 
meekly listened to, then blithely ignored once out of earshot.

Yet it's police who scrape their bodies off the road after accidents, 
who hunt the rapist who grabs the drunk girl staggering home from a 
party, who deal with gatecrashers intent on violence, and who have to 
deal, day after day, with stoned kids and their abuse.

Disliking police is a rite of passage. I was probably not much 
different from these kids at their age, for no particular reason 
other than dislike of authority, and it didn't help when I saw police 
behaving badly a few times.

That wasn't the case in Napier, in what should have been a routine 
drug bust, but there'll be plenty of people with a negative view 
about that. It happened, after all, just as the governor of 
California opened up the idea of looking at changing cannabis laws there.

Our cannabis advocates are an aggressive and humourless lot, and I 
expect they're muttering to each other that this siege would never 
have happened if only it was legal here.

OTHERS will pick up on the idea that drug raids are an invasion of 
privacy, as if police should give advance warning so people can tidy 
up and bake a batch of scones to welcome them.

They'll be less agitated about the man at the centre of the siege, 
Jan Molenaar, and his obsession with guns, and they'll be loath to 
link his cannabis use to his evident paranoia. But I'm not.

I've seen it too often. What would have been different last weekend 
if cannabis was legal? Would Molenaar have been a happy and 
well-adjusted individual, with a hobby no more sinister than keeping bantams?

Would the people who now profit from the drug trade quietly abandon 
it after legalisation? Would there be no black market trade? And 
would gang members turn suddenly benign, like the hippies of long ago 
who sat around being mellow and fatuous? I don't think so.

Molenaar is said to have hated both gangs and police, symbols of 
authority of vastly different kinds.

Gangs would have been both competition and threat, and police a 
constant legal threat. He was a looming disaster if either burst in on him.

There are men like him all over the country. They're not the kind who 
are ever likely to become legal operators, selling regulated, 
quality-controlled drugs, but dangerous, antisocial nutters, warnings 
against, rather than advertisements for, their supposedly benign drug 
of choice.
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