Arguments stack up to legalise cannabis

Around school drop-off time last week, a car drove up to the entrance of a Sydney unit block and five shots were fired. A 20year-old man died. A couple of days later, a 40-year-old man was shot in the early morning in Guildford.

Just another week of unending crime mayhem.

It’s clear that organised crime costs taxpayers billions of dollars and that the war on our streets is about control of the illicit drug market and the wealth that it offers. Is there a smarter solution? Yes. Legalise cannabis.

In 2021, one of the most senior police officers in NSW, Chief Inspector Jason Weinstein, called cannabis “the jet fuel of organised crime”.

“It’s one of the most widely used drugs in Australia and the profitability allows organised crime to generate significant income to fund the importation of other drugs from overseas,” he said.

As we saw when the US prohibited alcohol in the 1920s, you create an illegal business model and vicious cycle of killing.

Once you legalise and responsibly regulate a market, the killing stops.

If you take away the market, and instead tax and regulate it responsibly, the money stops filling the coffers of organised crime and starts flowing to schools, hospitals and police. Yet we still hear opponents telling us legalisation will bring a slew of bad consequences.

In January 2020, it became legal in the ACT to grow up to four cannabis plants per household and possess 50g of dry cannabis.

In the 12 months following, cannabis offences fell by 90 per cent, drug driving offences remained steady and there was no increase in cannabis-related hospital presentations. And cannabis use remained steady. The latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey showed that cannabis use in the ACT was not only steady but actually lower than the rest of Australia.

So the law and order argument stacks up and the health argument stacks up.

What we need is political leadership.

The same survey told us last week that since 2019, more people support cannabis legalisation than oppose it and that figure is growing by the day.

It also revealed that the proportion of people who believed that possession of cannabis should not be a criminal offence has reached an alltime high of 80 per cent.

There is no political cost. Just political and economic gain.

The time for delay and excuses is over. We should legalise and responsibly regulate cannabis now.

Jeremy Buckingham is a NSW Legalise Cannabis MP