ALCP Respond To Rankin Comments

It is annoying that Mr Rankin chooses to speculate as to what motivates our party and its supporters when a simple inquiry to one of our spokesmen would have clarified the matter.

He asks what kind of person is it who cares about nothing else other than the cannabis laws?

No one that I know of who is associated with the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis party [ALCP] is so impossibly single-minded...we all have other interests and activities..jobs, families,studies,hobbies and recreation. Cannabis prohibition happens to be a cause that we all feel passionate about and have collectively resolved to address. How does this makes us any stranger than those who passionately pursue other causes or pasttimes such as joining the local rugby club, the Lions, Abortion law groups,...? Our passion derives from the harm and hypocrisy that we see in prohibitionist policies and the serious erosion of rights and liberties that these policies have resulted in. We chose to use the electoral system to air our cause...a sensible and worthy exercise of the democratic process.

As for the outcome of the election and the status of the Greens, the ALCP actively encouraged its Coromandel branch to vote for Jeanette and quite clearly a large chunk of our would-be supporters also voted for the Green party-list. Our research suggested that our vote *would* have increased significantly from 1996 to over 2% but in the last week of the campaign, thanks to the PM's inept attack on the Green's cannabis policy, many ALCP supporters indeed swapped support to Green. In reality, the Greens have harvested what we have planted and tended...and we wish them well for the special votes. It is now not unrespectable to at least *discuss* drug law reform. We look forward to the policies in this area being based on science, reason and honesty rather than on Reader's Digest style anecdotes and what the PM can remember of sunday school.

Yours sincerely

Brandon Hutchison
General Secretary,
Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party

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