Cannabis Party’s Parliamentary Hopes Growing The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party is heartened by an internet poll that shows it comfortably over the 5% threshold to get into parliament. Xtra’s internet poll, which has had over 13,000 votes, shows that 8% of those polled would give their party vote to the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party.

ALCP list member and Epsom candidate Caleb Armstrong is optimistic but cautious. “We think this is a very good sign, but we’re not going to get complacent”.

The ALCP gained 1.66% of the party vote in the 1996 election and ranked seventh in the party vote s takes. The party had been together for only four months. Based on that performance they are campaigning to get everyone who voted for them last time to get two friends to vote for them this time.

Mr Armstrong says “I believe that the Xtra poll shows the message is getting across. A lot of people have put in a lot of work educating people about the fact that prohibition is an ineffective way of dealing with this issue.

A lot of the dogma that used to surround cannabis is going, thanks in part to the Health Select Comittee’s report on the health effects of cannabis. I think people know a l ot more about cannabis and its prohibition than they did three years ago”.

The poll mentioned is available at xtra’s election website, at www.xtra.co.nz.

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>