New Zealand - you gotta be this old to have rights.

[Rev. Rye]

I tend to think that restricted substance laws are dumb ideas..but it's not really clear how adding tobacco to an already existing list of things that people in nz can't legally consume amounts to subjugation or tyranny. Is this one of those conditioning things, where we contend that taking away the smokes is just a prelude to the big show....?

I assume it's illegal to smoke crack, too, is this also part of turning people into subjects?

I’m personally in the “legalize everything” mindset when it comes to drugs.

Why? For starters, I live in a nation where all it’s doing is creating a massive black market and filling our prisons (giving us a higher percentage of our population in jail than any other nation in recorded history with the possible exception of Nazi Germany). And I became convinced of the “legalize everything” route when I looked into what it looks like when the powers that be are actually effective at restricting the drug flow: in Russia, they managed to put a huge stop to the heroin trade. And what happened? Well, with Russia being Russia, I can’t expect a “happily ever after” ending. What actually happened was they came up with a new drug called Krokodil.

It’s a more concentrated form of heroin, with a high that’s eight times as intense that only lasts 15 minutes. And, because of the impurities in the drug manufacturing, it has a terrifying side effect. The name Krokodil comes from what it does to your skin, which makes it a combo of the most terrifying parts of Jared Leto’s arm going septic in Requiem for a Dream and the Nazis’ close encounter with the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the first stages, the skin around the puncture sites gets scaly and green. In the later stages of addiction, it just rots off, all the way down to the bone. There are images online that can show you exactly what it does to you. Life expectancy of a junkie is about 2 years from first hit to last breath. And, yes, they replaced another public health crisis with another one. This is exactly what the best case scenario looks like for drug criminalization: a Russian junkie, the skin of whose arms have rotted so much you can clearly see his bones.

Granted, I think the massive black market scenario is going to be more likely in New Zealand’s case, at least, as much as anything can qualify as “massive” there, but I can’t see this working out well in the long run. At least the cutoff date is sometime in the 2000s, and, unless cigar boxes count as “tobacco products”, I wouldn’t be affected by it in any case.