Peta Credlin: Canberra dopes are a law unto themselves

Thanks to the ACT Labor government, marijuana is set to be legal from next year, writes Peta Credlin. The reason it isn’t legal immediately? They just need to warn the public it’s dangerous. Come again?

It might be getting harder and harder to smoke a cigarette but relax, it’s now easier to smoke a joint, thanks to Labor’s latest burst of social engineering.

Despite no consultation with the electorate — an increasing problem at state and territory level when it comes to social changes like this — the ACT Labor government has just facilitated a backbencher’s bill through the assembly to legalise the growing and possession of marijuana for personal use from the beginning of next year.

When asked in a Sky News interview this week why it isn’t legal immediately, the MP responsible said that’s because a public information campaign is needed to warn young people how dangerous marijuana use can be!

I kid you not.

It’s now easier to smoke a joint, thanks to Labor’s latest burst of social engineering. Picture: iStock

The ‘‘brains trust’’ behind this nonsense, ACT MLA Michael Pettersson, a former CFMEU official and welfare officer for the National Union of Students, admitted that cannabis use by young people has a proven tendency to trigger or worsen mental illness; yet he then argued it still needed to be legalised because cannabis addicts should get treatment rather than face fines.

Come again?

So we know that recreational drug use is bad for people; we know that legalising anything makes it more widespread; and we worry about the epidemic of mental illness and suicide afflicting young people — yet somehow we think legalising cannabis makes sense?

Give me a break.

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If smoking is so damaging to our physical health that we wage massive million-dollar health campaigns against it; and if smoking marijuana is even worse because of the mental health dimension; and if we can’t trust people to drive a car with even a trace of cannabis in their system, why on earth are we making cannabis use easier and inevitably more common?

(And please, don’t confuse the issue by conflating recreational drug use with medicinal cannabis which uses a different part of the plant without nearly so much of the high-inducing THC).

Michael Pettersson has moved the bill to legalise cannabis for personal use in the ACT. Picture: Supplied

This isn’t just another example of a Labor government that campaigns on bread and butter issues but governs by social engineering.

Sadly, this is further illustration of how muddle-headed our society has become: being panic-stricken about the consequences but permissive about the causes.

It’s no mistake that the ACT assembly (not much more than a trumped-up local council in reality) is the first to make an illicit drug legal.

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They were also the proponents of a recent

pill-testing ‘‘trial’’ and are being set up as the ‘‘incubator’’ to promote social change for the larger states who can then say, ‘‘but it’s already happening under another Australian government so we should move with the times’’.

Are we really this stupid?

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights from 6pm.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Canberra dopes are a law unto themselves