Now he’s in charge you can be assured he’s either changed his tune or he will kick the can so far down the road it’ll just be a speck on the horizon.
The Sydney Morning Herald writes
NSW Premier Chris Minns passionately argued for the legalisation of cannabis while Labor was in opposition, arguing that ending the prohibition of the drug would make it “safer, less potent and less criminal”.
In 2019 Minns, then-shadow transport minister, told a gathering of party members in favour of drug law reform it was “time for Labor to have a big debate that includes a commitment to legalising this drug”.
In a written copy of the speech circulated by Minns at the time and obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald, the now-premier argued legalisation of cannabis was preferable to decriminalisation, saying the former would allow NSW to regulate the drug.
“While legalisation would make it easier to control, decriminalisation would not allow the state to regulate and control its manufacturing or distribution,” he said.
“This means we would be left with the illegal market, the criminal control of the substance and with the dangerous toxicity levels associated with manipulation of THC levels.
“The bottom line is that we can’t make it go away, but we can make it safer, less potent and less criminal. Without rewarding bikies, and organised crime groups that feed off the black market nature of the drug.”
Cannabis legalisation is likely to become a key issue in the new term of parliament following the election of the Legalise Cannabis Party’s Jeremy Buckingham to the state’s upper house.
With the upper house count to be confirmed on Wednesday, Buckingham, a former NSW Greens MP, has almost certainly garnered enough of the vote to join the powerful upper house crossbench.
Buckingham told the Herald that a bill to legalise the cannabis industry in NSW would be one of two immediate priorities for the party, along with reforms to drug driver laws to ensure people with legal prescriptions for medicinal cannabis aren’t discriminated against.
“What we’re keen to do through the parliament and through the committee process is to investigate the realities of the existing cannabis industry,” he said.
“There’s this failure by politicians to recognise that there is already a massive recreational cannabis industry in NSW and Australia worth billions that is unregulated and undiminished by laws around prohibition.
“We need to come to understand what the industry looks like and what the benefits could be if we were to bring it out of the shadows and into the light in terms of regulation.”
Minns’ comments in 2019 come despite ruling out decriminalisation during a debate in the lead-up to the state election last month.
In a statement on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the premier said his comments in 2019 were made “well before prescriptions for medicinal cannabis were as widely available as they are today”.
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