Great article in the herald today: Brian Rudman: High time Govt took notice of facts on drug war

Some highlights from the report that was suppressed for six months by the tories:

In a study of the drug laws of 11 countries, New Zealand included, the report concludes that punitive regimes like those in Britain and New Zealand have no impact on drug use. As Liberal Democrat Minister of State for Crime Prevention Norman Baker pointed out, “banging people up and increasing sentences does not stop drug use”.

And also, some tidy NZ stats thrown in:

In 2011, the Law Commission’s review of the Misuse of Drugs Act noted that 400,000 Kiwis broke the cannabis law every year. Many regularly. It said the police spent 598,000 hours fighting the war on drugs at an estimated cost of more than $100 million annually. In 2009, personal possession and use offences made up 69 per cent of the 25,000 drug offences recorded by the police. Another report records that 16 per cent of the prison population are inside for drug-related crimes.

I fully agree Brian!

Did you know the government can seize your assets without a conviction? All they need now is an allegation that a crime may have taken place. Here is a record of every forfeiture ever done since 2003…

So I got frustrated by the slow progress of cannabis legalisation in this country and decided I’d like to know how much money the government is currently potentially getting from their nasty little Criminal Proceeds Act.

This is the request:

Please supply a log of every forfiture ever done under the Proceeds of Crime act. In order to anonymise the data, I am happy to only receive a subset of the total records, but must include

• date of forfiture
• amount in dollars
• geographic region (can be granular such as Otago/Auckland)
• name of the law or laws that were allegidly broken
• current status of the forfiture (in order to see if refunds are being given for falsely done forfitures)
• ideally a serial code / ID code to help ensure the data is real and provide (not strictly required)

This should be dating back to 1991 when it was put into law.
http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1991/0120/latest/DLM250669.html

They responded with a PDF file made from rasterised text (I’d need to re-type it) which I redacted and rasterised below.

I’ve also data entered the scan into Excel to produce the following digital version of the data.

Excel file version of table below: Official Information Request

I also asked if it included the assets seized from one Kim Dotcom, to this their answer – from the Police this time – was as follows:

Police response in regards to Kim Dotcom Confiscations

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Here is an incredibly detailed analysis of the question of exactly how much would be saved in the USA if they went to full legalisation.

The report examines the budgetary implications of legalizing marijuana – taxing and regulating it like other goods – in all fifty states and at the federal level, and estimates that legalizing marijuana would save $7.7 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. $5.3 billion of this savings would accrue to state and local governments, while $2.4 billion would accrue to the federal government.

Miron Report (PDF) 2005