Legalise Cannabis Party

Summary

Policies & Commentary

As single issue parties go, Legalise Cannabis is an enduring one. This is only their second federal election under that name – you may remember them more as the Help End Marijuana Prohibition Party, or (HEMP) for short, the name they were originally founded under in 1993, back when Paul Keating was Prime Minister and Cobains still walked the Earth. They’ve had some success at getting elected in various state Parliaments, currently having candidates representing them in WA, NSW and Victoria. But so far, they’ve never got across the line in a federal election, but in the last two elections, they succeeded in more or less doubling their vote both times. It’s possible this could be the one for them.

Adding to that possibility is their new Senate candidate for Victoria, Fiona Patten. Patten founded the Sex Party back in 2009, and was later elected to the Victorian Parliament in 2014, under the banner of the renamed Reason Party. Last year, the Reason Party was dissolved, and Patten announced that she had joined the LCP. Patten is fairly well-regarded in Victorian state politics, having been one of the major forces behind the state’s decriminalisation of sex work in 2022. She also introduced a bill to legalise cannabis in 2018 and again 2022, unsuccessfully both times. Will her star power be enough to get her elected to the Senate? We could do worse.

Legalise Cannabis has a fairly straightforward policy position: Cannabis exists, and they want it to be Legal.

Oh, okay, there’s more nuance to it than that.

So the party would like to see cannabis treated in much the same way as alcohol and tobacco in terms of labelling and advertising, although they do not want it to be taxed in the same way (i.e. no arbitrary increases). They would like to see state step in to licence commercial growing and selling, and support to help people currently in that market transition to the new legal regime, and for non-profit growing for personal use to also be legal.

Relatedly, they want a moratorium on arrests for users, the expungement of all criminal records for cannabis use, and changes to the road laws to reflect the new regime. In particular, for the last, they want to test for impairment rather than presence, which sounds great, but I can’t help thinking would wind up being very subjective in practice.

They’d like to see a state-regulated testing facilities, presumably (although this is not specified) for product quality. And finally, they want an independent authority over-seeing personal use, specifically to involve both end users and experienced producers.

They intend to roll out these various reforms in three stages – stage one is basic personal use for adults, stage two for non-profit social groups, and stage three for full commercialisation, not unlike the current status quo in the US, although also including a prohibition on retail outlets being near schools, which is a nice touch. I’ve only skimmed the surface of it here, but it strikes me as a well thought out plan. The full version of it is here.

While the party is largely focused on the use of marijuana by individuals for personal reasons, they are also not blind to its other possibilities. They have policies regarding the potential benefits legalisation can bring to the economy, the environment, health practice both physically and mentally, and even to policing (e.g. legalising marijuana frees up police resources to go after other crimes, while at the same time replacing the consumption of other drugs that are more likely to lead to violence). I’m largely indifferent to the charms of marijuana myself, but I do think they’re making a reasonable case here for the general good – one that gets harder to argue against each year as the American experiment with legalisation continues. Or to put it another way, the personal use arguments don’t really interest me, but the rest are compelling.

The party also offers a set of values:

Party Values

We advocate to protect and uphold

• Civil Liberties
• Privacy
• Human Rights
• Personal Freedoms
• Anti-Discrimination / Tolerance
• Compassion

Which are fine, as far as they go, but also frustratingly vague. I suspect this may be something of a necessity for the party – while their members and candidates are in agreement about the central issue, the party is a big tent, and there may be considerable disagreement about other issues. For this reason, if you’re thinking of voting for Legalise Cannabis, I recommend visiting the website and looking at the profile for your particular candidate, just to be sure.

And that’s about it. Legalise Cannabis will be a few entries down from the top of my ballot, but well ahead of the rest of the pack.