Let's talk about pot

Bud, chronic, dak, dope, ganja, grass, maryjane, reefer and skunk. We all know the slang terms for cannabis. Half of us have tried it, and one-in-eight uses it regularly.

But is cannabis a glorified gateway to harder drugs and suicide, or some sort of herbal cure-all, benignly bestowed by Mother Nature? Should we be selling it from Courtenay Place cafes, or cracking down harder on cannabis smokers and growers?

The New Zealand Drug Foundation wants to start a national conversation about cannabis. We think it’s high time we took cannabis out of the ‘too-hard basket’ and talked about it sensibly and honestly. We’re making a start.

These essays kicked off the conversation in November 2007:

Here are new essays, published in our February and May 2008 Matters of Substance:

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Let's talk about pot


"If 25 years of smoking dope has addled my brain, I must have been an intellectual giant in my youth."
Tim Shadbolt, Author Bullshit and Jellybeans

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"Marijuana is taken by musicians. And I'm not speaking about the good musicians, but the jazz type."
Harry J. Anslinger, Federal Bureau of Marcotics, 1948

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"The nuns did not know what they were and assumed they were large decorative plants."
A police official in Athens tells of a Greek Orthodox nunnery that employed gardeners who turned out to be cannabis growers using the nunnery as their personal plantation.

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