 | NORML News: Climbing the Marijuana Mountain - NORML talks with David Lange |
 Former Prime Minister David Lange revealed his support for marijuana legalisation in a 1993 interview with NORML News editor Nandor Tanczos.
"Climbing the Marijuana Mountain - NORML talks with David Lange", was published in the Summer 1993 edition of NORML News magazine. Here, we present many of his best quotes from that issue.
"It’s perfectly plain that with all their pressures the police have no great stomach for going around finding bits of cannabis."
"What’s happened to cannabis possession and smoking is that it’s the sort of thing you get knocked with if they didn’t find the stereo they were after, or you didn’t say who you saw in a bank at four o’clock, or something like that. So it becomes a matter of aggravation of relationships between the police and the community."
"The next problem with marijuana is that it is not a substance exclusive to the underworld. It does have it’s appeal to the criminal classes. But it also has its appeal to the moneyed classes. And it also transcends town and country."
"There is a much higher possibility of it [cannabis use] becoming a transitional crime. In other words, the unsatisfactory half-way house of instant fines."
"But it is the sort of half-way house that police people and politicians can move to. See, it’s an evolutionary change in social attitude that is legislated for."
"So long as the production of it [cannabis], the growing, the selling, the distribution of it remains unlawful....it becomes, by reason of its illegality, a valuable substance, and there’s a lot at stake. And people therefore do things like kill for it - I mean that’s not an exaggeration, that’s the truth."
"So long as you have prohibition, you can’t solve the problem."
"That’s why I talked about the other half-way house, which is to treat it the same as you do other substances which produce euphoric effects, and license it and tax it. I don’t see any possibility this century of any move except in that area."
"No-one goes and breaks into your house to grab your home brew. But I’m sure that they would come into your house and grab your plants if you were growing cannabis."
"The other peculiar phenomenon is that, if you look at the statistics for imprisonment for non-payment of fines, we have a very large proportion of our prison population for non-payment of fines who are actually in for possession and smoking of cannabis. Its just amazing."
"You’ve got to study members of parliament and work out who the astute ones are. Then I think you’ve got to approach it from a different point. You can’t argue that you want it because it’s a nice thing, and it’s enjoyable, and it’s harmless. That’s exactly the sort of thing that politicians have legislated against for centuries. What you have got to do is say to people "what are its costs?" and you’ve got to put the down side."
"My views on penal reform are very simple: We are spending vast sums of money keeping people unnecessarily in prisons. The cost of imprisonment is always hopelessly understated. It would be actually cheaper to keep them at the Regent - and they’d probably stay there because you get 24-hour room service."
"If you could persuade people that you are actually throwing money around and not getting a result, people start to think ‘my word, what a stupid thing to do’. And so it is with cannabis thing."
"Politics is not a rational science. It’s not a science which proceeds along those medical lines. Politics is getting some maximum broad-based position on a whole series of swirling interests and prejudices and trying to get what is essentially a populist position out of it all."
"The only people asking for relief from (marijuana prohibition) are cannabis users and the police."
NORML extends our thanks to the late David Lange for sharing his thoughts with us, and also thanks Jason Baker-Sherman for typing these quotes up. We hope to publish the complete interview online, once we can find a volunteer to type the rest of it in!
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