Leader of The Australian Sex Party and Victorian upper house MP Fiona Patten has called on MPs, journalists and other commentators to be honest about their drug use after revealing in an editorial for The Age that she has “enjoyed the many blessings that cannabis can bestow for a lot of my adult life and have not lost my mind or become a serial killer.”
Patten explains that the debate around the legalisation of cannabis “would be far more informative if every journalist, every politician and every commentator on the subject of cannabis law reform did the same, instead of hiding their drug use, drug abuse or their non-use in the closet.”
Patten has long been an advocate not only for legalising medicinal and recreational marijuana in Australia. You’d think then with all the moves by the major parties to make medicinal marijuana available to the public, Mike Baird even applying for a growers license (he is a surfer from the Northern Beaches remember) she’d be over the moon.
However, as Patten details in her article, we shouldn’t be fooled by any of this, as neither The Liberals, Labor or The Greens have long term plans to legalise or de-criminalise cannabis.
“At the coming federal election, it is painfully clear now that none of the major parties want to see recreational cannabis legal in Australia. Neither Liberal, Labor nor the Greens has a policy that would in any way suggest they are looking at legalising Australia’s most popular illicit drug in the near future,” she wrote.
Despite the Liberal party having “fallen over themselves to legalise medicinal cannabis” with the likes of Barnaby Joyce and Bruce Baird joining forces as they “sat by the bedsides of ailing patients, assuring the TV cameras that they are pulling out all stops to have it legalised,” Patten is resolute in denouncing such action as “a fake agenda” designed only to win votes.
“None of them has any intention of making this happen soon and all the legislative promises are simply a smokescreen to hide the fact that they are basically old style Scotch and Coke drinkers and they don’t believe in hippy medicine for a moment… unless they think they can win votes with it in marginal seats.
“Then they’ll say anything,” she explained.
And with the 2016 election campaign now in ‘high’ gear, you can expect a whole lot more of that from all sides before the election on Saturday 2nd July.
You can read the full piece at The Age.
