Law Seen As Magnet to Drug Barons

A great flood of heroin will pour into News Zealand as a direct result of recent legislation requiring chemists to keep harmful drugs in locked safes, says the poet James K. Baxter.

This, he said, was because the new law, as a side effect, had guaranteed that the drug barons overseas would turn ‘their vulture eyes’ on New Zealand and notice this country had a drug shortage.

‘There are very few actual drug addicts in this country,’ he says, ‘since the drugs which produce physical addiction – heroin, cocaine, morphine, pethidine – are not, at present, widely available.’

Heroin, which travels in small packets and provides the maximum profit will produce ‘many more addicts’. Writing in the University Catholic Society’s quarterly review Dialectic, Mr Baxter, who has had considerable experience in helping those affected by drugs, says he feels alcohol should be treated as more dangerous than marihuana.

‘Among several hundred users of marihuana, young and old, male and female, who used the drug daily,’ he says, ‘I can recall only one instance when marihuana led a person to anti-social acts. A boy lit a fire in a box in the corridor of a house.

‘But in that community where violence was otherwise non-existent, the use of alcohol led people to fist fights, the destruction of property, and on one occasion a youth who had psychotic tendencies threatened others with a knife.

‘If grog came into the house, I sighed and thought, “Here comes trouble!”

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‘All the signs indicate that marihuana should have a clean bill of health and alcohol should be regarded as dangerous.’ 1970 (608)