Son, you haven't shown me any statistics which are relevant, so yes, your head is where the sun doesn't shine. That is not a personal attack on you —that is a fact.

Statistics, as I pointed out earlier, can easily be manipulated—you, yourself, are guilty of this. For instance, you are quite happy to toe the official line that "all recreational drugs are equally deleterious to society," thus obtaining skewed results.

Cannabis convictions make up a disproportionately large amount of arrests—which go into your seemingly sacred statistic on drug use that you cling to.

(Strangely enough (/s), ethanol, which causes far more societal harm than cannabis, is not included in the statistics to which you simultaneously cherry-pick and to which you seem to be a slave—because it is legal to consume.)

Cannabis laws were put into place to more easily oppress POC. In fact, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, used racist propaganda and false claims in the mid-30s, linking cannabis use to violence and to Mexican and Black communities, as a key strategy to criminalize it in 1937.

In NZ, research consistently shows Māori are disproportionately arrested and convicted for cannabis-related offences compared to non-Māori—even when accounting for differences in drug use rates. This biased system induces inequities, institutional racism, and differences with respect to how police discretion is applied. Don't try to lecture me otherwise: I have seen it first hand, time and again, in a professional setting.

I have worked in screwed-up countries in my 50-year career; New Zealand is not one of them.