High hopes: Who will benefit from NZ's legal cannabis industry?
Māori are disproportionately targeted by drug policing. With NZ poised to legalise medicinal cannabis, will they continue to lose out?
Vice (New Zealand)
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Thursday, July 5, 2018
In New Zealand, it’s Māori communities who have been hit by racial bias in drug policing. Even when accounting for rates of use, at every stage of the criminal justice system, Māori are more likely to be apprehended, charged, and given a prison sentence than their Pākeha pot-smoking counterparts. In this 2007 report, for example, Corrections notes that on the basis of equivalent usage of cannabis, Māori experienced arrest at three times the rate of non-Māori users. Now, New Zealand is poised to legalise. But who stands to benefit from a medicinal cannabis industry?
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