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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONSocietySeptember 1, 2020

How to convince your grumpy uncle to vote yes in the cannabis referendum

Guest writer
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Some people seem like they’ll never be persuaded, but don’t give up. Here are some effective strategies for convincing the sceptics in your life. 

The cannabis referendum is likely to be a nail-biter, with polls and campaigners predicting a very close vote.

With the election approaching, cannabis campaigners are working to get the word out that much of the most important campaigning in a referendum needs to happen on the micro level – in the form of human conversations initiated by “yes” voters, both in person and online.

Personal conversations are a surprisingly effective campaign tool, according to research. “The research is clear that the more a person hears about what’s in the Cannabis Control Bill, the more likely they are to vote yes to legalisation,” says Kali Mercier, policy and advocacy manager at the New Zealand Drug Foundation. “Conversations are a really important campaigning tool – in the Irish abortion referendum, 39% of voters thought discussions with family, friends or workmates were the most influential factor in the final outcome. To win the referendum, we need everyone to jump on board and start having conversations with their friends, family and workmates.”

Getting young voters to enrol is also a high priority for conversations. Young people are a crucial demographic when it comes to voting on cannabis. According to one poll, New Zealanders under age 30 are almost twice as likely to vote “yes” compared to those over 65 – but the under-30s are also by far the least-enrolled group of voters.

In the lead-up to October’s cannabis referendum, social media campaigns from Make It Legal, Health Not Handcuffs, the Drug Foundation and others are encouraging supporters to talk with family members to make sure they understand the issues.

But what makes a convincing conversation? Can you actually say something that might prompt your sceptical relatives to vote yes to legalising cannabis?

There’s definitely an art to building a friendly and inquisitive conversation rather than trying to score points or beating someone over the head with arguments. Some key tips from the Health Not Handcuffs #timetotalkcannabis campaign, supported by psychological research, include: 

Ask questions. Rather than just stating your stance, respect the person you’re talking with and try to understand where they’re coming from.

Focus on shared values. If someone is concerned about youth accessing cannabis, coming at them with a libertarian line like “but we all have a right to choose what we put in our bodies” is not going to help! Instead, connect with their values, validate their concerns and help them understand that you share the same values. For example: “I share your concern about kids using too much too early. But kids are not going to access more cannabis through this referendum, and a controlled market is going to make things safer for everyone…” (More on these points below.)

Share your own experience. Maybe your grumpy uncle has never even tried cannabis. Maybe he needs to hear more about the problems you’ve observed with the illegal cannabis market, and how regulation would solve these. People feel hopeful and more inspired to vote yes when they hear about solutions to existing problems.

Focus on the most effective talking points. Polling by the Drug Foundation has identified a handful of key points that work best with persuadable voters:

  • Public health programmes will benefit. Regulating cannabis is expected to generate up to $490 million in tax per year. This will include a specific levy that will fund cannabis education and drug treatment programme.
  • Prohibition of cannabis isn’t working; use is widespread anyway. Police spend almost $200 million and over 330,000 hours on cannabis enforcement each year. What’s the point of doing this over a plant that the majority of adult New Zealanders have tried? Legalising and regulating cannabis will free up police to focus on more serious crime.
  • The referendum will improve medicinal cannabis access. Although medicinal cannabis is now legal in New Zealand, products are exorbitantly expensive and still out of reach for most patients. Because of this, medicinal users are calling for a yes vote in the referendum.
  • The legal market will be tightly controlled for safety. The proposed legislation is called the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill for a reason. It’s actually quite a conservative law. Legal cannabis will be tested for potency and additives, kept at a moderate potency, and only sold at licensed premises. No advertising will be allowed. Cannabis will be controlled more tightly than alcohol and tobacco – even though alcohol and tobacco are both more dangerous, according to public health research.
  • It can also be helpful to go into cannabis conversations knowing what objections you’re likely to meet, and knowing how to answer them. According to campaigners, here are some of the most common concerns around legalisation, and ways to respond to them:

I’m worried about youth use increasing.

Overseas experience has shown that legalising cannabis for adults does not cause an increase in youth use. In Canada and the US states that have legalised, youth use of cannabis has not grown. This makes sense; youth cannot buy cannabis from licensed outlets. In New Zealand, the minimum age to purchase cannabis will be 20.

I’m worried about normalising cannabis and increasing its use.

Cannabis use is already pretty normal in New Zealand!

“Nearly half of all adult New Zealanders have tried cannabis at some time in their lives, and 590,000 use cannabis regularly,” says Kali Mercier. “Our current law doesn’t stop people using cannabis. Right now, people who use cannabis get it from the black market, outside of any government control. This is not about creating a new market – it’s about putting controls around an existing one.”

Amazingly, legalisation has not led to any real rise in cannabis use in Canada and the US.

I’m worried that cannabis will be everywhere!

Cannabis will be sold only at specific licensed premises with no publicity, and not at general shops or dairies. It will still be illegal to use cannabis in public. 

I’m worried about the effects of cannabis on mental health.

It’s true that cannabis can cause mental health problems in a small percentage of users. But even the researchers who have documented this in New Zealand are encouraging a yes vote in the referendum, because prohibition doesn’t deter use. When cannabis use is a crime, users are afraid to get help. When it’s legal, there will be less stigma around getting help – and remember, revenues from cannabis taxes will go toward health education and treatment programmes.

More Reading

Shouldn’t we just decriminalise rather than legalise?

Decriminalising cannabis would mean keeping it illegal, but not giving people criminal convictions for using it. This would leave supply in the hands of the black market. A regulated market is actually safer, resulting in a quality-tested product and tax revenues going towards public health.

Read our full cannabis referendum explainer here

Keep going!
Male Himalayan tahr (Hemitragus jemlahicus). (Photo: Sylvain CORDIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Male Himalayan tahr (Hemitragus jemlahicus). (Photo: Sylvain CORDIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

SocietySeptember 1, 2020

Tahr are magnificent creatures – but they’re destroying the landscapes we love

Guest writer
Male Himalayan tahr (Hemitragus jemlahicus). (Photo: Sylvain CORDIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Male Himalayan tahr (Hemitragus jemlahicus). (Photo: Sylvain CORDIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Himalayan tahr were introduced to New Zealand more than a century ago for sport, and they remain a popular target for hunters today. But hunting hasn’t stopped tahr numbers ballooning to an estimated 35,000 on public conservation land – far too many for the fragile ecosystem to take, writes DOC’s threatened species ambassador, Erica Wilkinson.

If you ask a Department of Conservation scientist what their favourite experience in a national park is, make sure you have a spare half hour. In Fiordland, it might be South Island robins pecking at your boots and looking up curiously, or the silhouette of long-tailed bats foraging in the sky at sunset. In Aoraki/Mount Cook you could spot a giant wētā crawling behind your bivvy or see juvenile kea learning to play. It would be epic thunder and lightning storms, beautiful starry nights, huge avalanches and rock falls.

National parks are our mainland insurance policy. They’re what more of New Zealand could look like, because they’re what New Zealand did look like. They’re like a film on pause, the characters currently spared the tragedy at the end of act two. With the greatest protection status of all conservation land, our national parks are bursting with species that, in some cases, wouldn’t still be here if not for these fragile green havens.

Globally, just over 100 countries boast parks like ours. Since Tongariro National Park was established in 1887, we have added 12 more national parks across the country, each with its own unique characteristics and ecosystems.

Aoraki Mt Cook National Park (Photo: DOC)

And now that our borders are closed and we can’t take the family to the Gold Coast, we have the chance to rediscover the places that we showcase to the world but sometimes forget – the national-scale version of how well we got to know our local walks during lockdown. There are more than 30,000 square kilometres of diverse, natural scenery on our doorstep just waiting for us to explore. They hold the remnants of our national identity, too. New Zealanders define ourselves by our love of the natural world. Today, however, 87% of New Zealanders live in urban areas. We’re more likely to recognise a blackbird or sparrow than a robin or kōkako. We can spot pine trees or gorse anywhere, but would have to Google kānuka. A lot of us experience a disconnect between our vision of New Zealandness and what we experience. That makes areas like national parks even more important.

National parks legally need to be preserved and maintained for generations to come. DOC is responsible for protecting them against the effects of a warming climate, invasive pests and predators, and habitat destruction. It’s a big job. The balance of an ecosystem can be a very fragile thing. One species taken out, or on the flipside becoming too dominant, can lead to a complete ecosystem collapse.

An adult kea posing in front of Aoraki/Mount Cook (Photo: DOC)

Take Yellowstone National Park, the first such reserve in the United States. In the early 1900s the government had the wolves in the park hunted to elimination to protect the elk. This set off something called the trophic cascade. With no apex predator to fear, the deer and elk populations boomed. This resulted in over-grazing, particularly of willows and other vegetation needed for riverbank structure – which led to heavy erosion.

With no wolves preying on them, elk could intensely graze along riverbanks, and the vegetation disappeared. Beavers lost the willows they needed to build their dams. Birds had no trees tall enough to safely nest in. Without beavers’ dams, fish weren’t thriving. As fish numbers dwindled, so did bears and foxes that relied on fish for food. Hundreds of species started to decline.

When wolves were finally brought back in the 1990s, the ecosystem eventually rebalanced, and the species bounced back. One beaver colony became nine.

We are facing a similar issue in New Zealand right now.

A young tahr eating vegetation (Photo: DOC)

In 1904, Himalayan tahr were brought to New Zealand for recreational hunting They were released in Aoraki/Mt Cook and, with no natural predators, quickly adapted to our alpine environment. Their population has boomed, and today tahr numbers exceed the level that the alpine environment can cope with. Tahr were picked up and put into our fragile ecosystem where species have not evolved with defence mechanisms to deal with mammals like this. In other places, plants might develop toxins or spines to discourage browsing. It hasn’t happened here. In autumn 2019 there were an estimated 35,000 tahr on public conservation land alone, where the maximum legally is 10,000 across all types of land. DOC, commercial hunters and contractors have since reduced their numbers but tahr have become a major threat to these alpine ecosystems. DOC is required to reduce tahr populations to the lowest possible densities in national parks to protect our species.

Just like we saw in Yellowstone with deer and elk overabundance, tahr can have a devastating effect across the landscape when their numbers are not controlled. As social animals they move in herds or mobs as they look for food. They are heavy, and compact the ground as they move, turning what was tall tussock grassland into something resembling a rough paddock no longer able to provide habitat or grow vegetation that our native species have evolved to depend on. Their faeces and urine even change the nutrient status of the soil, affecting what can grow there.

Zora Canyon in Landsborough on the West Coast in 1999 (left) and 2020 (right) showing the impact of tahr (Photos: DOC)

It can take decades to save an ecosystem, but not long to destroy it.

You only need to look at areas tahr or deer have been in at high densities to realise the fight our native species are facing on top of everything else. It’s good to be clear here: there is no plan to eradicate tahr, but we need to do this control work in order to protect our native species already exhausted from battling stoats, possums, and rats.

Believe it or not, nobody likes killing things. That is not a fun part of the job. You have to be outcome-focused, constantly reminding yourself of the conservation end goal you’re heading towards. We have a duty to protect our unique and ancient native wildlife and our reality is a huge number are on the fast track to extinction. I’m for our native species first and foremost, and in the 148,000 ha of national parks, our native species need to come first.

Society