There is a dogged persistence in the way Sue Kedgley, the Green Party spokesman on Consumer Affairs, trains her magnifying glass on the contents of every tin or package of food. Whether it’s the processing of food, the importation of food, the push for organic home grown, the contaminated clothing, the poison toys and so on, little escapes her exhaustive scrutiny. We should probably congratulate her for her efforts to protect our ‘Internal Environment’ – even if she could quite rightly be accused of evangelism.
We should probably give her the title she really deserves, “ANNE OF GREEN LABELS”. We do need watchdogs like her who are persistent and ask the hard questions.
However, one wonders if it has ever dawned on the Green Party at caucus meetings that Kedgley’s colleague Nandor comes from the opposite direction?
It must be a huge worry for Jeanette Fitzsimmons trying to handle the nine o’clock three o’clock approach from these two party members!
In a recent discussion on Party Pills with Jim Anderton on TV3’s Campbell Live, Nandor vigorously pushed for regulation. He explained that party pills should not be accessible to anyone under 18 and that they should only be available from responsible, properly supervised shops.
Party pills contain the registered poison benzylpiperazine or BZP. According to the NZ Chemical Industry Council veterinary surgeons are no longer allowed to use BZP on animals. It used to be used as a treatment for parasites. Even though Party Pills contain smaller amounts of BZP, as a slow metaboliser, it gets stored in the body.
I have real issues with a poison that is too toxic for use on animals being available for human consumption.
One wonders where Sue Kedgley is on this? What would have happened if Sue Kedgley had found the toxic poison BZP in a food product approved for human consumption?
We know what would have happened. She would have accused profiteering capitalists of poisoning our children. It would, of course, be a national scandal!
Yet her colleagues believe it is alright for those over 18 to purchase BZP from supervised shops and ingest the poison. Doesn’t Nandor have an interest in such a shop in Auckland? (see shop website www.hempstore.co.nz.) Isn’t he the “profiteering capitalist” that Kedgely would accuse if the poison had been found in a muffin mix or a condiment?
One would have thought that now Nandor is a father that he would also be interested in protecting those over 18 as well.
Nandor has battled relentlessly for decriminalisation of Marijuana, but then strangely went to ground for a period of time. He must have become aware that the Head of the British Medical Research Council Dr Colin Blackmore, along with the British newspaper the Liberal Independent, have apologised to the British public, stating that both the Council and the Paper got it wrong in the decade before the Millennium, and that Marijuana should now be reclassified upwards.
During the last year countless Medical Research findings have come outindicating very real concerns about the mental health of the young people using Dope, and linking it to psychosis and mental illness. London’s Institute of Psychiatry has gone so far as to claim that at least 25,000 of the 250,000 schizophrenics in the UK could have avoided the infliction if they had not used cannabis. That comes on top of a 2005 study from the University of Otago that showed that pot smoking can raise the risk of mental illness by 50 percent.
Earlier this year, research published in the medical journal Lancet shows that cannabis is more
Meanwhile, the Green Party has to decide what its philosophy really is.
Is it Clean Green –condemning poison products for human use, or is it Dirty Green – promoting poison products for human use? The hypocrisy of their two positions is plain for all to see: Kedgley saying poison in food is bad, Nandor saying poison in pills is OK. The Party saying polluting the environment with poisons is bad. Nandor saying polluting our bodies with poison is OK.
This is a major contradiction for the Green Party to resolve.