Australia: Bong Ban Will Harm Cannabis Smokers, Users and Experts Say

NORML.ORG Australia: Bong Ban Will Harm Cannabis Smokers, Users and Experts Say
THE Rann Government’s ban on bongs will not stop drug use and could have dangerous flow-on effects on the health of pot smokers, according to users and experts.

The State Government last night passed tough new laws so anyone selling cannabis bongs or drug implements will face fines of up to $50,000 or two years in jail.

The laws cover the sale of implements such as hookahs, bongs, cocaine kits and pipes used to smoke deadly crystal methamphetamine, otherwise known as ice.

One local drug expert, pharmacology associate professor Rodney Irvine, said users will seek other ways to inhale smoke and that could be more dangerous.

“When you close one loophole another one emerges, a different pattern of use emerges,” he said

“They’ll make them out of anything, obviously.

“I would say that there’s a possibility those alternative homemade ones will have some problems.”

Dr Irvine said smoking through a bong or water pipe was probably slightly less dangerous than using joints or pipes.

“Intuitively, I would say that smoking anything through a water pipe is a better option than smoking it in a joint or a spliff,” he said.

“If you’re smoking tobacco through a water pipe you’ve got cooler smoke. If there’s cooler smoke, there are less volatile substances, therefore less tar.”

Until now, courts had to establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that the person in possession of the equipment intended to use it in connection with preparing or consuming an illegal drug.

“Your Honor, when that surfer dude came into my head shop, I had no idea he was going to take that triple-chambered, dual-carb, psychedelic… uh, glass art sculpture, and use it for smoking marijuana! I’m shocked, d’ya hear, shocked!”

I’ve always found both sides of the paraphernalia issue somewhat silly. On our side, the defense for head shops is that they somehow aren’t selling bongs so long as nobody says the word “bong”. Every head shop I’ve ever visited has the sign saying, “don’t say bong”, as if they were The Knights Who Say “Ni!” in the old Monty Python film. One old head shop owner on the Oregon/Idaho border once told me they were “functional glass novelty items”.

On the other hand, banning something because someone might do something illegal with it seems odd, especially when we sell handguns to people. Nobody seems to apply the bong standard to other items. If I went into a hardware store and got myself a baseball bat and a shovel, and said to the clerk, “How much for this head basher and corpse burier?”, would it be illegal for him to sell them to me? Unwise, certainly, and I hope he’s calling the cops, but it wouldn’t be illegal.

Besides, it’s just a stupid idea because it can’t work and solves nothing. We cannabis consumers are like McGuyver when it comes to making bongs. The only ones hurt here are the head shop owners who were contributing some of our incomes to the local economy and sales taxes, diverting it instead to apples, paper towel tubes, and tinfoil.