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The Australian and Aboriginal flags fly over Sydney Harbour Bridge. Australians must now decide on a body to represent Indigenous people. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION:

A Kiwi wandering into an Australian pub these days might find the chatter at the bar is about something they didnt expect.

The chances are that bar patrons will be sparring over the upcoming voice referendum rather than, say, the weekend footy or the upcoming Ashes series.

Given that the voice debate has underlying themes of identity and belonging, it might have some degree of familiarity for Kiwis. They are, after all, the themes of some of the conversations (or slanging matches, more like) going on in New Zealand.

Across the Tasman, the voice in question is that of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. What Australians will be asked in the referendum is whether there should be constitutional recognition of the continents original inhabitants.

Its an issue thats dividing Australians and, whatever the outcome of the referendum, about half the country is going to be unhappy. Especially now that hopes of a bipartisan approach appear to have been dashed.

A yes vote would mean changing the constitution to give the Indigenous population a voice, meaning theyll be able to advise the Australian Parliament and Government on laws and policies that affect their wellbeing.

It wont deliver anything in the way of tangible benefits, such as new services or funding. And it wont lead to any laws being invalidated. It would simply enshrine two fundamental principles, recognition and consultation.

It doesnt seem a lot to ask on behalf of one of the oldest living cultures on Earth.

Yet the referendum subject is controversial and creating deep splits. Not surprisingly, its one of the five biggest news stories of 2023, as measured by the number of hours a story spends on the homepages of major Australian news sites.

The politics of the issue are intriguing. Since winning last years election, the Labor PM Anthony Albanese has been urging Australians to seize the moment. His catchcry is, if not now, when? The polls suggest hes on a winner, though the gap has narrowed slightly in the past month.

Meanwhile, the Opposition and Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, has decided to champion the no case. He argues the referendum is divisive and wont materially help First Nations people, many of whom continue to live in appalling conditions. Instead of a peoples vote, he wants regional and local voices established by legislation.

The sniping has gone up a level since Dutton made his call, as I observed on an Easter visit to Australia.

Hes been tagged a heartless Judas and accused of fuelling a culture war campaign. There are howls of outrage about race-based constitutional change. A Liberal grandee has denounced the yes camp for trying to denigrate and humiliate opponents. And the exercise has been described you probably guessed it as wokeness, a promotion of identity politics.

Duttons strategy sure feels risky.

Hes managed to alienate some of his own party. His shadow minister for Indigenous Australians has resigned the role, and the Liberals deputy leader and several other frontbenchers are refusing to say how theyll campaign ahead of the vote. Most worryingly, a shade under 40per cent of Liberal voters back the yes case, either strongly or partly, according to Newspoll.

Yet despite that latter statistic, his sagging popularity, and the fact the Liberals lost a March by-election the Government won an Opposition seat in a by-election for the first time in 100 years Dutton is going for broke and making the referendum a partisan political issue. Aussie commentators have had plenty to say about whether thats a wise idea.

If the referendum fails and many are pointing out that no referendum in Australia has succeeded without bipartisan support some warn of sorrowful times ahead. And Dutton will inevitably be blamed for that.

Thats the thing with polarising issues that attract labels such as culture war and wokeness. There is seldom, if ever, any upside for politicians who wade in, but there can be downside, as we have seen here recently.

We tend to remember only the blunders, like Greens co-leader Marama Davidson blaming violence on white cis men, and Nationals Simon OConnor boorishly responding, on the day after a US school shooting, that the shooter didnt fit that description.

We are getting used to New Zealand opposition politicians trying to capture and exploit the public mood on issues where theres a marked polarity of opinion.

Co-governance, hate speech laws, transgender rights and the use of Te Reo Mori have offered them plenty of material.

Co-governance is probably the foremost example.

Whether the public unease about it is a consequence of the issue being poorly communicated, or just the Government being tone deaf on where the political centre is, the upshot is that it has presented an opportunity for the doomsayers.

So Christopher Luxon demands an end to co-governance in public services because the conversation about it is immature and divisive. David Seymour derides it as a culture war that must be resolved by a referendum. And Winston Peters mentions co-governance when lamenting the seeds of apartheid being sprinkled around New Zealand.

By whipping up a squall of drama, they hope to position themselves on what they see as the right side of the divide over the issue, and if theres votes in taking that position, so much the better.

British academic Matthew Goodwin, a specialist in populist politics, has written of the lingering divides over values, voice and virtue that are emerging in the UK, and the political risks for parties that amplify those divisions.

In New Zealand, where the dark shadow of high inflation and rising borrowing costs means the upcoming election will be overwhelmingly about the economy, its difficult to see how such culture-war divisions will change many votes.

But that wont stop some politicians from trying.

- Mike Munro is a former chief of staff for Jacinda Ardern and was chief press secretary for Helen Clark.

Read more from the original source:
Mike Munro: Politicians wade into the culture wars - New Zealand Herald

In a slap to Muslim girls at Stuyvesant High School, the school is canceling single-sex swim lessons, even though swim instruction is required to graduate. That forces the girls to choose between preserving their modesty and getting a diploma.

Count on Muslim families to fight back and likely prevail. Nationwide, Muslims are taking up the battle in schools to protect traditional religious values, including modesty.

Move over, Roman Catholics, evangelical Christians and conservative Jews. Reinforcements have arrived, and theyre turning the tide.

Even in the Ivy League. After weeks of protests by female Muslim students, Yale University is switching its campus housing policy for the coming academic year to offer single-gender dorms and bathrooms.

From Michigan to Virginia, Muslim parents are showing up at local school board meetings to oppose graphic sex education and gender fluidity indoctrination. Their engagement is impacting politics. More Muslims are voting Republican, concluding that the Democratic Party is trampling Islamist values.

In Dearborn, Michigan, left-wing Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib opposed the Muslim parents in her district protesting sexually explicit materials in school.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues its lurch to the extreme left. President Joe Bidens Department of Education announced double-barreled rule changes last week, one favoring transgender athletes in elementary and middle school, and the other revoking a Trump-era commitment by the department to protect religious clubs and associations on college campuses. Flipping the bird to people of faith twice in a single week.

The Democratic Party is blowing off traditional values.

Sexual modesty is a core value in Islam. Muslims observe a dress code and guard against physical contact between sexes once students reach adolescence.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects an employees right to practice religion in the workplace, but there is no comparable statutory protection for students. Muslims are waging the battle one campus demonstration and school board meeting at a time, often winning.

Muslims are powerful at Yale. In 2021, undergrads elected a Muslim woman to be student body president. And on March 10, Yale acceded to demands from the Muslim Student Association, Orthodox Jews at Yale and other religious groups to provide single-sex campus housing. Muslim women students had protested that with men in the bathroom, they couldnt even remove their hijab.

Modesty is the issue at Stuyvesant High School, too. Brian Moran, assistant principal of physical education, told the student newspaper that the girls single-sex swim classes clashed with other scheduling priorities. He made it sound like a mere scheduling inconvenience was justification enough for the change, and told the girls to wear full-body burkinis. Sorry, but those still cling to the body when wet.

New York Citys Board of Education website promises trans students alternative arrangements for anyone with a need or desire for increased privacy. Why should Muslim students get less? One in every 10 students in the citys school system is Muslim.

Last September, Muslim women at Syracuse University waged a battle for swim time without men in the college pool and won a concession that starts next fall.

In Utah, the Muslim Civic League worked with the Sikh and Jewish communities to pass a state law in February allowing school athletes to wear turbans, hijabs and modest pants and tops in competition instead of the regulation form fitting uniforms.

Luna Banuri, the leagues executive director, said: All faiths have modesty standards. We believe this affects multiple communities. Maryland and Illinois recently passed similar laws.

In Bethel, Ohio, a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents are suing to preserve single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms and halt a rule change that would allow biological boys to use the girls facilities.

Most Muslims still vote Democratic, but the shift is beginning. According to a Wall Street Journal exit poll, 28% voted Republican in the 2022 midterms, a double-digit increase over the 2018 midterms.

Republicans are gaining ground as more Muslims conclude the Democratic Party doesnt show regard for Islamic values.

Tell educators to respect families with faith-based values instead of shunning them.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.

More:
Star Parker Muslims turning the tide in the school culture wars - The Mountain Press

"Fortunately, the voters saw through the hidden extremists who were running for school board across the [Chicago] suburbs especially," Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters after last weeks election. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo

Amid all the attention on this months elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out.

Democrats and teachers unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms.

While theres no official overall tally of school board results in states that held an array of elections on April 4, two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record. Liberals are now making the case that their winning bids for school board seats in Illinois and Wisconsin show they can beat back Republican attacks on divisive education issues.

The results could also serve as a renewed warning to Republican presidential hopefuls like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe.

Where culture war issues were being waged by some school board candidates, those issues fell flat with voters, said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association labor union. The takeaway for us is that parents and community members and voters want candidates who are focused on strengthening our public schools, not abandoning them.

The results from the Milwaukee and Chicago areas are hardly the last word on the matter. Thousands more local school elections are set for later this year in some two dozen states. They are often low turnout, low profile, and officially nonpartisan affairs, and conservatives say they are competing aggressively.

We lost more than we won earlier this month, said Ryan Girdusky, founder of the conservative 1776 Project political action committee, which has ties to GOP megadonor and billionaire Richard Uihlein and endorsed an array of school board candidates this spring and during the 2022 midterms.

But we didnt lose everything. We didnt get obliterated, Girdusky told POLITICO of his groups performance. We still pulled our weight through, and we just have to keep on pushing forward on this.

Labor groups and Democratic operatives are nevertheless flexing over the defeat of candidates they opposed during races that took place near Chicago, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from state Democrats and the attention of Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, and in Wisconsin. Conservative board hopefuls also saw mixed results in Missouri and Oklahoma.

Democrats hope the spring school election season validates their playbook: Coordinate with local party officials, educator unions and allied community members to identify and support candidates who wield an affirming pro-public education message and depict competitors as hard-right extremists.

Yet despite victories in one reliably blue state and one notorious battleground, liberals are still confronting Republican momentum this year that could resemble Novembers stalemated midterm results for schools and keep the state of education divided along partisan lines.

Conservative states are already carrying out sharp restrictions on classroom lessons, LGBTQ students, and library books. And they are beginning to refine their message to appeal to moderates.

Trump, DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and other Republican presidential hopefuls are leaning on school-based wedge issues to court primary voters in a crowded White House campaign.

That rhetoric, combined with Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkins ability to harness voter frustration with education as part of his upset victory in 2021, has inspired a wave of conservative challengers to run for school board seats.

Once the domain for everyday academic concerns, mild-mannered bureaucracy, and the occasional controversy, school boards became a lightning rod for the right during pandemic lockdowns plus a national reckoning with gender identity and race.

Critical race theory was an obscure academic legal framework used to examine racism in American institutions. But it has been reframed by conservative activists to encompass broad complaints about issues related to diversity.

Conservatives have also seized on transgender students to rejuvenate a social agenda that includes a push to restrict transgender athletes in sports, gender-affirming medical care and access to LGBTQ-affirming library materials.

What I was most surprised by was just the sheer prevalence of these Republican candidates, said Ben Hardin, executive director of the Democratic Party of Illinois, after his party made an unprecedented decision to endorse dozens of local school and library board candidates and funnel nearly $300,000 into those elections.

Obviously this is not a new phenomenon, Hardin said in an interview. But to see it so widespread here in Illinois, across the state in regions that are across the partisanship spectrum, was what was most interesting to me.

In Oswego, Ill., a small community in Chicagos far southwestern suburbs, the 1776 Project supported four candidates running as part of a We The Parents slate on a platform aligned with the conservative parental rights movement. Each of those candidates lost, including to one candidate endorsed by a local Illinois Federation of Teachers affiliate.

The race, like many others across the region, featured core concerns that are often splitting school communities today.

The Chicago Tribune reported Oswegos We The Parents slate received support from the local Stamp Act political action committee, which proclaims it will fight to preserve our cultural and religious heritage and resist attempts by the Left to transform and reshape American society.

The conservative Awake Illinois group, which has opposed critical race theory and gender-affirming medical care for children, weighed in too.

A group of conservative candidates in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Barrington who were backed by the 1776 PAC, Moms For America Action and Awake Illinois also lost their school board bids.

Fortunately, the voters saw through the hidden extremists who were running for school board across the [Chicago] suburbs especially, Pritzker told reporters after last weeks election. Im glad that those folks were shown up and, frankly, tossed out.

Overall, the 1776 Project PAC endorsed 14 candidates but won six races in Illinois. Other conservatives also notched wins in Illinois, including two candidates who claimed seats in a suburban high school district in Lockport Township, Ill. over two union-endorsed aspirants.

The Democratic Party of Illinois said 84 of 117 candidates the party recommended won their April 4 races. The Illinois Education Association, the state affiliate of the National Education Association, said it won nearly 90 percent of the races where it endorsed candidates.

Part of the reason we did so well is because of how we are organized, said Kathi Griffin, president of the Illinois Education Association. The state organization does not tell the local affiliates who to support. It is the local affiliates that do the interviewing of candidates, have relationships with the community and with the parents. They are the ones that make the decision, then they reach out to us to ask for support.

Teacher unions are also celebrating a school board victory in a bellwether community in suburban Milwaukee.

Brian Schimming, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, described the Wauwatosa School Board election last month as an important race for the whole state.

Schimming promoted candidates known as the Three Tosa Dads who emphasized a platform centered on school safety and academic performance after the Republican National Committee last year encouraged candidates to broaden their message beyond culture wars and court independent voters with a more nuanced message focused on parental involvement and student educational development.

Wauwatosas GOP-backed aspirants still lost by wide margins to teacher union-supported candidates. The 1776 Project won slightly less than half of the nearly 50 Wisconsin races it endorsed candidates in.

Other efforts led by Wisconsin Republicans were more successful.

In Waukesha County, where voters heavily favored Trump in the 2020 election, the local party successfully endorsed dozens of area school board candidates as part of a WisRed Initiative to dominate local government races.

But Moms For Liberty, a newly prominent conservative group that helps train and endorse school board candidates, said just eight of its candidates won races in Wisconsin last week. The group had endorsed candidates in another 20 elections, its founders said.

We are hopeful that as more people learn about Moms For Liberty and contribute to our PAC, we will be able to win more races, organization co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich said in a statement. The majority of those [endorsements] were first time candidates who did not win, and that just gives us a great bench of folks to have trained and ready to run again to fight for parental rights in future elections.

The results offer lessons to both parties as they eye even more board elections this year.

Education was central to Youngkins win, though his political advisers have stressed the campaigns success was based on building custom messaging models targeted at different groups of voters instead of relying on a single message.

Conservative school campaigns should heed similar advice, Girdusky argued.

Dont assume that a blanket message on critical race theory or transgender issues is going to claim every district its very personalized, he said. If its happening in that district, speak to it in volumes. But dont tell parents something is happening if its not happening, because then it doesnt look like youre running a serious operation.

Read more:
Why GOP culture warriors lost big in school board races this month - POLITICO

DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) This month we have marked the Jewish Passover and Christian Easter, and Muslims will soon end the holy month of Ramadan with the feast of Eid al-Fitr a religious convergence that many celebrate as a sign of Americas robust religious diversity.

But in my purple state of North Carolina, Republican lawmakers have proposed another expansion of charter schools, a movement that has as one of its premises that parents ought to have the right to separate their evangelical Christian or Catholic children from Jewish and Muslim children and those of other faiths.

The topic of school choice has caused a fever here since last year, when the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals deemed that charter schools specifically one in Brunswick County, near Wilmington, that demanded girls wear skirts are state actors. This designation would prevent the state from approving religious charters publicly funded private faith academies as unconstitutional. Charter school advocates in at least 10 states are now seeking a reversal from the Supreme Court.

Attacks on public schools are hardly restricted to the right. A decade ago, the Gates Foundation funded a piece of propaganda called Waiting for Superman to persuade progressives that racial solidarity excludes support for teacher unions.

But in the past few election cycles, the anti-public school wing of the Republican Party has ramped up its use of religious freedom arguments to mobilize parents and convince voters that public schools are too progressive,too secular, too compassionate. The old arguments against public schools had it that teachers werent competent to teach. Today they are accused of being too good at brainwashing our kids.

The only cure for this, charter school backers say, is to redirect money for our public schools to charter schools, private schools, parochial schools any institution where privilege and exclusion can operate freely. They appeal to non-Christian and minority parents by offering them vouchers for, say, Jewish academies or by pointing to inner-city charters that build character and empowerment.

But as Ronit Y. Stahl wrote recently, these appeals are a fig leaf used by white evangelicals and a majority Catholic court to bolster a white, conservative Christian agenda.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has named the escalation: Attacks on public education are not new. The difference today is that the attacks are intended to destroy it. In North Carolina, coalitions are seeking to counter these attacks and preserve public schools, but their funding is mere drops in a bucket compared to the rights water cannons.

A key moment was the trifecta of doom handed down by the Supreme Court last June. The Dobbs v. Jackson abortion decision, decided June 24, was bracketed by two decisions on religion and public education. In Carson v. Makin, decided June 21, the court prohibited a state from choosing not to fund religious schools with public funding. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent: Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.

In Kennedy v. Bremerton, decided June 27, the majority of the court went in from the other door, ruling that public-school officials are, in Sotomayors words, required to allow one of its employees to incorporate a public, communicative display of the employees personal religious beliefs into a school event. She continued, Government neutrality toward religion is particularly important in the public-school context given the role public schools play in our society.

This moment was decades in the making. The list of briefs on both cases shows that foundations committed to the privatization of public goods in the name of religion, and the use of public funding for religious endeavors, had invested heavily in the results.

The destabilization of public schools has an even longer pedigree, however. James Davison Hunter is the evangelical Christian sociologist at the University of Virginia credited by The Wall Street Journal with coining the phrase culture wars in 1991, the year before Pat Buchanan. In Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, published that year, Hunter borrowed the term, he explained, from the German kulturkampf of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Germany, culture wars were a battle to preserve the religious content and character of public education.

Hunter, through his Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, established the conceit that the battles over education and children required a religious people versus secular humanist formula. He understood that the quickest way to portray public schooling itself as a problem was to paint public school proponents as enemies of religious freedom.

The Cato Institutes amicus brief in the 2022 Carson v. Makin case draws almost directly from his 2000 book, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil.

Indeed, secularism in public schools has become akin to a state-established religion: the secular values that the state promotes conflict with deeply and sincerely held religious beliefs, so classroom conflicts often arise. Maine unjustly alienates religious individuals, treating them as second-class citizens in the context of school tuitioning for merely living as their faith demands.

Sotomayors minority dissent comes from a core conviction shared by the majority of U.S. citizens. In North Carolina, polls show a majority of citizens want more funding for public schools, not less, and even deep in the conservative heart of Texas, rural residents have rejected plans for vouchers. Public schools have support across partisan and religious lines. It is a public good that people across faiths share, recognizing that integrated and well-funded public schools deserve our vocal, interfaith support.

Amy Laura Hall. Courtesy photo

(Amy Laura Hall is associate professor of Christian ethics and of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University. She is the author, most recently, of Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World With Julian of Norwich. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

View post:
How school choice drives America's people of faith apart - Religion News Service

There are several different issues arising for the Citizens Assembly on Drug Use doctors should contribute to each one, writes Dr Brendan OShea

Apologies for the melodramatic title, but this is a very exercised topic. Cannabis use is prevalent in most practice populations, particularly so among the young and middle-aged. Evidence suggests that availability of unregulated cannabis is tending towards more potent forms. Across some societies, the commercialisation/commoditisation of cannabis is proceeding energetically.

As registered medical practitioners, we can keep our heads buried in the sand for long periods at a stretch, but inevitably cannabis will intrude, either in the context of our individual patients and their families, in calls for the legalisation of medical uses of cannabis and/or the regulated availability and commoditisation of cannabis, raising the prospect that it somehow may, in time, even flourish on a scale similar to tobacco and alcohol.

Beyond our personal views, and our clinical practice, we are likely to be called on at a societal level to attempt to inform the public debate (er.bunfight..culture war??) as our Postgraduate Training Colleges and other miscellaneous professional organisations are requested formally and informally to comment to the Oireachtas, Ministerial Reviews, RT, Newstalk and whatnot.

Tobacco and alcohol were well established deeply as cultural and social phenomena long before there was reliable evidence of their harms. This is not the case regarding cannabis.

In all of this, what can and should we usefully do as medical practitioners? There is a clinical imperative to be aware and alert to instances where individual patients are consistently using cannabis and the consequences of this, for the care we are providing, and for their own wellbeing.

We will be asked from time to time regarding legalisation of cannabis for medical use, and for a spectrum of guidance on legalising cannabis for recreational use, ranging from decriminalising for possession of small amounts for personal use, up to the full licensing for the commercial sale of cannabis, and indeed the blessing of society for the development of this, as a substantial taxable part of mainstream culture and economy.

In practiceIn practice, it is reasonable to admit that doctors do not see the proportion of people who regularly use cannabis with no apparent medical consequences; we see those with problems. What is the proportion of users who experience problems ? This question was at the heart of a decent systematic review by Janni Leung and colleagues from Queensland in 2020, since which I would guess that cannabis consumption has only increased. They included 21 studies in their review, and concluded that prevalence of Cannabis Use Disorder was almost one in five among regular cannabis users, and that almost one in 10 regular users have evidence of cannabis dependency.

As clinicians, we need to be able to respond to individual cases, and also to keep the epidemiology in perspective. Were a car manufacturer to apply for a licence to manufacture and sell a new model, where they could confidently assert that the risk of harm to drivers of the new model (and nearby pedestrians!) was as high as one in five, no government would licence the sale of such a vehicle.

Closer to home, should a pharmaceutical company wish to licence the sale of a new drug, the use of which was associated with a substantial harm in as many as one in five of those using it long term, it would be highly unlikely that it would be made generally available for broader use.

Elsewhere the evidence strongly indicates that the criminalisation of cannabis use at the level of the individual is not a successful strategy, is expensive, punitive, is a waste of a range of resources, and does not help the individuals affected. Thus, one might support a reform of our own approach through the Irish justice system.

But this is a very different issue from enabling the commercialisation and wilder availability of cannabis in our communities. Resources inappropriately consumed thorough the justice and law enforcement systems would be far better spent on earlier and more consistently available therapeutic services, including greater capacity for earlier brief interventions in primary care, and paying more attention to the factors which drive younger people into all forms of substance misuse, and/or who rely on the pharmacological effect of cannabis, alcohol and nicotine as unsafe psychological supports for their journey through the considerable anxiety of adolescence and early adulthood.

Many of us in general practice (c4,000 GPs) have our own dozen or so of (mainly) young men, whose lives are adrift in anxiety, intermittent depression, purposelessness and social withdrawal. In many such instances, problem drinking and cannabis use are a recurrent feature. The findings of Leung et al absolutely ring true at the practice level. In my view, and informed by years in practice, the impact of cannabis, alcohol and other illicit substances on the life trajectory of many younger patients is real and significant; opening up the supply, and putting a strong profit imperative behind it all sounds very alarming and quite counter-intuitive.

Before leaving the clinical space, there is the issue of availability of cannabis for medicinal use, particularly in pain management, and refractory mental health diagnoses and progressive neurological conditions. I use the BNF to inform and support my prescribing; there is a vast plethora of pharmacological agents there already, and I would greatly value additional time with my patients, more talking therapy time for them, life-coaching, better social supports for them and their beleaguered households, rather than yet another drug. Medicinal use of cannabis is a much smaller issue for society than broadly opening the floodgates and selling cannabis for profit as a mainstream activity.

The public debateOf course, is it even a debate? In this era of burgeoning social media, the ubiquitous, restless and all pervasive always on media cacophony, the braying of populist politicians, and growing expression of verbal aggression, trolling, unabashed subjective personalised commentary, click-bait culture, and incessant sensationalism, are we ever to have a debate on anything ever again?

It is likely that we will, even as societies struggle with the restless emergence of always on social media. In this debate, it will be better perhaps, if we as clinicians have the best current scientific knowledge to hand, and where there are remaining uncertainties, admit to these honestly, and/but always refer back to who are the most vulnerable in all of this, and take the decisions and best judgements with those primarily in mind.

The public debate on this, in my view, is best used to be clear about the toxicology of cannabis, and to advocate for better social capital at the community level, for sane systems of work, decent housing and investment in education, targeting deprived neighbourhoods.

We can look forward in confidence to the outcome of the Citizens Assembly on drugs use, bearing in mind that the Assembly has arguably been a very effective source of reflection, guidance and political direction on issues which are complex, important, emotive, and not well suited for deliberation by the usual rough and tumble of adversarial electoral politics. Due to report to the Oireachtas before the end of the year, we medics would do well to consider our position, individually, and through our own professional organisations, in the year ahead, should any of us find ourselves at the Assembly, in front of a Minister or on Newstalk Radio! Anything could happen.

AuthorDr Brendan OShea is on the Educational Governance Council at the ICGP, and is an ICGP Lead for GP Nursing.

Read more from the original source:
The cannabis culture wars rage on... mildly - Irish Medical Times