M.P. adamant on drugs

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32588, 23 April 1971, Page 3

M.P. adamant on drugs

(New Zealand Press Association)

DUNEDIN, April 22.

“Anyone who tries to convince me that there is no relation between marijuana and hard-line drugs is going to have a hard time,” says the Labour member of Parliament for St Kilda, Mr W. A. Fraser.

During a tour of Britain recently, Mr Fraser investigated the dangers of drugtaking. He spoke to highranking officers of the Department of Health in Britain and to senior officers of the ScotYard’s crime department’s drugs and narcotics branch. These professional investigators, he says, had accumulated plenty of evidence to support the link between marijuana and hard-line drugs. “They showed me photographic evidence dead bodies of those who had been hooked on hard-line drugs,” said Mr Fraser.

“In almost every case, those who finished up on hard-line drugs, began on relatively harmless ‘trips’—on by-products of marijuana and opium.” Mr Fraser said it had been

reported recently that the prevalence of drug-taking in Dunedin had not declined.

He appealed to parents, and others associated with youth ,to help prevent the growth of drug-taking. Overseas, the enormous price that the individual and the community had to pay for drugaddicition was self-evident. “I certainly could not con, done any suggestion of the legislature at this juncture, enabling the open and free use of marijuana,” he said.