Tasmania bans drugdealing board game

Press, 12 September 1987, Page 15

Tasmania bans drugdealing board game

NZPA-Reuter Hobart Tasmania has banned a 10-year-old American board game called Grass because the State’s Attor-ney-General believes it glamorises drug dealing. Advertised as "a great new card game that lets you wheel and deal as you buy and sell large quantities of very desirable weed,” Grass was invented a decade ago by a retired New York policeman, Ed Lee.

Players face jail terms, fines. Government harassment and cut-throat competition, says the advertis-

ment for the game, produced by Eurogames, Inc.

The Tasmanian Attor-ney-General, Mr John Bennett, said that any game that glamorised or took a light-hearted view of drug-dealing was inappropriate. The ban, imposed after a complaint by an unidentified member of the State Parliament, was attacked by the Australian distributors of the game.

They said it did not mention taking drugs and was just a send-up of the drug-dealing scene of a decade ago.

“It is just a card game. Basically it is anti-drugs because there is no way you can win. You either go to jail or you lose your money,” said the director of the Sydney importer, Ventura International, Mr Nick Farago. “We find it quite incredible that a game which has been on the market here for seven years can suddenly be banned like this,” Mr Farago said. The game had not been banned anywhere else in the world as far as Mr Farago knew.