Cannabis candidate sows ‘seeds of hope’ | ELECTION 2016

Mr Balderstone is the Marijuana party’s lead Senate candidate for the upcoming federal election, on a joint ticket with the Australian Sex Party.

He has just finished walking from Darwin to Port Hedland, planting thousands of what he has called “seeds of hope and sanity”.

In a press release, he described the plight of Aboriginal people in WA as desperate and said the drug cannabis was the solution to problems caused by alcohol and more serious drugs.

“Aboriginal people in WA are being forced to pay over $100 a gram for cannabis in the Kimberley and it’s not much better in some southern areas”, he said.

“Most of the time it is already mixed with addictive tobacco.

“So in fact, it's about $200 a gram or four times the price of gold.

“Alcohol is so much cheaper by comparison”.

Mr Balderstone said recreational cannabis expenditure levels made it twice the size of the wine industry in Australia.

It was time for cannabis users to have their own representative in parliament, he said.

“It’s that big and it’s that important,” he said.

“Nearly 50 per cent of adult West Australians would have used cannabis at one time or another and 30 per cent will use it alongside alcohol as their social tonic of choice,” he said.

“Domestic violence, street violence and the amount of vomit on the streets will reduce drastically if people used legal, regulated cannabis rather than alcohol as their recreational drug of choice.”