At the Initiative, we have consistently stood up for the rights of random bureaucrats to stop people making harmless choices in their everyday lives.


That’s why we were strong supporters of John Key’s decision to ban pseudoephedrine from pharmacies.


It just made sense. After all, most people who go into pharmacies are drug hounds just waiting for that stray poppy seed that might provide an opening into the Trainspotters lifestyle. Why risk it? After all, everyone knows they’ve found a cure for the common cold.


It’s also worth remembering how easily drug addicts and crime bosses are discouraged. If they can’t find an important ingredient for their drug of choice at the local dairy, they tend to throw their hands up and take up lawn bowls instead. This is why New Zealand has been free of meth since 2011 (Please check this. -Ed.)


In line with this excellent policy, we would like to extend Key’s thinking to other substances of concern, substances that will inevitably (considering what your average Kelburn householder is like) immediately be used to make hard drugs on an industrial scale.

• Most urgently, we need to crush poppy seeds (in the metaphorical sense). In 2019, an Aro Valley dairy lost its liquor licence for selling a suspicious number of these tiny kernels of darkness. We need to go further. In the United Arab Emirates, people have been jailed for proffering poppy seeds. Failing to impose similarly tough sanctions here is tantamount to shooting up our youth.
  
  
• Nutmeg is also not to be sniffed at. It may add a touch of Christmas to your pumpkin latte, but do not be deceived. You are literally only a few teaspoons away from perdition. Sprinkle wisely, or better still, do not sprinkle at all because it’s banned. New Zealand must lead the world on getting tough on powdered spices.
  
  
• Finally, we really have no choice but to ban Coca-Cola. Yes because of the capitalism; also yes because of the caffeine and sugar (Dr. Shane Reti’s openness to a sugar tax hardly goes far enough); but mainly because Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine, and even if it doesn’t now, that cheerily alliterative name still opens a (literally) high road to a collapsed septum.

Readers may snort. But the world is full of dangers, and ordinary Kiwis can hardly be trusted to take tiny risks into account, any more than they can be trusted not to take enough tiny seeds to catapult themselves to Shangri-La.