NZCPR Weekly: The Tragedy of Suicide

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

This week we investigate New Zealand’s suicide tragedy, our NZCPR Guest Commentator former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson outlines the link between cannabis use, mental illness, and violent crime, and our poll asks whether you agree with former Prime Minister Helen Clark that smoking marijuana is “hugely less harmful than alcohol or tobacco”.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Point of Order: Setting a suicide-reduction target might have been detrimental to the govt’s wellbeing

The headline on a statement released from the PM’s Office on the eve of the official release of the Wellbeing Budget tells us the government is Taking mental health and addiction seriously.

To demonstrate this, the government has accepted, accepted in principle, or agreed to further consideration of 38 of the 40 recommendations in the report of the Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction.

Karl du Fresne: Speculations on the unknowable

Charlotte Dawson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, L’Wren Scott: three dynamic, talented, apparently well-loved people, dead in the prime of life, and all in the space of a few weeks.

Two, Dawson and Scott, took their own lives. Hoffman didn’t; he died with a heroin needle stuck in his arm. But he must have known that death was a likely consequence of his drug habit, and he took the risk anyway. So in a sense it was self-inflicted, even if he didn’t intend to die.