The northlondonhippy

Archive for October 25th, 2007

I get con­fused, some­times, by all the dif­fer­ent, con­flict­ing bits of infor­ma­tion offered to me on any given day.

I try to dis­re­gard as much of it as I can, but when it comes to the bat­tle over cannabis, my ears prick up, which is markedly bet­ter than a prick up your ear.

The cur­rent lies being ped­dled about weed must be con­fus­ing to a lot of folks out there. The pow­ers that be are not-so-subtly work­ing hard to shift pub­lic per­cep­tion. They want you to think mar­i­juana is the devil’s weed; that it will turn your chil­dren in psy­chotic killers who are only con­cerned with where their next fix of dope is com­ing from.

This por­trayal couldn’t be any fur­ther from the truth if they tried. Oh wait, they are try­ing and they are not in remote prox­im­ity of even a reflec­tion in a pud­dle of piss of truth.

Yet, the news­pa­per head­lines scream with out­ra­geous anger and hyper­bole over the dan­gers of cannabis.

Head­lines can be wrong. Fre­quently, they are. It’s eas­ier to par­rot some make believe fact, if that fic­ti­tious fact cre­ates fear and moral indignation.

Here’s some­thing you won’t be read­ing in any respectable news­pa­per, any time soon. A recent study car­ried out by a respected Dutch uni­ver­sity, com­pared the teenage brains via MRI scans of two groups of teenagers; group A were reg­u­lar weed smok­ers, group B never touched the stuff.

Guess what? There was no dis­cernible dif­fer­ence in the results, between the two groups. Or as it says in the head­line of the arti­cle I’m quot­ing, “Cannabis not dan­ger­ous for young people”.

Could you imag­ine the front page of the Daily Mail or the Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day splash­ing the same head­line across their front page? Nei­ther can I, but a hippy can dream and this hippy does. Far too much.

I’m not really a hippy, but I do play one on the internet.

That con­fes­sion shouldn’t be a huge sur­prise to you, as I’ve said on more than one occa­sion on this very blog that I’m not an actual hippy.

I’m a gen­uine cap­i­tal­ist, not like the peo­ple who run the coun­try. I believe that mar­ket forces should dic­tate what the mar­ket sells; demand should reg­u­late sup­ply. That is one of my biggest argu­ments for legal­is­ing drugs. Peo­ple want them and the black mar­ket steps in where the con­trolled mar­ket fails.

If you’re anti-legalisation, then you’re not a real cap­i­tal­ist and I can’t take you seri­ously over any eco­nomic issue. Are you lis­ten­ing Mr. Brown? And you Tory twats? I hope you all wrote that down!

Gen­uine hip­pies don’t believe in sur­vival of the fittest, they believe in a world where we all help one and other. All you have to do is step out­side your front door for 30 sec­onds and you’ll see how unhippy-like the world truly is in that regard. Peo­ple are cunts and they treat each other like cunts. That, my friends, is a sure thing.

I’m over-generalising, but you get the idea. The more self­ish you are, the bet­ter your chances of sur­vival are. If you put your­self ahead of every­one else, you’re prob­a­bly going to come out on top. Of course, there are excep­tions to this rule as well.

Think about your boss, or bosses in gen­eral. They all tend to share a com­mon belief that they are bet­ter than the peo­ple work­ing below them. This belief doesn’t come from hav­ing the more senior role, I’m sure they all believed they were supe­rior prior to that. If any­thing, that innate belief in supe­ri­or­ity is what got them the job in the first place. But reach­ing that posi­tion of power can come with a price, and the price can be dis­missal from a hot­shot, high pay­ing gig.

I’m not self­ish enough, but then I don’t claim to be the fittest and wor­thy of sur­vival. I wouldn’t last 2 min­utes in the real jun­gle, I don’t have that killer instinct, much as I pre­tend I do. I’m too pseudo-philosophical and too much of a pseudo-intellectual to care about any­thing enough to really fight for it. I’d be chewed up, swal­lowed down and shat out by a big­ger, meaner, scarier ani­mal than me.

And that would be OK. If you believe in the laws of the jun­gle, then you have to accept your fate. I accept mine every day the good lord above sees fit to let me wake up and endure another day.

Like I believe in “the good lord above”! You didn’t buy that shit, did you? There is no god, there’s only hip­pies and occa­sion­ally, once in a gen­er­a­tion, there are hip­py­gods. I am that hip­py­god and have the busi­ness cards to prove it.

Except, I’m not really a hippy. I don’t even own a pair of san­dals, never mind love beads.

What are “love beads” any­way? Could a real hippy let me know? Pre­ferrably one that was older than 6 when the 70s started, I was 6 when 1970 started and I just don’t know what they are.

I bet these peo­ple know. I mean, the peo­ple in THIS REPORT from today’s Inde­pen­dent, which checks up on some for­mer hip­pies to see if they are still liv­ing the dream.

I guess the Indy left me out of that list because they think I am cur­rently a hippy and they prob­a­bly already know I was 6 when the 60’s ended. It still would have been nice for them to phone me, you know, just to say “hi”.

I know you guys at the Indy are com­ing here, hang­ing out, read­ing my shit. I men­tion your rag too much for you not too. I don’t mind if you sniff around my nether regions a bit. I kinda like it, actu­ally, but usu­ally I expect a bit of din­ner or a drink before I let some­one do that sort of thing to me.

Don’t worry, I still dig your Monday-Saturday edi­tions, but you really need to sort those dorks at the IoS out. Their lies, exag­ger­a­tions and mixed mes­sages on cannabis are ludi­crous, hurt­ful and unhelp­ful and they should cease imme­di­ately. You know it makes sense!