The northlondonhippy

Archive for October, 2007

I really need to make notes of good ideas when I have them because now that I’ve sat down to write some­thing, my mind has gone blank.

I’ve been awake since 7am and its just gone 2pm, that’s 7 hours already. It wouldn’t mat­ter, except that I’m work­ing tonight, in another 8 hours and I really should be hav­ing a wee rest. I’m not, though. I’m sit­ting here for­go­ing sleep so I can main­tain my “one post per day for 100 days” nonsense.

I’m dri­ving myself mad, try­ing to remem­ber a great idea I had for today’s sub­ject; it came to me just as I was drift­ing off to sleep last night. I can remem­ber think­ing it was a wicked idea, I just can’t for the life of me remem­ber what it was. It’s very annoying.

I guess its a pisser for you too, since you turned up at my site expect­ing some­thing that would change your life in all sorts of won­der­ful ways and all I’m offer­ing you is a load of half-baked excuses and oblique ref­er­ences to some great topic that I promptly for­got sec­onds after think­ing of it.

Maybe it was bet­ter when I only posted once or twice a week. You got far less of these ram­bling, unfo­cussed pieces which pro­vide noth­ing but a few cheap laughs at my expense.

Fuck it, I’m here, I’ve started, so you’ll have to deal with it.

I’m not going to deliver a win­ner every day. Some days. I’m going to hunch over my key­board, let out a big yawn and strug­gle to fill a page with ran­dom crap from my head.

My head is full of so much ran­dom crap, it’s not a prob­lem giv­ing it a lit­tle squeeze and extract­ing some of it for your enter­tain­ment and amusement.

Maybe I need to squeeze harder?

I just can’t be both­ered, today. Sorry. I can’t stop yawning.

Here is my slightly delayed, but finally com­plete review of my brand new iMac!

Two weeks ago, I took deliv­ery of my brand new, shiny, super­fast iMac. It’s my sec­ond iMac and 5th Apple com­puter in the last 3 years. You could say, I’m a bit Apple-mad!

You could be onto some­thing if you did…

I fell in love with my last iMac, I’m talk­ing seri­ous techo-geek devo­tion. The pre­vi­ous one I had was a 20”, 1.8mhz G5 model, which I still have and is still going strong. I might try to sell it, or it might become the media cen­tre in the bed­room. I haven’t decided yet.

The sys­tem replac­ing my old iMac, is a 24” alu­minium, 2.8mhz Core Duo Extreme model, with 2gb of RAM and a ter­abyte of hard drive. It’s quite a tech­no­log­i­cal leap from my old one.

First of all, it’s big…considerably more screen real estate than my 20”, around 30% big­ger I think. The screen is glossy, the same as my Mac­Book and I do like the way it makes things look. It’s very bright and the colours are very deep. The down­side is that it shows smudges very well, but Apple give you a cloth to keep it nice and shiny. I haven’t found glare to be a prob­lem and I do have a double-window right behind me.

It’s also con­sid­er­ably thin­ner and sleeker than my pre­vi­ous model. The ports run along the bot­tom of the back and not along the side.

It is also much qui­eter than the last one, with the fans barely audible.

I pre­fer the alu­minium case much more than the plas­tic. It has a more sub­stan­tial look and feel.

I miss the sleep light, which has been omit­ted from this ver­sion. I liked the way it pulsed, almost like a visual ver­sion of snoring.

Unbox­ing my new com­puter took no time, as it lifts out in one piece. All I had to do was con­nect the power cable and plug it in. I also had to put bat­ter­ies into the wire­less mouse and wire­less key­board, but that wasn’t com­pli­cated either.

I plugged a firewire cable into my new iMac and my old iMac and used the Setup Assis­tant to trans­fer all my data and accounts and that was the only hitch I expe­ri­enced. The old iMac rebooted about 2 and 1/2 hours into the process and I had to start again from scratch. Had that not hap­pened, with would have only taken 3 and 1/2 hours to trans­fer around 120 giga­bytes of stuff.

When I finally started OS X on the new iMac, my desk­top looked iden­ti­cal to the old one in every respect. My desk­top pic­ture was there, so were all my files, appli­ca­tions, home fold­ers, even my login photo! It worked per­fectly and was rel­a­tively painless.

It was actu­ally kind of strange, hav­ing a brand new com­puter, but it look­ing and respond­ing like the old one.

My new com­puter is light­en­ing fast, and will only get faster when I max out the RAM to 4 gigs. It was a bit pricey to do that now, but in 6 months of so, it will be a lot cheaper. Even with only 2 gigs, it still per­forms excep­tion­ally well.

I’ve played with some of the new appli­ca­tions that shipped with my iMac and from what I’ve seen, I’m very impressed so far. The new iPhoto ’08 is amaz­ing and a giant leap for­ward for the pro­gram. I’ve also had a look at the new iMovie, and I can see the direc­tion they are try­ing to take with it. I think, in time, it will be regarded more highly than it is now, but it will take sev­eral revi­sions to get to that point.

I haven’t had a chance to use the other iLife app’s yet, but will get there even­tu­ally. I have used Final Cut Express and Logic Express and both run exceed­ingly well. I’m going to be upgrad­ing Logic Express to the full ver­sion of Logic Stu­dio 8 in the not too dis­tant future, which will give me the full ver­sion of every­thing in Apple’s audio pro­duc­tion suite of software.

I’ve also been test dri­ving iWork ’08 and I like it very much. I’m using Pages right now, to write this and I think I’m going to drop MS Office in favour of it. I’ve also used Keynote and think it is very pow­er­ful, yet sim­ple to use and could see using it for sim­ple ani­mated graph­ics again in the future. I’m going to buy a copy of iWork before my trial runs out.

Over­all, I’m glad I upgraded my desk­top sys­tem. I can see huge per­for­mance gains already and I really do appre­ci­ate the extra screen space. Leop­ard is ship­ping later this week and I’m sure it will run like a dream on my new machine.

The only “think tank” in the UK, focussed on drug pol­icy has called the cur­rent gov­ern­ment con­sul­ta­tion “a sham”. They will pub­lish a report this week which explains how badly cur­rent drug laws have failed.

Here, check out this arti­cle from today’s Observer news­pa­per, which I will pro­vide in full:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0„2195985,00.html

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Drugs strat­egy debate ‘is a sham’

Jamie Doward, home affairs edi­tor
Sun­day, Octo­ber 21, 2007
The Observer

The government’s con­sul­ta­tion on a new 10-year drugs strat­egy is a ‘sham’, accord­ing to one of Britain’s lead­ing think-tanks on nar­cotics, which warns that the cur­rent pol­icy is fuelling a crime epidemic.

A spokes­woman for the Home Office said: ‘We have under­taken an open con­sul­ta­tion and we wel­come con­struc­tive ideas and views on how we can con­tinue to reduce drug harm. How­ever, the gov­ern­ment is emphat­i­cally opposed to the legal­i­sa­tion of drugs which would increase drug-related harm and break both inter­na­tional and domes­tic law.’
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They don’t hold back, do they. Here’s my favourite 2 para­graphs again, because I think they actu­ally speak volumes:

“The think-tank has taken the unusual step of writ­ing to the Bet­ter Reg­u­la­tion Exec­u­tive, set up to ensure gov­ern­ment runs smoothly, to com­plain that the Prime Min­is­ter, Gor­don Brown, is already mak­ing pol­icy before the con­sul­ta­tion process had finished.

The Prime Min­is­ter sig­nalled ear­lier this year that the gov­ern­ment would reclas­sify cannabis. He also recently insisted the gov­ern­ment would never decrim­i­nalise drugs, some­thing Trans­form argues makes a mock­ery of the con­sul­ta­tion process.”

Yes, I know you just read them, but they are worth repeating.

The gov­ern­ment has decided the out­come of this rethink on drug pol­icy, prior to think­ing! It reminds me of an old say­ing, “I’ve already made up my mind, please don’t con­fuse me with the facts!”

The facts are not con­fus­ing, they are abun­dantly clear! Why can’t any­one be hon­est about drugs? I mean, besides me!

(read the hippy’s “cannabis truth” series)

(read a lit­tle more truth about cannabis)

The northlon­don­hippy is report­ing for duty; I am present and accounted for!

Yes, it’s going to be one of those and I am forc­ing myself right now to write this. I’ve put a gun to my own head which means I am typ­ing one-handed. I bet many you out there type one-handed too, only with­out the pistol!

I’ve got very lit­tle to say this morn­ing and barely any energy as well

Instead of try­ing to come up with some­thing out of noth­ing, here’s a pic­ture of a kitten:

I’ll be back tomor­row with more time on my hands and more ideas in my head.

Yep, me again. And no, it’s not the threat­ened review of my brand new, shiny, lick­able and super­fast iMac. It’s com­ing. So is xmas. Xmas will not come first, because as we all know, com­ing first is rude.

As I was thread­ing my way through the rush hour traf­fic this morn­ing, strug­gling to get myself home, I started think­ing how much I could really do with get seri­ously out of my skull.

What I mean is, I could really do with a psy­che­delic trip that got me totally off my face. I need to see some pretty colours!

I’ve done acid a hand­ful of times, the last time around 10 years ago. I also used to enjoy magic mush­rooms, around every week or so. I’ve lost count of the num­ber of shroom trips I’ve had.

Magic mush­rooms grow wild all over the UK and a friend of mine would take an annual pil­grim­age to the West Coun­try every autumn to col­lect them. He was always very gen­er­ous with them and I ended up with a few trips yearly.

Then, in 2003 I dis­cov­ered that fresh magic mush­rooms were avail­able, legally to pur­chase and con­sume. I didn’t believe it at first, that you could really buy them that eas­ily. At first, I thought it was some sort of a scam. How wrong I was!

I first ordered them from EDIT my friends who are now the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of my NLH deluxe bong. They arrived the fol­low­ing day and were exactly as described. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I started research­ing shrooms, learn­ing about dif­fer­ent strains, poten­cies and dosages. With my friend’s West Coun­try shrooms, I never mea­sured them; they were dried and rel­a­tively easy to con­sume, if not totally disgusting.

Fresh shrooms are even nas­tier, slimy and cold, with the flavour of what I expect the insides of a rot­ting corpse might taste like. Gross!

I started out on 30 grams of Mex­i­can p-cubes, which is a rea­son­able, but not overly strong dose — for me any­way. Over the few years I did them reg­u­larly, I worked my way up to higher doses, peak­ing around 55 grams or so.

The trips were amaz­ing, I got to hang out with the mush­room god. Search for him on my site, if you want to know more. Basi­cally, if you eat enough shrooms, the mush­room god vis­its you and shows you the pretty colours!

Shrooms take a while to hit you. On an empty stom­ach, it would take 60–90 min­utes before feel­ing the first effects, with a peak reached any­where from 2–4 hours and last­ing for 4–6 hours. It pretty much wasted a whole day, but what way to waste it!

Psy­che­delic drugs enhance your per­cep­tion; the sim­ple way to under­stand it is they make the synap­tic nerves in your brain fire faster, giv­ing you more sen­sory input. Your vision sharp­ens, as does your hear­ing which makes music sound amaz­ing. As you get fur­ther into your trip, pat­terns in things swish and swirl, wood grain flows like a river.

On one par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant trip, on some Colom­bian p-cubes, right at the point where I peaked, I saw a burst of rain­bow colours in the air, in a sun-filled room. It was astound­ingly beau­ti­ful and com­pletely unex­pected. Colom­bians are appar­ently known for the colours they pro­duce, but try as I did, I was unable to repeat the experience.

No two trips are exactly alike, which is why I had no chance of repeat­ing my explo­sion of colour by pre­med­i­tat­ing it. Shrooms take you on the jour­ney, though I can’t say I really lost any con­trol. Except once…

For my birth­day a few years back, I had some Hawai­ian shrooms, which are very well known for their ultra-high potency. I had tried them before, elect­ing to exper­i­ment with the rec­om­mended starter dose of 10 grams. They didn’t do that much for me. Then, I did some­thing stu­pid, I dou­bled the dose.

Bad move! I had a seri­ously strong trip which ended with me hid­ing under my duvet with my eyes closed for sev­eral hours, still see­ing a multi-coloured geo­met­ric pat­tern stretched from right in front of me, all the way to infin­ity. I couldn’t see what my eyes were see­ing, I could only “see” what my brain was gen­er­at­ing. Kids, I seri­ously rec­om­mend you do NOT try this at home!

A few months after that, the gov­ern­ment put fresh magic mush­rooms into Class A, which is the same cat­e­gory as coke and smack.…the fuck­ers! In no way are shrooms any­where near as bad for you as heroin or crack. Used respon­si­bly, they are very safe, good fun!

Thanks to the actions of some stu­pid tourists, the Dutch have just banned shrooms as well. So much for tol­er­ant Hol­land! The tourists in ques­tion were all drink­ing as well, but booze had noth­ing to do with their unfor­tu­nate inci­dents. Sure thing! Booze never causes any­one any trou­ble, does it?

I think I read that shroom farm­ing is a 14 mil­lion pound a year busi­ness in Hol­land. That’s an awful lot of money to be just throw­ing away. And peo­ple will still want their shrooms, they will just have to go under­ground for them.

I haven’t had any shrooms since the gov­ern­ment out­lawed them. It’s not because I haven’t had the chance, one can still get them, if one knows where to look — like online! You can still get grow kits from Europe, if you really want some and they’re dead easy to grow. I haven’t had any shrooms because I don’t do Class A drugs and haven’t done since I gave up coke and E’s over 5 years ago.

I still love weed and con­tinue to sam­ple lots of dif­fer­ent legal highs, and as of today, I wouldn’t mind some­thing psy­che­delic. I don’t think I will actively seek any­thing elec­tric, but should I be offered some shrooms or even a blot­ter, I would be sorely tempted to accept the universe’s gen­eros­ity. I could really use a lit­tle break from real­ity right now, I think it would do my men­tal health a world of good.

Wel­come to the last 24 hours with this hippy.

No, this isn’t my iMac review. As if I had time to fin­ish that! It will come when its ready.

It’s just gone 10am, north Lon­don time and I’ve now been awake con­tin­u­ously for 24 fun-filled hours. I also worked last night, which only enhances the fun and delir­ium of skip­ping sleep.

I’ve done this with­out stim­u­lants, except for 3 cups of cof­fee in that time. I had one around the time I woke up yes­ter­day, another one around 8pm, before I departed my lair and my third and final cup at mid­night. I haven’t taken any speed, or coke or any other sim­i­lar substance.

What’s even more amaz­ing is I do this to myself once or twice a week because of my erratic, noc­tur­nal exis­tence. Hey ho.

When I woke up yes­ter­day, I went through my nor­mal rou­tine, which along with the cof­fee, includes sev­eral cig­a­rettes and a con­sid­er­able amount of time parked in front of my com­puter. After a quick glance at my emails, which I’ve still mostly yet to respond to, I read most of the UK’s news­pa­pers online as well as sev­eral other news and cur­rent affairs sites. This hippy likes to know what’s going down in the world and around the cor­ner before I’ve even had a shower.

I also refresh my RSS reader, which is full of mainly gad­gety blogs and Apple related sites, so I can stay up to date with all the cool new toys they want me to buy.

They want me to buy every­thing. Fear not, I don’t. I only buy what I need, it’s just I need every­thing. Like a lot­tery win, I could really do with a lot­tery win. If you’ve got a spare win­ning ticket that’s just going beg­ging, why not punt it in my gen­eral direction.

Bet­ter yet, if you’re one of those super rich moth­er­fuck­ers, why don’t you just send me a mil­lion or two. You could become my patron or my spon­sor. Shit for a cou­ple of mil­lion quid, you can be my sugar-daddy or sugar-mummy and I wouldn’t care which.

No, seri­ously, hear me out. Say you were mega-rich and part­ing with a cou­ple of mil­lion quid wouldn’t put a dent in your port­fo­lio and you wouldn’t even miss it. You really could just give it to me.

We could hold a press con­fer­ence, where I reveal my iden­tity as the northlon­don­hippy and you reveal a large gift for yours truly. Peo­ple would love us both! We’d be heroes! Just for one day!

Maybe not.

Where was I? Oh yeah, what I read online in the morn­ing. Loads.

I also have the tele­vi­sion on, at that time of the day most defin­i­tively on a 24 hour tv news chan­nel. It’s on in the back­ground, I’m not star­ing at the screen because it rests directly behind me. The telly and the iMac are in oppo­site cor­ners of the room.

I sip my cof­fee, I take deep, sat­is­fy­ing drags from my first smoke of the day and I surf the web for an hour or so. I also start any down­loads I need that day. Yes­ter­day it was a pro­gramme called “Dam­ages”, which I have decided is pretty shit-fucking hot. There’s one more episode left for me next week and I am really look­ing for­ward to it! It’s on in the states right now and I think I read it was bought over here by a ter­res­trial broad­caster for trans­mis­sion next year.

After screen­ing “Dam­ages”, I threw on some clothes and ran a few errands locally. Noth­ing excit­ing, unless you think col­lect­ing dry clean­ing is a thrill.

Have I just gone down in your esti­ma­tion because I men­tioned “dry clean­ing”? Not just any dry clean­ing, but my own? Is my hippy hat slipping?

Nah! I’m still cool, I’m chilly, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

After all that I came home, got comfy and had my first thing of the day. By thing, of course I mean spliff. Mmm­m­mmm. By then, Mrs. H was around and we’ve had a DVD of “Casino Royale” for a cou­ple of weeks that really needed view­ing. So that’s what we did; we watched a blonde James Bond kick some seri­ous bad-guy ass!

After the film, it was quite late in the after­noon, so I tried briefly to catch some zzzz’s, but sleep was elu­sive and my dark and dan­ger­ous thoughts con­tin­ued to race through my head.

We had my favourite Malaysian take­away for din­ner, before I had to go, though I’ve got a newly dis­cov­ered Japan­ese restau­rant nearby that’s becom­ing a very close second.

Work was fine, just a bog stan­dard night with noth­ing much of merit to report. And if there was some­thing of merit, I wouldn’t men­tion it here. I keep my job well out of this site!

After work, I pro­vided a lift home for a friend of mine. We got away a bit later than we’d hoped, which meant the traf­fic was heav­ier than I would have pre­ferred. It took me ages to drop my mate off and even longer to get to the supermarket.

Yep, awake 22 hours and I did what any nor­mal, sen­si­ble, sane moth­er­fucker would do…my weekly shop!

I’ll spare you the details of the that, though if you are really des­per­ate, I could scan in my till receipt and email it to you as a JPEG. Then you could buy the same crap I buy. It would be just like you were liv­ing my life, only with­out all the mind­less angst and depres­sion over the futil­ity of existence…unless of course, you could bring a lit­tle bit of your own inse­cu­ri­ties and neu­ro­sis to the table!

After the shop­ping, there was the return trip home and then the cer­e­mo­nial unpack­ing of the car and trans­fer­ring of the pur­chases back inside my lair.

You would think this would be an easy task to accom­plish, but not in my world. For starters, there was no park­ing any­where near my front door. Nice. I had to dou­ble park, with my flash­ers a-flashing.

But could I unpack my car straight away? Of course not, because first I had to go inside and lock the kit­tens in the liv­ing room. They have an unhealthy inter­est in my front door and the last thing I’m going to let them do is escape to go play in the rush hour traf­fic, so they had to be secured before I could hold the front door open long enough to move every­thing inside.

Once the lit­tle kit­tens were safe, I then emp­tied the car, 4 bags of gen­eral shop­ping and 2 large bags of cat lit­ter. Don’t envy me for my glam­orous media lifestyle, envy me because as soon as I was fin­ished unloading/transferring/unpacking/storing every­thing and then prop­erly park­ing my car, I got out of my work clothes and rolled myself a tasty spliff of Organic Pur­ple Kush, which is one of the strongest weeds I’ve ever had. Great taste, seri­ous couch lock and zero% psy­chosis. Nine out of ten hip­pies, if given a choice, will always choose OPK.

And I know some of you really cool peo­ple out there in internet-land know exactly what I’m talk­ing about. Pre­cisely, even.

Which brings me right up to the present moment, OPK still going strong and my down­load of episode 4 of the new “Bionic Woman” com­pleted and ready for me to watch.

It’s got “Zoe off Eas­t­en­ders” in it, though she has an Amer­i­can accent and never says “innit”.

I’ll be back tomor­row for day 5 of “100 posts in 100 days”. The ques­tion is…will you be return­ing too?

Don’t tell me! I want it to be a surprise!

It’s only day 3 in my 100 post chal­lenge and I’ve already dropped the ball.

I tried to get ahead of myself and started my new iMac review a few days ago, but I haven’t fin­ished it yet. Instead, you are get­ting this bollocks.

And by “bol­locks”, of course I mean high qual­ity, thought pro­vok­ing prose from one of the internet’s top pseudo intel­lec­tu­als. I truly am a god among men!

Ah-hem.

Look, I said I would post some­thing every day for a 100 days, I never promised each and every entry would change your life. If you’re look­ing to me to inspire you to towards great­ness, you will just have to wait for another day.

Some days you are going to come to my site and not learn the secrets of the uni­verse. Some­times, I am just going to waste your time, but don’t worry I am wast­ing my own as well.

I’m prob­a­bly wast­ing even more time than you on this dri­vel today. I bet you can read it a lot faster than I can write it, unless you’re on heavy tran­quil­lis­ers or have had a long, liq­uid lunch, in which case you have an excel­lent excuse.

I haven’t had any lunch today. I don’t eat lunch, mostly, so you’ll have to visit some­one else’s blog for that level of bor­ing life detail. Most blogs, from what I hear. I don’t actu­ally read that many myself.

If I had lunch today, I would have had the lob­ster, but only because you were buying!

I can’t remem­ber the last time I had any lob­ster, its expen­sive and not read­ily avail­able here in my lit­tle cor­ner of north Lon­don. I’d have to spe­cial order it from my local fish­mon­ger. Seems like a lot of has­sle for a meal I usu­ally skip.

I’m work­ing for the next few nights, which means time will be some­what at a pre­mium, but a deal is a deal and I will con­tinue my daily post­ing. I know this one wasn’t any­thing excit­ing, but I’ll try harder tomor­row. And if I don’t, by the time you dis­cover that, you will have read tomorrow’s shite and by then its already too late!

It’s clear to any­one with an open mind and access to the facts that the pro­hi­bi­tion on drugs is not work­ing on any level. Sup­plies are at an all time high, potency is up while prices con­tinue to fall and pris­ons world­wide are filled with oth­er­wise law abid­ing folks who are no threat to soci­ety or other peo­ple. Yet, in the face of all that, our lead­ers con­tinue to cling to irra­tional poli­cies that only make the sit­u­a­tion worse.

I’ve been pro-legalisation for many, many years. I can see the seri­ous harm that cur­rent drug leg­is­la­tion causes to soci­eties around the world and that dam­age it does to indi­vid­u­als. As an oth­er­wise law abid­ing cit­i­zen myself, I find it absolutely abhor­rent that I am crim­i­nalised because I enjoy smok­ing cannabis in the pri­vacy of my own home.

There has been much made in the media recently over cannabis with many trumped up scare sto­ries based on weak sci­ence and a rep­e­ti­tion of non-facts to jus­tify a reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of weed back to Class B from its cur­rent sta­tus of Class C. Those of us who have taken the time to exam­ine the facts know that this is a polit­i­cally moti­vated move, meant to make our new lead­er­ship appear strong on the drug issue, with no regard for how it effects soci­ety. When it comes to drugs, most peo­ple in power refuse to be ratio­nal on the sub­ject, instead they prey on your emotions.

Cur­rent drug pol­icy is built on these twin themes, of attempt­ing to appear tougher than your oppo­si­tion and appeal­ing to people’s emo­tional and moral views. The pre­vail­ing cri­te­ria for deal­ing with this com­plex issue should not be based on any­thing other than, clear, ratio­nal, com­mon sense. Laws should pro­vide the most ben­e­fit to the most peo­ple. That’s com­mon sense. Cur­rent drug leg­is­la­tion ben­e­fits only one group of peo­ple, the black mar­ke­teers who insure their wares are read­ily avail­able to any­one who wants them at wildly inflated prices.

You don’t have to believe me, as there is a cover story in the most recent edi­tion of a pub­li­ca­tion called “For­eign Pol­icy” which has been mak­ing waves in polit­i­cal cir­cles around the world. This rather con­ser­v­a­tive, respected and high­brow mag­a­zine is call­ing for the com­plete legal­i­sa­tion of all drugs. It’s extremely well-presented, thought­fully con­sid­ered and thought pro­vok­ing and wor­thy of your valu­able surf­ing time. Please read it by CLICKING RIGHT HERE.

It’s not just crazy, pseudo-intellectual hip­pies based in north Lon­don who want to see drugs made legal. A top police offi­cer, a bit closer to home has come to the same con­clu­sion. Richard Brun­strom, the Chief Con­sta­ble of North Wales is prepar­ing to sub­mit just such a pro­posal to the Home Sec­re­tary, lay­ing out this very sen­si­ble solu­tion regard­ing ille­gal sub­stances. My friends at the Inde­pen­dent news­pa­per had THIS STORY on the front page of their news­pa­per on Monday.

When­ever I’ve per­son­ally spo­ken to law enforce­ment offi­cers or read about their views in the press, they always seem to sup­port decrim­i­nal­i­sa­tion or legal­i­sa­tion. These are the peo­ple on the front lines in the “war on drugs”, so their voices should carry a bit more weight and grav­i­tas than even our elected politi­cians, who remain blink­ered to reality.

Here’s another exam­ple of the view from some­one for­mally, very senior in law enforce­ment. Lord Rams­botham, who used to be the chief inspec­tor of pris­ons, has come out in full sup­port of Chief Con­sta­ble Brunstrom’s pro­pos­als. Again, my friends at the Inde­pen­dent pub­lished THIS REPORT today, which details Lord Ramsbotham’s comments.

As an aside, I’m still con­tin­u­ing to be amused by the giant schism between the Inde­pen­dent (the one pub­lished Mon-Sat) and the Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day regard­ing drugs. While the daily ver­sion of the Indy con­tin­ues to pro­vide fairly bal­anced and com­mend­able cov­er­age on cannabis, the IoS is fol­low­ing a pol­icy of mis­rep­re­sent­ing facts to jus­tify fic­ti­tious ban­ner head­lines nearly every Sunday.

I’m sure some­one at the Indy is track­ing back to my site and read­ing this. I’m also cer­tain I can’t be the only one amused by this silly sit­u­a­tion and I bet their own employ­ees are laugh­ing too!

The most recent exam­ple of this poor level of jour­nal­ism in the Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day, was a mis­quote from Mr. Nice, Howard Marks regard­ing an as-yet unproved link between cannabis use and psy­chosis. I won’t pro­vide a link, so as not to fur­ther embar­rass the IoS, but what Mr. Marks said is that the sit­u­a­tion is wor­thy of fur­ther study and the ques­tion was sim­i­lar to that old favourite, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does cannabis cause psy­chosis or does hav­ing psy­chosis help steer peo­ple towards cannabis for relief? It should be stud­ied fur­ther, because the reports so far are extremely incon­clu­sive and like most things in this world, far more com­plex than a news­pa­per head­line can allow.

The gov­ern­ment has already said that a proper rethink on drugs pol­icy is out of the ques­tion, Their minds are closed to even pos­ing the ques­tion for debate. In a free and open soci­ety, how is that ben­e­fi­cial to anyone?

I don’t under­stand what the prob­lem is with ratio­nal thought, exam­in­ing the hard facts and reach­ing a sen­si­ble, common-sense con­clu­sion. I apply these sim­ple rules to absolutely every­thing in my life, both pro­fes­sion­ally and per­son­ally and these this approach has never, ever let me down.

Why can’t we present the facts prop­erly? Why do we have to be ruled by peo­ple who refuse to con­sider things unemo­tion­ally? Why can’t we just do what’s right and ratio­nal? Shouldn’t we all be doing our best to make the world a bet­ter place?

I just sited sev­eral exam­ples of intel­li­gent, ratio­nal peo­ple, with expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge on the sub­ject of drugs, offer­ing up alter­na­tive views on some­thing we all agree is a prob­lem that requires a solu­tion. Why won’t they lis­ten? Why do the pow­ers that be auto­mat­i­cally react as a reflex in attempt­ing to dis­credit both the mes­sage and the messenger?

Wouldn’t chang­ing our tack on drugs be pru­dent? Isn’t our new PM sup­posed to be a fan of pru­dence? Isn’t he in favour of a free mar­ket econ­omy? Doesn’t he claim to care about the future of Britain? Then why won’t he even enter­tain a full and frank dis­cus­sion of the issue? Is there a wider agenda which lurks beneath all of this?

I don’t have the answers, but I do have some more thoughts on the sub­ject, which many of you know is near and dear to this hippy’s heart. I’ll be return­ing to the sub­ject soon, with a glance in the direc­tion of the lat­est anti-drug phe­nom­e­non, the cannabis-hysteria mum as well as offer­ing a pos­si­ble expla­na­tion why cannabis is cur­rently under such a seri­ous assault from the estab­lish­ment. Bet you all just can’t wait!

(read the hippy’s cannabis truth series)

I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post that I was con­sid­er­ing rais­ing the bar a bit, in terms of my hippy output…

I’m here to more than men­tion it this time, I’m actu­ally con­firm­ing that this hippy will pro­vide at least 100 posts in the next 100 days. Count this one you are cur­rently read­ing as the first in the series. Yes, cor­ners might get cut!

The rules are sim­ple, I am aim­ing for at least one post every day, for the next 100 days. Some days, my posts may be brief, but I hope to main­tain rea­son­able hippy-length pieces of some quality.

My rea­son­ing for this is incred­i­bly sim­ple; I don’t feel like my out­put has been pro­lific enough recently and this one sim­ple idea should inspire (read as “force”) me to put more time back into my website.

Right now, I would be silly not to make the extra effort, as my vis­i­tor num­bers con­tinue to steadily increase. A smart hippy would be try­ing to hook these new, casual vis­i­tors and turn them into life-long hippyfans…

I’m a smart hippy! Well, sometimes!

You will notice that I’ve added an extra num­ber, fol­low­ing the post num­ber, in the title of this entry. The new, extra num­ber, denotes the num­ber of posts within my 100 post chal­lenge, so you can also keep score and play the home ver­sion right along with me.

I hope you’ve all checked out my nlh deluxe — graphic promo, which I’ve embed­ded in my site as a YouTube video. It’s noth­ing fancy and only 1 minute long, so please have a look.

And for you tech-geeks out there, like me, here’s how I made it. The ani­mated graph­ics were all put together in Keynote, Apple’s pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware and then exported as a Quick­Time movie. I then brought the Quick­Time file into Final­Cut Express to add the music and sound effects. The orig­i­nal ver­sion is 720p, high def, bur YouTube ain’t down with that shit, so I had to com­press it a fair bit before uploading.

I hope you all enjoy what­ever it is I’m going to do with the next 100 posts! I know I’m going to have lots of fun writ­ing them, but then I always have fun! I’m hav­ing fun right now, I sure do hope you are too…