The northlondonhippy

I know, I know. I haven’t been here in a fair few days.

No excuses, except for my catch all; “I’m rub­bish”. Fur­ther expla­na­tions will not be offered.

I’ve squan­dered a fair bit of time this week, being a bit of a tech-geek, sort­ing out some things around the house. One of those things was my Sling­box, which is now reli­ably work­ing on my home net­work, but I still haven’t sorted view­ing out­side of the house. More on this later.

I’ve also had a bit of a play around with Logic Stu­dio, or rather the bits of it that I have installed. I still haven’t received my replace­ment instal­la­tion DVD, so much of the included extra con­tent is out of my reach. Today’s post hasn’t come yet, so there’s still a chance it might arrive before the day is out.

Add to that the nor­mal bull­shit I have to do every day and you’ll see that I’m pretty busy most days.

I did get to screen an excel­lent film yes­ter­day, “Amer­i­can Gang­ster” and I can highly rec­om­mend it. It’s the story of Frank Lucas, a Harlem based busi­ness­man, who’s busi­ness was heroin impor­ta­tion, mar­ket­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. Lucas basi­cally re-invented the heroin trade in the late 60s/early 70s in a very inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative way. He was also quite bru­tal, but only out of necessity.

If Lucas had used his con­sid­er­able intel­li­gence and busi­ness skill in any other indus­try, he would prob­a­bly be star­ring as the boss on the TV show, The Appren­tice, as he was truly an entre­pre­neur, but he didn’t. He chose heroin and the film does not shy away from show­ing the harm that smack does to its users, but it also makes the point that the anti-drug stance is almost as big an indus­try as the drugs trade and if black mar­ket trade in ille­gal drugs went away, so would the asso­ci­ated law enforce­ment and other ancil­liary businesses.

The film tells a com­plex story in many shades of grey and cer­tainly you will admire a lot about Lucas, though his bru­tal out­bursts never let you for­get the path he chose. It opens here in the UK tomor­row, if you get the chance, it’s worth seeing.

It comes back to some­thing I’ve said on here more than once, that the world wide black mar­ket in drugs is cap­i­tal­ism at its most basic; sim­ple sup­ply and demand. There is a huge, never-ending demand for sub­stances which alter your con­scious­ness, always has been, always will be. Cig­a­rettes and alco­hol, the legal drugs, just don’t cut it for some peo­ple and where legit­i­mate sources don’t deliver, ille­gal sup­ply lines will emerge. As long as peo­ple want some­thing, some­one will be there, ready to pro­vide it. This is about as basic a tru­ism as you can find about capitalism.

Our econ­omy and polit­i­cal sys­tem is build upon the foun­da­tions of cap­i­tal­ism, yet when it comes to the issue of ille­gal drugs, we are in deep, orches­trated denial. Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work and if I can site the usual exam­ple of when Amer­ica banned liquor, the result was an organ­ised crime struc­ture that still exists today. Peo­ple wanted booze; peo­ple got booze. They’ll realised then, you couldn’t stop free trade, so they opened the doors to a reg­u­lated, taxed and legal system.

If heroin were legal, Frank Lucas would have been on the cover of busi­ness mag­a­zines as a hero and leg­end, in almost the same way that Star­bucks rein­vented cof­fee. He also prob­a­bly wouldn’t have shot all those peo­ple in the head. It’s some­thing to think about. Well, for me anyway.

Comments are closed.