The northlondonhippy

Archive for October, 2008

I don’t think any­one is going to be sur­prised that I’m hop­ing (and wish­ing and pray­ing) that Barack Hus­sein Obama will be elected as the next Pres­i­dent of the United States.

If the New York Times can endorse some­body, why can’t I? Here on the inter­net, we’re all equal, though I don’t make you reg­is­ter to get to the good content.

If you’re sur­prised by my endorse­ment, then you don’t really know me very well. I’m extremely lib­eral and not ashamed of it.

Being lib­eral is a good thing, it means you are open to pro­gres­sive ideas and new ways of look­ing at things. Being lib­eral means I’m more inter­ested in the hap­pi­ness of peo­ple, then main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo for the sake of it.

Many lib­er­als have become afraid of the word and now call them­selves pro­gres­sives. You say tomato…

If gays can take back own­er­ship of the word “queer”, then why can’t we reclaim the word “lib­eral”? Like gays, lib­er­als have noth­ing to fear or be ashamed of and we should all come out of the brainy closet.

I’m lib­eral because I am smart. Smart peo­ple are liberal.

All you need to do is spend 10 min­utes watch­ing FoxNews and you will see what I mean. They don’t allow many peo­ple with lib­eral views on-air, they stick to their con­ser­v­a­tive agenda all the time. The over­whelm­ing amount of stu­pid­ity that spews from the mouths of their pre­sen­ters, guests and pun­dits will be more than enough to prove my point.

I watch FoxNews strictly for com­edy value and if you added some canned laugh­ter, you’d think you were watch­ing a bad sit­com for dimwits.

Being lib­eral means not fear­ing change. “Change” can be a good thing and if Amer­ica needs one good thing right now, it would be change. “Change we can believe in”, if you will.

Obama offers that change. As one of the most lib­eral mem­bers of the US sen­ate, which is demon­strated by his vot­ing record, Obama is offer­ing Amer­ica the chance to right the myr­iad of wrongs from the last 8 years.

Yes, I am talk­ing to you George W. (for What­ever hap­pens next week, he’s still his­tory come Jan­u­ary) Bush.

Obama has the ideas, intel­li­gence and charisma to be a real game-changer. He can help restore Amer­ica back to its for­mer glory.

Maybe you’re not old enough to remem­ber way back when, but peo­ple actu­ally used to like Amer­ica and I don’t just mean the shop­ping and the enor­mous por­tions in restaurants.

It’s kind of amaz­ing if you con­sider how much real dam­age Georgie Bush junior has done to America’s rep­u­ta­tion and stand­ing in the world. Com­pared to Bush the lesser, even Richard M. Nixon seem like a decent guy.

Think back to 8 years ago, when Big Bill Clin­ton was run­ning the show. The econ­omy was in great shape, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment was debt free and had a huge sur­plus of cash, Amer­ica was at war with nearly no one and Amer­i­cans abroad didn’t have to pre­tend to be Cana­dian. These are all good things.

Eight years of the Repub­li­cans not only undid all the good that came from Clin­ton, they thought of loads of bad shit of their own to do, to drag Amer­ica down even further.

Before you start think­ing, “what does some twat in Lon­don know about Amer­ica?”, I should, in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure let you know that I spent around half of my life liv­ing in Amer­ica, so I am in a posi­tion to jus­ti­fi­ably com­ment on all things Amer­i­can. I con­tinue to con­sume a lot of Amer­i­can media and I am always across every­thing in the news — it’s an occu­pa­tional hazard/bonus (delete as appropriate).

I also get loads of Amer­i­can vis­i­tors to my site, obvi­ously far more than from any other coun­try, includ­ing the UK. On the inter­net, Amer­i­cans out­num­ber everyone!

I like Amer­i­cans and I actu­ally like Amer­ica too. At its heart Amer­ica is good, kind and just coun­try, pop­u­lated by good, kind and just peo­ple. They can’t help it that their elected lead­ers are mas­ters at manip­u­lat­ing the media by spoon­feed­ing them crap that the media is too stooopid to question.

In the after­math of 9/11, your media failed you. Your gov­ern­ment wrapped every press release in the stars and stripes and ques­tioned the patri­o­tism of any jour­nal­ist who dared to ques­tion the offi­cial ver­sion of events. That’s espe­cially true about the “war” in Iraq.

I’ve got some news for you, it was never really a war. It was an ille­gal inva­sion of a sov­er­eign nation, jus­ti­fied with bold-faced lies. We were lied to, over and over, for no good reason.

The inva­sion was brief, the occu­pa­tion seems end­less. The geniuses in charge had no con­crete plans on what to do once they arrived in Iraq. It was an unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter and con­tin­ues to be one.

I don’t know how many peo­ple died in Iraq, I’ve lost count. And for what?

Noth­ing at all. No good rea­son. No rea­son at all.

But what about the “surge”?

The surge is mean­ing­less, extra troops haven’t calmed things down, cold hard cash is what’s done it. Again, your liars, I mean lead­ers are not only nego­ti­at­ing with “ter­ror­ists”, they are brib­ing them with large sums of cash not to stage attacks any more.

It’s a bit like giv­ing the school bully your milk money in return for him not beat­ing you up that day. It doesn’t make you tough, it makes you a wimp and a wuss.

Since when does Amer­ica pay its ene­mies and groups labelled as ter­ror­ists not to attack?

Since a cou­ple of years ago.

Can you imag­ine them writ­ing a cheque to Osama Bin Laden in return for a promise not to plan another attack on Amer­ica? To me, it sounds like it would be the next log­i­cal step from their unof­fi­cial “brib­ing the enemy pol­icy” in Iraq.

The point is that the Repub­li­cans have fucked Amer­ica over every which way from here to xmas and back again. Every day, in every way, they have done some­thing to screw you all over and you’ve had to just lie there take it like a bitch.

Not any more. This time, you actu­ally have a gen­uine choice to make between to polar oppo­sites. That doesn’t hap­pen very often, maybe once in a lifetime.

Like 1960, when the choice was between Nixon and JFK and prob­a­bly not since.

You can choose between four more years of the same bull­shit, or you can elect a man who will set Amer­ica back on its true course.

Here’s another word you shouldn’t fear: Socialism.

In Amer­ica, you’re taught, or rather indoc­tri­nated into the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem and told that social­ism is just another word for com­mu­nism and that’s just plain wrong.

The state should not exist to sup­press and exploit you, it should act in such a way as to ben­e­fit all of the peo­ple, all of the time.

The state, your gov­ern­ment should be there to pro­tect you, and not just from imag­i­nary enemies.

The state should be there to help you, as an indi­vid­ual as well as for the greater good of soci­ety. You don’t pay your taxes to be kept in your place, yet that’s what the state does, rather than encour­ag­ing you to flour­ish and realise your potential.

I’ll go with the clas­sic exam­ple and its some­thing I can com­ment on with author­ity because I’ve lived under both sys­tems, pri­vate and nation­alised health care.

You have excel­lent doc­tors and hos­pi­tals in Amer­ica, some of the best in the world, yet your life expectancy is in decline. There’s a sim­ple rea­son for that, some peo­ple are denied access to your fine doc­tors and hos­pi­tals purely on eco­nomic grounds. If you can’t pay the extor­tion­ate fees charged, then you have only one choice, to get sicker and die.

That’s wrong.

That is so wrong.

Health­care should be a basic human right pro­vided equally by the state. You shouldn’t be penalised for not hav­ing the dosh to stump up for treat­ment, if that lack of treat­ment results in your death or incapacity.

Here in the UK, where I’ve also spent around half of my life, I’ve been a patient of the NHS. The stan­dard of the health­care I’ve received has been first rate, though I’m not going to deny there have been some wait­ing times that have been longer than I’ve liked and to be fair that has improved dra­mat­i­cally of late.

I can ring my GP’s surgery, any week­day morn­ing and get an appoint­ment to see my GP that same day. My cur­rent GP, who I’ve seen for over a decade is excel­lent, I never feel rushed, he always takes the time to lis­ten to me and he doesn’t hes­i­tate to pre­scribe an expen­sive drug or test, if he thinks it is nec­es­sary. The flip­side to this is that he is often run­ning behind on his appoint­ments and I usu­ally have to wait to see him. A lit­tle bit of my time is a small (and only) price to pay for access to excel­lent health care.

This is what I don’t get about peo­ple who oppose any form of social­ism; what’s wrong with help­ing oth­ers? Why should any­one resent any­one else receiv­ing assis­tance from any­one, whether its a rel­a­tive or a com­plete stranger or the gov­ern­ment? Isn’t it a good thing to help others?

Isn’t that what Jesus would do?

When some­one else is in pain, do you not have sym­pa­thy for them? Do you not have the empa­thy to even feel their pain? Does it not touch you, even slightly?

If you could feed all the hun­gry chil­dren in the world, would you? Regard­less of the cost?

If you could cure all the sick peo­ple in the world, would you? Regard­less of the cost?

I would.

Ninety per­cent of the wealth in this world is in the hands of 1% of the people.

That’s just fucked. You can’t jus­tify that, no mat­ter how hard you might try. It’s 100% fucked. Par­don my fuck­ing French.

The redis­tri­b­u­tion of the wealth doesn’t mean the lux­ury police are going to come to your house and nick your flatscreen telly and give it to some ran­dom poor person.

The redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth doesn’t mean we’ll have to dress like Chair­man Mao, even if you think his uni­form was fashionable.

All it means is poor peo­ple pay less tax, rich peo­ple who can afford it, pay more. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Rich peo­ple spend any way, because they are rich and a slightly higher tax bur­den isn’t going to effect them very much.

Poor peo­ple pay­ing less tax, means poor peo­ple (remem­ber the 99% of the rest of us) will have more money to spend. Spend­ing money fuels the econ­omy, a fuelled econ­omy can cre­ate jobs, new jobs means more peo­ple work­ing, with more money in their pock­ets to spend, which fur­ther fuels the economy.…

You get the idea.

Some­one has to redress this hor­ri­ble eco­nomic imbal­ance and that’s Barack Obama. He wants to do it, don’t you want him to do it?

As I sit here in my north Lon­don lair, exactly one week before elec­tion day, Obama is way ahead in the polls, but his vic­tory is not assured. Every reg­is­tered voter out there in inter­net­land has to vote to insure he wins and wins big. Bill Clin­ton is right, Obama needs a huge man­date to affect the kind of change he has in mind and he needs to have the Democ­rats sweep the house and the sen­ate too.

I’m also con­cerned that the bad guys will steal it from Obama, as they did to Al Gore in 2000 and prob­a­bly Kerry in 2004 as well, at least in Ohio. Those elec­tronic vot­ing machines sound dodgy and I’ve read uncon­firmed reports in the early elec­tronic vot­ing of bal­lots being “flipped” from Obama to that old guy with the forced smile and ident-i-kit wife.

If they steal it from the Democ­rats again this time, burn the place to the fuck­ing ground! Let’s hope they don’t, as I don’t want to see any coun­try in flames, but if they fuck around with this elec­tion, they deserve it. SWAT teams are allegedly already on standby for pos­si­ble unrest, so this sce­nario is possible

Barack Hus­sein Obama is America’s best hope. Don’t let your­selves down, don’t let the world down. Please vote for him.

And for those of you that still might have reser­va­tions over Mr. Obama because of his race, shame on you. Obama is a remark­ably intel­li­gent and edu­cated man and his race should not be a factor.

If you’re afraid to vote for him, because his skin colour dif­fers from yours, please look deep into your heart and soul and finally see the truth about race — like most things in this world, it’s mean­ing­less. We’re all the same on the inside, our hearts all beat, our lungs all breath the same air.

But if you really can’t look past his race, per­haps this lit­tle cam­paign jin­gle I wrote on Obama’s behalf might help.

(sung to the tune of Santogold’s “You’ll Find A Way”)

You know you wanna
You know you wanna
vote for Barack Obama
You know you wanna
You know you wanna
‘cause a white woman was his momma

It’s catchy, ain’t it?

Look, all jok­ing aside, if you are reg­is­tered to vote in the United States of Amer­ica, I don’t just urge you to get out and vote, I implore you to vote for Obama.

If I’ve man­aged to sway just one unde­cided voter with this post, then I’ll feel like I’ve done my part, but I’d like to sway even more. If you know some­one who’s waver­ing and you think I might be able to have a pos­i­tive effect on their deci­sion, please feel free to email this to them or send them a link to my site.

It’s not just Obama who’s count­ing on you, and not just your nation, but the entire world.

Please don’t let us down.

Yo.

I haven’t point­lessly ram­bled here in a while. It’s just an observation.

I woke up early this morn­ing, silly early, before 6:30am. Blame a blocked nose, a noisy cat and the threat of a cou­ple of deliv­er­ies for this early morn­ing appear­ance. I had an alarm set for 7:30am any­way, so its not a tragedy that I am up so early.

I’ve got a ship­ment of fresh cof­fee beans com­ing from my online roaster…yes, I am still madly into fresh cof­fee. I had to ease back from it a bit thanks to my thy­roid prob­lems, but I am feel­ing a lit­tle bet­ter, which means caf­feine and I are bud­dies again.

I couldn’t really han­dle cof­fee for a cou­ple of months, which was quite depress­ing for some­one who adores the stuff. For a while, I thought it was down to side effects from my thy­roid med­ica­tion, but my doc­tor told me it wasn’t, it was the actual dis­ease caus­ing the breath­less­ness and heart palpitations.

For about the last fort­night, I haven’t had those symp­toms because around a week prior to that, my doc­tor up the dosage on the thy­roid meds. I’m still not on a high dose and its likely to be increased again in Decem­ber, after my next blood test. I just think the new dose is hav­ing some sort of ther­a­peu­tic effect on me.

I’ve also seemed more ener­getic in the last week or so and I am feel­ing more myself than I have in a long time. That’s a good thing.

My back has been a lot bet­ter too. You might remem­ber that’s how all this health non­sense started, with a crip­pling back prob­lem. I never do any­thing that’s straight­for­ward, so nat­u­rally my thy­roid con­di­tion caused inflam­ma­tion in my back!

I was off from work for about 8 or 9 weeks in the end and my doc­tor offered (or rather sug­gested) that I take even more time off but my bank account couldn’t afford it. I went back for a cou­ple of nights a cou­ple of weeks ago and it was a seri­ous strug­gle, but I had another long planned gap of 2 weeks between shifts and my health improved some­what dur­ing that time.

While I was off, I had the joys of hav­ing builders in, refit­ting my ancient bath­room. I’d been try­ing to get this done for years, but find­ing some­one reli­able and trust­wor­thy was nearly impos­si­ble. In the end, I found a plumb­ing com­pany that was not ridicu­lously expen­sive and did the job fairly well, but it meant nearly two weeks of dis­rup­tion in my home.

The new bath­room is sim­ple and mod­ern, replac­ing a 30–40 year old bath­room that was nei­ther. I’m just happy to have it finished.

Return­ing to work this time was far less daunt­ing because I am gen­uinely start­ing to feel bet­ter. After being part time for Octo­ber, I’m back to work­ing full time in Novem­ber. Trust me, its a wel­come return and not just for the finan­cial reasons.

I like work­ing and I’ve missed it; I’ve missed my work mates too. That said, I am get­ting increas­ingly bored with being asked where I’ve been for the last cou­ple of months and hav­ing to explain all of my health woes. I thought about prepar­ing a writ­ten press state­ment, that I could hand out and refer to when repeat­edly ques­tioned, but peo­ple would think that was weird.

I’m sure some of the peo­ple ask­ing gen­uinely care how I am, but the major­ity are just ask­ing to be nosy. I also thought about mak­ing shit up and giv­ing every­one a dif­fer­ent answer on my where­abouts, like:

- I was on a secret mis­sion for the queen
– I was direct­ing my first fea­ture film
– I was on tour with my band
– I was in a drug induced coma
– I was hav­ing my shin­bones stretched (and it didn’t work!)
– I ran away and joined the cir­cus
– I was on an EU wide thrill-killing spree

And my per­sonal favourite:
– I don’t know where I’ve been, I have amnesia

The only place I ever want to talk about myself is right here on my web­site. In real life, I’d much rather be ignored and not have to explain myself to oth­ers. I’m actu­ally quite a pri­vate per­son, reclu­sive even, but when peo­ple pre­tend to be inter­ested in your life, you have to pre­tend you’re happy for their inter­est. Social niceties have to be respected, even when you know its all bullshit…especially when you know its all bullshit.

But not you, of course. You’re deeply inter­ested in every sin­gle aspect of my blessed exis­tence and you hang on my every word. Online, I’m used to the atten­tion and I crave it like a drug.

Ok, not really like a drug and believe me I know the difference.

It’s more like leav­ing the cur­tains open, while you change your cloth­ing in front of the win­dow. I’m giv­ing you the choice to peep at me, but its up to you if you choose to cast your glance in my direc­tion and if you do, you might see more than you expected.

My life is an open book here on the inter­net, avail­able for you to casu­ally thumb through the more inter­est­ing chap­ters, assum­ing one day I might write some. We can all wait for that day to come, but until then you’ll just have to put up with what­ever dri­vel I post.

Like this point­less entry about my rather point­less life.

Why isn’t THIS WOMAN in charge of UK drug policy?

I’m talk­ing about Lady Amanda Nei­d­path, the head of the Beck­ley Foun­da­tion, the group respon­si­ble for THIS REPORT which I wrote about recently.

Why are our elected offi­cial so afraid of the truth?

Why do we ignore experts on issues which are con­tro­ver­sial? Cer­tainly peo­ple with this sort of exten­sive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence on any sub­ject (includ­ing and espe­cially drug use) should be embraced, as should their conclusions.

We don’t expect enough from our lead­ers, we should expect more. We should receive more too.

Let’s put Lady Nei­d­path in charge of the UK’s drug strat­egy. She’s already got my vote!

If you didn’t watch last night’s final pres­i­den­tial debate, here’s what you missed:

At least that’s how it looked when I was watch­ing it…

I’m sit­ting here in my north Lon­don lair, try­ing to enjoy a peace­ful Sun­day early after­noon, while out­side a high-speed car chase is tak­ing place, between what I am guess­ing is a stolen vehi­cle vs. a very low-flying police helicopter.

It’s like my very own per­son­alised episode ITV’s “The Bill”, only with a higher pro­duc­tion bud­get and bet­ter stunt men.

The car, a sil­ver piece of crap, has sped past my front win­dow sev­eral times, the dri­ver appar­ently think­ing that going in cir­cles will con­fuse the chop­per pilot and he will lose his tail in the sky.

It don’t work that way, homie!

The heli­copter, which must cost a grand or two an hour to keep in the sky, has been fly­ing so low that my house has been shaken and when I looked out my ground floor win­dow and saw it, it was as if I could look in the pilot’s eyes. If my back gar­den wasn’t postage stamp sized, I would have thought he might have set it down on my patio, to con­tinue the chase on foot.

This is mod­ern life in the urban ghetto, wel­come and enjoy your stay. If you can’t enjoy your stay, at least be heav­ily armed!

It’s worse at night, with the cop chop­pers, they use pow­er­ful spot­lights, which when they hit your win­dows, can be quite star­tling. Per­haps they’re run­ning sur­veil­lance at night, lis­ten­ing in on our phone calls and pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions inside our homes. The tech­nol­ogy exists to do all that, but does the will?

I was dri­ving through my neigh­bour­hood at night, a cou­ple of weeks ago and I saw a large gang of kids being stop’n’searched by the local rozzers. The kid­dies by my esti­ma­tion, ranged in age from 12 to 15 years old and there were over 20 of them, with half a dozen cops doing the search­ing. Not great odds for the cops, if you fig­ure all those chil­dren had weapons and the cops only had lit­tle sticks. This was tak­ing place three min­utes by foot from my front door. Cool, eh?

It’s gone quiet out­side, finally. I don’t hear the chop­per any more, though I am sure it will be back. It always comes back. I won­der if the guy in the sil­ver piece of crap got caught.

Prob­a­bly not.

Some­body needs to say it, or at least put it prop­erly into words. We’re in the mid­dle of global stock mar­ket crash.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

The bot­tom is falling out of the ass­hole of the world’s finan­cial sys­tem. So what? Why is any­one surprised?

You wouldn’t build your home atop bricks made of noth­ing but air and imag­i­na­tion, but that’s what they built our economies on top of; it has a foun­da­tion of nothing.

Credit is not tan­gi­ble, it is con­cept. You can’t hold a con­cept in your hands.

Investors in the stock mar­ket are sell­ing and sell­ing fast and wide, which is why all the prices are tank­ing. They’re mov­ing all that cap­i­tal into things like guar­an­teed gov­ern­ment bonds and gold. Yes, gold, you know the shiny yel­low stuff.

If I told you all of this is mean­ing­less, would you believe me? You should, because it is.

All the real, tan­gi­ble assets remain, like cash, gold, homes, etc. They are all prob­a­bly worth less now, but they are far from worth­less. Your stock port­fo­lio, how­ever, is prob­a­bly worth­less today, but only if you sell.

Here’s a bit hint: don’t sell today. Hang onto your worth­less paper, because stock val­ues will even­tu­ally return. They always do, though the cur­rency val­ues of the stock may be reduced. So what?

Its all bull­shit. It won’t last. The cap­i­tal­ist pigs of this world won’t let it. Just close your eyes, grit your teeth and hang on tight. This wild ride ain’t nowhere near over yet!

Back in 1992, it was the “econ­omy, stu­pid”, but here in the future, its the stu­pid economy.

The econ­omy is stu­pid because it has been built on credit, not actual assets. That’s stu­pid and its no won­der its tank­ing now.

The peo­ple run­ning big busi­ness are stu­pid too, for let­ting things get to this unbe­liev­able state.

But worst of all are the col­lec­tive gov­ern­ments dump­ing tax money into pri­vate com­pa­nies to bail them out. That, my friends is the wrong answer yet every­one is still won­der­ing why the stock mar­kets con­tinue to drop.

Sim­ple, investor con­fi­dence is non-existent. How could it be any­thing else, when gov­ern­ments are reward­ing badly run firms with bailouts. That’s not how busi­ness works and investors won’t respect it.

CEOs and MDs are used to mak­ing dif­fi­cult and painful deci­sions, that’s why they make the big bucks. They don’t hes­i­tate to decide to cut 10 or 20% of their work­force, if it makes their com­pa­nies more prof­itable in the longer term and screw the poor saps who lose their jobs. Life is tough. I don’t think this is a good thing, I just think it is a true thing.

So these tough, hard-assed man­agers are used to exe­cut­ing painful edicts for the good of their firms and they’re not accus­tom to throw­ing good money away. When a gov­ern­ment throws good money away, it wor­ries everyone.

That’s what all this bailout bull­shit is, just plain throw­ing good money away. It’s not going to save any reg­u­lar folks, its not going to pre­vent the stock mar­ket from plung­ing and in the long term, its not going to pre­vent any of these poorly run com­pa­nies from going under.

Its not going to do any­thing except make things worse.

They should have let all of these poorly run, badly man­aged, shitty com­pa­nies fal­ter. Eco­nomic Dar­win­ism and sur­vival of the finan­cially fittest would have been the sen­si­ble response. That would have prob­a­bly resulted in the com­plete restruc­tur­ing of the world’s economies into some­thing sus­tain­able and work­able. Most of all, it would have sent the right mes­sage and let the captalist-pig world know that if you fuck up, you lose.

And then we wouldn’t all be fucked.

Except me, I’m not fucked. I’ve been gath­er­ing shells, beads and berries. I reckon I’ll be able to trade them for weed and junk food when the time comes. That’s all I really need to survive.

Don’t throw away all those bills and bank notes just yet, though, as they’ll still be use­ful as toi­let paper.

I realised this morn­ing, I have a real prob­lem with drugs…

No, not that kind of prob­lem, you won’t see me going into rehab, no, no, no!

My prob­lem with drugs is this: my drug of choice, weed, is not legal and I’m unduly made a crim­i­nal as a result. That’s a big problem.

Its silly, its unfair, and its unjus­ti­fied. It’s also the law.

Laws can be changed and when a law is unjust, it should be changed. Crim­i­nal­is­ing peo­ple because they want to indulge in the con­sump­tion of a plant is stu­pid, no mat­ter how you look at it.

Cannabis is com­par­a­tively safe, if you’re com­par­ing it to the two legally obtain­able drugs, tobacco and alco­hol. You can’t over­dose on weed and accord­ing to the post just below this one, there are only 2 recorded deaths attrib­uted to cannabis in the his­tory of recording!

How is soci­ety served by crim­i­nal­is­ing me? I am a respectable, oth­er­wise law-abiding, tax pay­ing cit­i­zen of this fine planet. Send me to prison for a few years and not only do you lose my pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tions to soci­ety and the queen’s purse, but I end up cost­ing you money! You think those orange boiler suits and mys­tery meat sur­prise for lunch every day is free? You pay for it! Isn’t it bet­ter that I stay on the out­side and con­tinue to pur­chase my own meals and clothing?

The truth is, the like­li­hood of me ever serv­ing time for sim­ple pos­ses­sion is min­i­mal. I’m care­ful, I don’t take risks and I pretty much only ever smoke in the pri­vacy and secu­rity of my own home. The only place I flaunt my cannabis use is here on the inter­net, but I do that for a rea­son. My agenda.…

My agenda here has always been sim­ple and hope­fully obvi­ous; I wish to remove any remain­ing stigma attached to smok­ing cannabis. I am a pro­fes­sional, I work full time (and then some), I take care of myself and the peo­ple I love, I’m kind to strangers and ani­mals. Espe­cially animals.

I’ve per­son­ally known loads of peo­ple who smoke dope, from the casual “I’ll have a cou­ple of puffs on that spliff” types, to peo­ple “who can smoke me under the table”, I’ve smoked with them all. I’ve prob­a­bly directly encoun­tered over one-thousand peo­ple in the last nearly three decades of my daily dope smok­ing who have all enjoyed a bit of weed. None of them were home­less, clin­i­cally insane or went on to harder drugs. If any­thing, most of them mel­lowed as they got older, which is not some­thing I can say for myself. Ninety-nine per­cent of them were gain­fully employed and if I am hon­est worked in my pro­fes­sion. The media is full of hyp­ocrites and the same peo­ple putting out anti-drug pro­pa­ganda bull­shit in the news­pa­pers, enjoy a toot or a pill or a puff at the weekend.

When­ever I’ve had to deal with drug issues pro­fes­sion­ally, I’ve tried to be bal­anced and I’ve aimed to find voices on my side of the argu­ment. Trust me, its more than most would do, for to be seen as sym­pa­thetic to drug use could land you in hot water. I’ve never kept my drug use a secret and if asked point blank by a boss, I wouldn’t deny where my inter­ests lie. As I’ve aged, I’ve become more vocal in mak­ing sure the pro­pa­ganda is not unchal­lenged. It’s about all I can do and I know its not much.

I want to do more.

I want us all to do more.

For the drug laws to change, every sin­gle one of us who smokes weed has to come out of the green closet and declare with pride our love of weed. If I do it on my own, if I out­ted myself here and now, there’s a very good chance I would lose my job or worse.

Atti­tudes are chang­ing, more so than one might think. Espe­cially if one is in the cur­rent, out of step with the elec­torate, gov­ern­ment of this coun­try. Remem­ber, our Prime Min­is­ter, old what­shis­face, the really unpop­u­lar one that EVERYONE hates, said that cannabis is lethal. What fuck­ing planet is he from and can we send him back, please?

Check out this sur­vey which was pub­lished today. Really, click here and read it, it won’t take you long.

Did you read it? Don’t lie, this hippy sees all. A bit like Santa Claus, or god, only I’m not fictional.

The “rave gen­er­a­tion” has begat another gen­er­a­tion of “junior ravers” and both gen­er­a­tions think the other gen­er­a­tion is on drugs. Cool.

The times, they are a’changin’ and our politi­cians have to wake up to this, espe­cially on my pet sub­ject. Cli­mate change, finan­cial melt­down, pos­si­ble flu pan­demics, a McCain pres­i­dency, the future is look­ing decid­edly bleak. The least those idiots in power could do is let us all soften the blow with a lit­tle sweet smoke!

I really need help with my drug prob­lem. I’m will­ing to help myself, if you’ll help me too, but its a big ask…

I want you all to con­sider out­ting your­selves along side me as a life long dope smoker. More than con­sider, I want you to make a pledge to do it and I want you to email it to me. If I get, oh I don’t know, a mil­lion emailed pledges, I will reveal myself to the world.

Ok, a mil­lion is prob­a­bly push­ing it.

Prob­a­bly? I’ve got more chance of sprout­ing wings, spit­ting fire and renam­ing myself the northlondondragon.

What’s a real­is­tic num­ber? If I’m seri­ous about this, and dammit I am, then I need to come up with a num­ber that strikes a bal­ance between being attain­able and yet still giv­ing me the con­fi­dence of know­ing I’ll be backed up by my legions of hippyfans.

How many in a legion?

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, around 5,200. Of course, Wikipedia says Neil Arm­strong was the first man to eat cheese. At least it does now.

Five thou­sand ain’t nearly enough.

I’ve nar­rowed it down then, I need some­where between 5,000 and one-million emails from you guys before I’ll tell the world who I am.

Clearly this plan requires more thought.

It’s not easy hav­ing a drug prob­lem, espe­cially when the solu­tion seems so elu­sive, but with your help, maybe our col­lec­tive drug prob­lem can be cured.

(Keep read­ing, the next post is about weed too. I know, two in a row, go me!)

It’s about bloody time!

The Global Cannabis Com­mis­sion report is being pre­sented at the House of Lords today. It was under­taken by the Beck­ley foun­da­tion, a UN-accredited non-governmental organ­i­sa­tion in advance of the United Nations strate­gic drug pol­icy review expected next year.

The report makes a rather sur­pris­ing recommendation…surprising because it is so sen­si­ble! They sug­gest that a “reg­u­lated mar­ket” should replace the cur­rent (silly and unen­force­able) inter­na­tional pro­hi­bi­tion of my favourite plant. The report pro­poses that we con­sider replac­ing pro­hi­bi­tion with a sys­tem of labelling, tax­a­tion and min­i­mal age requirements.

This is a seis­mic shift in atti­tude for the United Nations, which as an organ­i­sa­tion, sits at the cen­tre of cannabis pro­hi­bi­tion, but I can’t say for cer­tain that they will take this advice on board. After all, sim­i­lar rec­om­men­da­tions have been made here in the UK and have been promptly ignored by our igno­rant politi­cians. Espe­cially that incom­pe­tent ues­less twit, Gor­don Brown. I really thought he would be gone by now, but the Labour Party is seri­ously lack­ing com­mon sense and balls and they pussed out at their party con­fer­ence. Wimps!

This report puts the issue in con­text, going on to say “…in terms of rel­a­tive harms it (cannabis) is con­sid­er­ably less harm­ful than alco­hol or tobacco. His­tor­i­cally, there have only been two deaths world­wide attrib­uted to cannabis, whereas alco­hol and tobacco together are respon­si­ble for an esti­mated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone.”

I’d like to know how 2 peo­ple died from weed. Did they choke on on it? Oh and the word “his­tor­i­cally” in that con­text means since records began, which is a seri­ously long-old time!

Nat­u­rally this report is being warmly wel­comed by cannabis cam­paign­ers world-wide, myself included.

My dope smok­ing recently hasn’t been recre­ational, as much as it has been med­i­c­i­nal, thanks to my recent health prob­lems. Spliff helped when my back was seized up like a clenched fist and it con­tin­ues to calm the nau­sea I am feel­ing from my chronic thy­roidi­tis, which is another name for Hashimoto’s disease.

I don’t know what I would do with­out weed and I know that is the same for lit­er­ally mil­lions of peo­ple around the world, who are unnec­es­sar­ily crim­i­nalised for our love of dope. I am not a crim­i­nal and nei­ther are they! It’s about time the law caught up to this unde­ni­able truth.

If you would like to read the Guardian’s take on this new report, all you need to do is CLICK HERE.

And if you would like to find out more about weed, please fol­low this link to the hippy’s cannabis truth series.