The northlondonhippy

Archive for February 14th, 2009

Hello. Wel­come back. Did ya miss me?

Its ram­ble time. Woke up too early fol­low­ing too lit­tle sleep. Must focus.

On what?

Its a pleas­ant, relax­ing day off, or rather it should be, but I’ve got heaps to do ‘round the house and I might even wan­der up to my local high street.

Do they call it a “high street” because you have to get high before you go there? No? Well, tough, because I will be high when I go.

It should be a rule that you have to be high before allowed onto your local high street. It would make the entire shop­ping expe­ri­ence more pleas­ant for every­one involved. The shop assis­tants would think all the cus­tomers were mel­low and pleas­ant, the shop assis­tants would be help­ful with­out being over­bear­ing and I wouldn’t nearly get into fist fights with all the rude, surly peo­ple knock­ing into me and block­ing my way.

Oh wouldn’t it be grand?

As soon as they start open­ing cannabis cafes around the coun­try, this is the sort of relaxed Utopia we can expect. Until then it will con­tinue to be no fun.

Did you see a group of for­mer pres­i­dents from Latin Amer­ica are urg­ing the world to adopt a con­trolled and reg­u­lated cannabis mar­ket? Did you look here?

Even the UN is work­ing towards this fairly obvi­ous and sen­si­ble con­clu­sion. In the good ol’ US of A, they are mov­ing in this direc­tion. Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama has even said that fed­eral raids against med­ical mar­i­juana estab­lish­ments must end and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment needs to start respect­ing laws passed by indi­vid­ual states.

Many states in Amer­ica have already decrim­i­nalised weed. That means it is con­sid­ered the low­est pos­si­ble polic­ing pri­or­ity, with penal­ties for pos­ses­sion being the equiv­a­lent of a minor traf­fic or park­ing offence.

Why can’t we do that here?

We could and we were going to until Gor­don Brown and Jacqui Smith started muck­ing around with things. These two nin­com­poops believe laws should be used to “send a mes­sage” to peo­ple, rather than reflect the sci­en­tific evi­dence or the truth.

This week the Advi­sory Coun­cil for the Mis­use of Drugs (ACMD). the body that advises the gov­ern­ment on drug pol­icy stated that ecstasy (E, pills, MDMA), be re-classified from its cur­rent A grade, back into Class B, to reflect its rel­a­tive harm to the user. Sounds sen­si­ble enough as E is not in the same league as coke and smack.

The head of the ACMD, Pro­fes­sor. David Nutt went on to say that tak­ing ecstasy is no worse than horse­back rid­ing and an equiv­a­lent num­ber of peo­ple die from both activ­i­ties annu­ally. You would have thought that he said Jesus was secretly Satan for the drub­bing he took over the com­ments. He was even forced to apol­o­gise and his future on the ACMD has been questioned.

Just for telling the truth!

In Amer­ica, MDMA has been used by men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als to assist in the ther­apy process. Would med­ical doc­tors pre­scribe some­thing poten­tially lethal when their first rule is to “do no harm”? What do they know that we don’t know.

Noth­ing! The dif­fer­ence is our gov­ern­ment uses leg­is­la­tion to “send a mes­sage” rather than to treat peo­ple with respect. Leg­is­lat­ing moral­ity never works, because peo­ple have their own moral com­passes and that counts for something.

The sim­ple fact is that any­one who’s ever smoked a joint or necked an E knows that what the gov­ern­ment is say­ing is bull­shit. What do you reckon that does to the government’s credibility?

It knocks it into the toi­let. When a gov­ern­ment lies about any­thing, we all suffer.

Drug tak­ing is a health issue, not a moral or legal issue and try­ing to force it only does a dis­ser­vice to every­one. If I choose to ingest MDMA, or cannabis or choco­late or even bro­ken glass, its my body and my choice.

Crim­i­nal­is­ing mil­lions of peo­ple serves no one. If you’re hav­ing trou­ble with drugs, you should be able to seek help with­out wor­ry­ing about end­ing up with a crim­i­nal record. And if you are enjoy­ing them respon­si­bly, it should be nobody’s busi­ness but your own.

Com­mon sense and com­pas­sion will even­tu­ally rule the day, but for now we’ll have to just keep watch­ing our lead­ers screw things up more and more. Its frus­trat­ing, annoy­ing and unavoid­able, for as long as politi­cians can use the debate over drugs to score points with Mid­dle Eng­land, the sense­less per­se­cu­tion of peo­ple who enjoy some­thing other than booze will continue.

Gee, that wasn’t as nearly as ram­bling as I expected it to be. Lucky you, or maybe even lucky me.