The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘cannabis’ Category

Like hello and whatnot.

Another year has flown by and I’m already cel­e­brat­ing my anniver­sary of being the northlon­don­hippy, again.

And by cel­e­brat­ing, of course I mean writ­ing this.

Whoopeeee…

Seven years ago today I started my orig­i­nal web­site on Blog­ger. Its still there, though I moved every­thing to this, my own hosted web­site a few years ago.

Go me!

Back at the begin­ning, I posted quite fre­quently, mainly because I had noth­ing bet­ter to do.

Blog­ging sprouted from a rel­a­tively brief period of unem­ploy­ment , it gave me some­thing to do with my time, when I wasn’t get­ting high or gob­bling magic mush­rooms, which were legal at the time.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this with­out a men­tion of shrooms, did you? Shrooms played an impor­tant part in the early days and I was a reg­u­lar con­sumer of them. Since the gov­ern­ment tight­ened up the reg­u­la­tions, I’ve been with­out them. I miss them, a lot. Shroom ref­er­ence ends.

Flash for­ward to seven years into the future, to this very day and you’ll see that I hardly post any­thing, any more. There’s prob­a­bly more posts about my lack of posts, than any other subject.

I don’t even attempt to make excuses any more, I’ve just accepted that my par­tic­i­pa­tion here is spo­radic and ran­dom. I pop up when­ever I feel like it, I just don’t feel like it very often.

That’s not strictly true, as I seem to con­tinue to main­tain a run­ning list of top­ics I want to cover, I just don’t seem to get around to doing it. Then, what­ever the topic might be, becomes less inter­est­ing to me, or less rel­e­vant and I delete it from my list and it just never gets written.

I’m back to mak­ing excuses again. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

It would be eas­ier if I could just beam my thoughts directly to the inter­net, I think that’s com­ing as a fea­ture this sum­mer in the iPhone 5, but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to be start­ing that sort of a rumour.

I know I bang on about Twit­ter a lot, but I do spend a lot more time there than I do on my own web­site. If you did want to bathe in the weird thoughts flow­ing through my head on a daily basis, that remains the best place to do it. Though again, my par­tic­i­pa­tion is ran­dom and spo­radic. I con­sume far more than I con­tribute to Twit­ter, but I do suf­fer from infor­ma­tion glut­tony and tech addiction.

That’s prob­a­bly one of the biggest changes to my life in the last seven years, the amount of tech­nol­ogy in it. I’ve always liked tech and toys, but here in the future, they are more per­va­sive and use­ful than ever before and I find that I am always con­nected, always con­sum­ing media.

A typ­i­cal day starts with me pick­ing my iPhone up from the bed­side table, switch­ing off air­plane mode and let­ting it check my email. I put it in air­plane mode when I go to bed, so it doesn’t ding or buzz with new mes­sages, but I leave it on because it is also my back up alarm clock.

I come down­stairs and fire up my iMac, which is the hub of my tech­no­log­i­cal exis­tence. The hard drive in it died last week and its being repaired this very sec­ond. Don’t worry, I have a TimeMa­chine back up, so I don’t think I’ve lost very much at all, but I am miss­ing my 27” beast very much.

I’ve been using my lifeboat com­puter in the mean­time, an orig­i­nal black Mac­Book that I think is nearly 5 years old. While I’m thank­ful that I’ve got it to use now, its painfully slow, its got about 25% of the screen space of my iMac and the view­ing angle of the LCD screen is not very good. Five years is a very long time in tech termss and my Mac­Book is def­i­nitely show­ing its age. Its bet­ter than noth­ing, loads better!

Any­way, my nor­mal rou­tine with the iMac is to switch it on as soon as I wake up, read the papers online, along with a few other web­sites, check my RSS feed reader, keep an eye on Twit­ter, do some work on some other web­sites I work on, deal with pro­fes­sional and per­sonal emails, sync and charge my iPhone and con­trol my Mac Mini.

My Mac Mini is around 4 and a 1/2 years old and is also show­ing its age. I use it as my media hub, its con­nected to my flatscreen tv and my A/V amp. I use it to play music (streamed around my house to two Air­Port Express units, one in the kitchen, one in my bed­room), I also stream online radio sta­tions the same way. I use the BBC’s iPlayer ser­vice, I down­load and play­back videos from Bit Tor­rent, I use it to screen XVID films friends give me, or even just to play­back videos I’ve shot myself. It gets used a lot. I mostly con­trol the Mac Mini with a remote con­trol, or I use OS X Screen Shar­ing to remotely use con­trol it from the iMac.

My iMac is a pow­er­ful com­puter, I use it to edit video and I mainly use iMovie. I also record my own music, using Logic Pro and a host of exter­nal toys and musi­cal instru­ments that con­nect to my iMac with ease

Once I’ve done every­thing I have to do on the iMac, I might move over to the sofa with my iPad. I surf, use Twit­ter, keep up with my RSS feed, all in a relaxed, com­fort­able way, but that’s not all I’ve done with it. I’ve also used it to edit video, write blog posts and record music. Some of the music pro­duc­tion apps I have are truly amaz­ing, espe­cially Apple’s new Garage­Band app. Its easy to lose hours of your day just play­ing around with it. I’m also a secret Angry Birds HD addict, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

My iPhone is always with me and I use it for so many things, its really a Swiss Army Knife of a gad­get. Its my cal­en­dar, my con­tact book, my mobile Twit­ter machine, RSS reader, inter­net browser, still cam­era, video cam­era, music player, film and video player, nav­i­ga­tion device, com­pass, photo edi­tor, video edi­tor, news por­tal, note taker, audio recorder, gam­ing device, clock, weather cen­tre, torch, hand­held track­pad for my Macs, email client, ref­er­ence library, text mes­sage device, oh and its a tele­phone and video­phone too! It does even more than that, I’m just run­ning out of steam think­ing of it all.

My point to all this tech his­tory is that none of this was pos­si­ble 7 years ago, 2 of the devices I just men­tioned couldn’t have even been imag­ined then.

In 2005, I had a run­ning joke here about my brand new all dig­i­tal lifestyle, right around the time I bought my first iMac. Its no joke today, my life truly is all dig­i­tal. So’s yours. So is everyone’s.

They like to describe all this as “dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy” and that’s a pretty accu­rate term, as long as you don’t see dis­rup­tion as a nec­es­sar­ily bad thing. I don’t buy CDs any more, I don’t go to record stores any more, because that indus­try has been dis­rupted by the ease and avail­abil­ity of music down­loads. If you own a chain of music stores, you’re not going to like this sort of dis­rup­tion, but if you are a keen media con­sumer, you’re prob­a­bly pretty happy about it.

Tech­nol­ogy isn’t the only thing that’s dis­rupted my life in the last seven years, there’s also been some ill­ness and some death. When it comes to dis­rup­tion, noth­ing else comes close.

Both of my par­ents passed away since I started this web­site. My father was already ill when I started it, and his can­cer fea­tured fre­quently back in the day. Some­where, in the archive, is a post called “Dad’s piss­ing blood again” and I’m sur­prised it didn’t win any awards. He died before this blog was a year old.

My mother crossed over to the great beyond at Christ­mas, two years ago. Noth­ing fills you with the hol­i­day spirit like a bereave­ment on Xmas eve, and that applies to the future too, Xmas will now and for­ever be a reminder of her death.

While my mother had health prob­lems for years, her sud­den death was unex­pected. My father died slowly over the course of a year and we pretty much knew when his death was com­ing to the day. I last spoke to him two days before he died and I got to say good­bye. I didn’t have that chance with my mother.

I’ve become old in the last seven years, at least in my head I have. In my head I’m not 48, I’m “push­ing 50”. One of those posts I haven’t writ­ten is enti­tled “My unhealthy obses­sion with death” and I will get around to writ­ing it, mainly because I’m hop­ing that spit­ting out a life time of death obses­sion might help me move past it. Or not. Who knows.

Blog­ging is like ther­apy for me some­times, its a good way to try to work shit out.

I don’t really think I will ever work out my weird obses­sion with death, specif­i­cally my own. I’ve imag­ined my moment of death so many times, in so many ways, yet I know that none of it has prob­a­bly come close to what­ever hor­ri­ble fate awaits me, as it awaits us all.

Keep an eye out for my death post, it will be a cheery lit­tle num­ber, guar­an­teed to lift your spir­its and make you want to do a happy dance down the street.

The truth is that I feel expend­able, dis­pos­able and irrel­e­vant because I am get­ting old. Maybe that’s nor­mal. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal.

I can feel my body break­ing down, I dis­cover some new ache or pain on a daily basis. My joints creak, my mus­cles throb, my bones ache and I’ve been diag­nosed with a long term health prob­lem that requires daily med­ica­tion for the rest of my life.

Mid­dle age is a joy.

Mid­dle age is stu­pidly named. Either you are young or you’re old. I’m old. Phys­i­cally I am, but in my head I’m still 18 years old and full of all the hopes, ideas and dreams I had at that age. Sad, eh?

I’m the same per­son I was back then, I might move a bit slower and have loads more knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, but I’m still me.

And I still smoke weed.

That was one of my goals when I started blog­ging, to fur­ther the cannabis cause. I’ve been smok­ing weed every day, for a cou­ple of months shy of 30 years. I would qual­ify my use as a com­bi­na­tion of recre­ational and med­i­c­i­nal, though its cer­tainly more med­i­c­i­nal these days.

Weed should be legal and the fact that its not shows just how mixed up our cur­rent drug pol­icy has become. Cannabis can be so ben­e­fi­cial in so many ways.

Right now, in these dif­fi­cult and depress­ing eco­nomic times, cannabis is a cash crop our lead­ers should not be ignor­ing. A licensed, reg­u­lated and more impor­tantly taxed cannabis mar­ket would be a much needed boon to the econ­omy. Instead they would rather close schools, hos­pi­tals and libraries and let crim­i­nals con­trol the mar­ket. Its as fool­ish and short­sighted as it sounds.

I’m not going to bang on about it too much now, my posi­tion is clear.

I may not be as pro­lific as I once was, but there’s a giant archive of nearly 750 posts to explore. You might learn to love me, you might come to hate me, but I’m sure you can waste plenty of time here, if you desire.

So that’s it, my weird and ram­bling reflec­tion of the last seven years of liv­ing my life online, just for you. I’m always here, just a few mouse clicks away. Come hang out with me, any time.

If the first seven years are any­thing to go by, the next seven ought to be a real gas, man! Groovy!

Hey. Remem­ber me?

I used to be a some­time blog­ger who some­times blogged here, some­times, but I haven’t posted did­dly in nearly 2 months.

Go me.

The usual non-excuse, excuses apply. I’ve got no good rea­son for doing so lit­tle here, except that I am eas­ily dis­tracted by shiny things.

Appar­ently, being attracted to shiny things is hard­wired into our DNA, and is com­mon to many crea­tures, not just us. Evo­lu­tion favoured off­spring that under­stood shiny usu­ally meant fresh drink­ing water. If you could find the fresh water, you could have a healthy drink and live long enough to pass on your water dis­cov­ery skills to the next generation.

My water comes out of a plas­tic bot­tle (oh the shame) or the tap, so I have no real need to be drawn in by shiny things. Damn you evolution.

I am digress­ing like a moth­er­fucker now.

I’ve toyed with shut­ting my web­site down in the past, but I don’t really want to; I like hav­ing a site where I can spew and vent when I feel like it. I just don’t feel like it very often.

Decem­ber and Jan­u­ary are shitty months for me any­way, what with xmas and the anniver­sary of my mother’s untimely demise and my birth­day all around the same time, I’d really rather just hiber­nate until Feb­ru­ary. I’m not sure how that would work, exactly, but fat­ten­ing up for a long nap is some­thing I think I could really handle.

There are cou­ple of per­sonal mile­stones com­ing up in 2011 that I am look­ing for­ward to already: my 20th anniver­sary of mov­ing to Lon­don and my 30th anniver­sary of smok­ing weed every day. I look for­ward to reflect­ing on both of those things in the future.

Espe­cially the 30th anniver­sary of smok­ing dope every day, because once that passes, I’ll be able to say things like “as some­one who has smoked cannabis every day for over 30 years…” blah, blah, blah. I can feel the smug self-satisfaction com­ing on already.

They still lie to us about weed on a reg­u­lar basis, so isn’t it nice to know your old uncle hippy is here to tell you noth­ing but the truth about it?

Weed is why I am still around, its saved my life in count­less ways on count­less occa­sions. That shit should be legal for adults to pos­sess and con­sume and in some cases its con­sump­tion should be mandatory.

I haven’t given up on com­mon sense pre­vail­ing, but I cling to com­mon sense and truth the way a baby clings to its favourite com­fort blan­ket. If you try to take it away from me, I just might cry and wail.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

YouTube user “grow­glass” has posted four videos of my beloved RooR NLH Deluxe bong being used in action. Check it out!

No doubt you’ve caught the media frenzy sur­round­ing the most recent legal high of choice, mephedrone. Its the lat­est in a long line of legal highs, sold openly and pos­sessed with­out fear of arrest.

Who wouldn’t want a high that was legal? Isn’t that the ulti­mate goal? Sure, booze is legal and will get you absolutely blotto, but so what? Peo­ple want a choice of intoxicants.

I don’t like liquor and if asked, will declare that I no longer drink. Its true, I can’t remem­ber the last time I had even a sip of alco­hol. The hang­overs were just too much to bear. I’m too old for a self-inflicted sore head.

Where does that leave you if you don’t like booze, but you do enjoy alter­ing your state of con­scious­ness? Black mar­ket drugs like weed and coke and smack and MDMA and speed and LSD I guess.

But what if you don’t want to break the law? I’ve already sug­gested vot­ing for lead­ers who would change the laws, but we can’t seem to find any, except for the Lib Dems and if its going to be a hung par­lia­ment any­way, then we should all vote for the Lib Dems so they can have a big­ger share of the even­tual coali­tion government.

But I digress. If you want to get high with­out break­ing the law, you look for some­thing legal.

Until 2005, fresh magic mush­rooms were legal to pur­chase and pos­sess in the UK.

Finally, there was a legal high avail­able that was pro­foundly effec­tive and read­ily avail­able. I shroomed reg­u­larly for a cou­ple of years, every week or two. I was always care­ful, I stayed in a safe, com­fort­able envi­ron­ment (my own home) and had very pleas­ant, enjoy­able times. It was eas­ily one of the best drug expe­ri­ences of my life, I can’t begin to express how much I enjoyed it.

Well, I can and I did, if you read the first cou­ple of years of my out­put here, I rave about shrooms con­tin­u­ally. Taken respon­si­bly and with a rough knowl­edge of the appro­pri­ate dosage, shrooms are rel­a­tively harm­less. You would need to con­sume your own weight in mush­rooms for the dose to be fatally toxic and I haven’t heard about any­one who’s tried.

You could always pick fresh mush­rooms in the wild, pro­vided you knew what you were look­ing for, because the wrong type of mush­room could be fatally toxic at a much lower dosage. But if you were buy­ing them from some­one who could reli­ably tell you the strain, with knowl­edge of where they were farmed and advice on how many to take, you would be much bet­ter off.

And for a few years, we were much bet­ter off, with our safe, easy to buy fresh shrooms. It was bliss.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

The above para­graph will be repeated again, you will notice, I promise.

And so I did sadly lament the demise of my beloved shrooms because the gov­ern­ment man didn’t want me to have any more fun.

But it was too late, the mar­ket for legal highs had been estab­lished, a decent cus­tomer base still existed. All they needed was another prod­uct, some­thing legal that would fuck you up a bit.

The answer came from New Zealand:

BZP

BZP came as some­thing called party pills, which was a big change from fresh shrooms, it was a man made chem­i­cal of dubi­ous ori­gin. Rumour was it was used for worm­ing pets, but it gave peo­ple a buzz, so we tried it.

It worked. It was quite speedy and a bit spacey, pleas­ant but not over­whelm­ing. There were many brands, legal high forums were brim­ming with reviews to help you choose. Peo­ple were happy to have any­thing that was legal and had an effect.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

Right around the same time, the first legal mar­i­juana sub­sti­tutes that worked came along, the first was called Spice, which has become a generic term for these drugs. The ingre­di­ents were kept secret, so we didn’t know what the magic herbs we were smok­ing were, but we knew they got us high.

Turns out the herbs weren’t magic, but the JHW-081 they sprayed onto it was. JHW-081 is a syn­thetic cannabi­noid, made in a lab to mimic THC. Sneaky fuck­ers, no won­der it worked.

As if overnight, many dif­fer­ent brands of smok­ing mix­tures came on to the mar­ket, all with a very sim­i­lar weed-like effect. It was legal, but it was also expen­sive, and in some cases pricier than real weed.

Think about that, peo­ple were will­ing to pay more for a legal weed alter­na­tive, than actual weed. That says a lot.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

In the gloom of my post-legal-shrooms exis­tence, I tried many of these legal highs and a few years ago, I was get­ting these rather delight­ful lit­tle cap­sules shipped in legally from Israel.

They tried to keep the ingre­di­ents a secret, but with a bit of research, I dis­cov­ered it was a chem­i­cal related to cathi­none, which is the active ingre­di­ent in khat, the Africa plant that is used as a stim­u­lant when chewed.

At first, I only ordered a cou­ple and found them quite pleas­ant and quite strong, closer to real MDMA than BZP or the crap that fol­lowed. I ordered a few more, and then a few more.

And then I ordered a lot.

And then I lost a cou­ple of days. No lie, I think my ben­der lasted around 48 hours. Peo­ple were con­cerned, I just dis­ap­peared. It was the most mor­ish drug I’ve ever had and I used to do coke years ago. I kept going until I swal­lowed the last pill I had.

Then I crashed for a cou­ple of days and felt extremely depressed. I was angry with myself for los­ing con­trol, some­thing I rarely if ever do while under the influ­ence of any­thing. I didn’t con­trol this drug, this drug con­trolled me.

It didn’t, ever again. I didn’t touch any more after that. It seemed to tar­get my plea­sure cen­tre with laser-guided pre­ci­sion. No thanks.

Guess what I am 99.9% cer­tain that drug was?

Mephedrone.

Kids, lis­ten to your old uncle hippy, that shit’s not worth it. Its way too mor­ish. It feels absolutely won­der­ful when you’re tak­ing it and you will want to take it end­lessly. You can’t, even­tu­ally the money, or your body will give out and then you will crash. The crash sucks. Its not worth the pleasure.

As much as I don’t like mephedrone, I am merely sug­gest­ing (in strong, unam­bigu­ous terms) that you not take it, I am not sug­gest­ing some knee jerk reac­tionary ban. Actu­ally, I think it makes more sense to keep it legal and out in the open. at least until you have an alter­na­tive to offer.

If the gov­ern­ment can’t offer an alter­na­tive (I sug­gest weed, please), the mar­ket­place will find one. It always does, because we live in a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety and sup­ply will always try to meet demand.

Oh, and if you’re against sup­ply and demand, even in the illicit mar­ket­place, then you are against the very foun­da­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. So take that all you anti-drug com­mie pinko social­ists! Get on the free mar­ket band­wagon, don’t get in the way of trade!

Ban­ning mephedrone isn’t the answer, unless the ques­tion is: “how can we get another untested, cut­ting edge man-made intox­i­cant into the hands of our chil­dren in the quick­est pos­si­ble time?”

I’ve yet to see one con­clu­sive report of a death being caused directly by mephedrone. I’ve seen lots of bull­shit about it being “linked” to a few untimely deaths, but alco­hol and other drugs have also been in the mix, though that hasn’t been highlighted.

If I drank myself to death right now while eat­ing a banana, you could quite accu­rately state that, until the coroner’s report is issued, my death was linked to eat­ing a banana. I can see the head­lines now, “Ban the Yel­low Scourge”.

Booze kills and kills often, but the alco­hol indus­try spends a lot of money on image and rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment. When you think of liquor, you don’t think of corpses, do you? No, you think of good times, par­ties and women in tight dresses that you know will have sex with you.

Think about how many times you’ve got­ten pissed, puked your insides out and woke up the next day feel­ing like death, swear­ing you’d never ever do that to your­self again. Until next Saturday.

That’s either effec­tive mar­ket­ing or addic­tion. Or both.

The legal high indus­try isn’t organ­ised, they don’t have a cen­tralised body to speak on their behalf and be their pub­lic face. Its the same for ille­gal highs for that mat­ter. Who rep­re­sents them? Who does their spinning?

No one.

Maybe its time they did.

People’s need to get high, to be intox­i­cated, to alter their state, is not new and its not going away any time soon. There will always be a demand for sub­stances, legal or oth­er­wise, that change your mood.

Recent his­tory has shown that when given the choice, peo­ple pre­fer legal sub­stances, even if they cost more and have less pleas­ant effects than their ille­gal rivals.

If the gov­ern­ment left well enough alone with my old friends, magic mush­rooms, none of us would have ever heard of mephedrone and what­ever might follow.

Go on, if you let us all have legal weed, we can leave all is designer drug shit alone. Please?

Yes­ter­day, leg­is­la­tors in the US state of Cal­i­for­nia took the first real step towards a fully legalised, reg­u­lated and taxed cannabis mar­ket. Ear­lier this week, the US state of New Jer­sey legalised cannabis for med­ical use.

All over Amer­ica, atti­tudes and laws are chang­ing and chang­ing fast.

What are we doing wrong here in the United Kingdom?

Lots, by the look of it. How is it pos­si­ble that we are falling behind Amer­ica on this very impor­tant issue?

A few years ago, the sit­u­a­tion was reversed. The atti­tude here to weed was relax­ing, Tony Blair and David Blun­kett down­graded cannabis to Class C, mak­ing pos­ses­sion a very minor offence. In Amer­ica, so much as a seed or a used hash pipe was enough in most states to get you a lengthy, manda­tory prison sentence.

Cannabis didn’t remain Class C for long, as Gor­don Brown asked the ACMD to review its sta­tus. The ACMD did just that, twice and rec­om­mended that it remain in Class C. That was unac­cept­able to our very des­per­ate and weak, make-believe Prime Min­is­ter and he pushed ahead with restor­ing cannabis to to Class B. Class B increased penal­ties for pos­ses­sion, but had no effect on pro­duc­tion or dis­tri­b­u­tion, the penal­ties are the same for either clas­si­fi­ca­tion. Gor­don wanted to send a “strong mes­sage” that cannabis was a “dan­ger­ous, deadly drug”.

Now, you can ask any teenager if cannabis is lethal and once they stop laugh­ing, they will set you straight. Cannabis is in no way lethal, but our cur­rent gov­ern­ment and rul­ing party don’t have a prob­lem lying to the gen­eral pub­lic about any­thing. These are the same shit­bags that invaded Iraq on the basis of utter fab­ri­ca­tion, so a lit­tle white lie about weed won’t cause any issues with their consciences.

Well, I can tell you right now, its caus­ing major issues with mine!

Amer­ica is mov­ing apace to legalise weed. This is a huge shift in atti­tude and approach from their pre­vi­ous pol­icy of “just say no” and the war on drugs. Its seismic!

Amer­ica is the most liti­gious coun­try in the world, if there were any risks to cannabis, some­one would be get­ting sued for dam­ages, whether its the gov­ern­ment for allow­ing it or the peo­ple who pro­vide it. Amer­ica has accepted that cannabis is not a bad thing, but a ben­e­fi­cial prod­uct that can help mil­lions medically.

C. Everett Koop, for­mer Sur­geon Gen­eral of the United States declared that cannabis was the “most ther­a­peu­ti­cally ben­e­fi­cial sub­stance known to man” years ago, but it is only now that Amer­ica is accept­ing his assess­ment. At least they got there in the end.

We are still so far away from tak­ing a com­mon sense approach that I’m not sure what to do. Gor­don Brown, in his igno­rance and desire to appear strong on drugs, has set the cause back at least a decade. Its time we regain some of our lost ground.

Its not just Amer­ica, many coun­tries have relaxed their drug poli­cies to reflect com­mon sense, the most recent being the Czech Repub­lic. How could the UK be lag­ging behind them?

We’re lag­ging behind almost everyone.

I want to change that. I am going to change that.

I just don’t know how yet.

Every jour­ney starts with a first step and this is mine. My goal for 2010 is to com­bat the igno­rance and stu­pid­ity that is UK drug pol­icy. Its time for all decent, upstand­ing, oth­er­wise law abid­ing res­i­dents of this fine coun­try to stand up and demand that they are not crim­i­nalised for enjoy­ing a smoke.

We can fight the lies, we can fight the igno­rance. We can fight, fight fight until we get what we want, which is a legalised, reg­u­lated and taxed cannabis mar­ket. The time is now!

A year from now, we will be closer to our goal.You have my word on it.

Mar­tin Luther King, the famous and revered Amer­i­can civil rights activist once said, “…there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advo­cate obey­ing just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral respon­si­bil­ity to obey just laws. Con­versely, one has a moral respon­si­bil­ity to dis­obey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augus­tine that, “an unjust law is no law at all.””

Memo to self: Must try harder!

I don’t really write myself memos, that would be stu­pid and prob­a­bly a bit too neu­rotic and tight-assed even for me, but that doesn’t take away from the message.

To be fair on myself, I had a very busy Octo­ber, work­ing more last month than I have in a very long time, nearly 18 months. That’s a year and half to nor­mal people.

This is going to be one of those ram­bling posts with no set agenda or dom­i­nant topic. Its the blog­ging equiv­a­lent of singing scat. Be bop be bop wow.

I prob­a­bly shouldn’t use the word “scat” on my web­site, as it does have other mean­ings out­side of the world of jizz, I mean jazz. Too late, so let’s just for­get about it.

I’ve got a few days off, which is always wel­come and I am hop­ing to receive my very own Eigen­harp Pico. When I ordered it a cou­ple of weeks ago, they said it should ship out today!

What’s an Eigen­harp? Its a brand new elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ment, its avail­able in 2 mod­els, the Alpha, which is the pro­fes­sional, full sized ver­sion which is pricey as fuck and the Pico, its more afford­able baby brother.

Rather than have me try to explain all this to you, why don’t you CLICK HERE and check it out for your­self. Once you get there, go to The Road­show sec­tion and watch the short You Tube video. But be care­ful, you will end up want­ing one yourself.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/

I have no idea what exactly I am going to do with an Eigen­harp Pico, but I am plan­ning on using it when I finally record the northlon­don­hippy album. I know, I know, I’ve threat­ened to do this before, but I feel ready to invest the time, effort, blood, sweat and tears to do it now.

I’ve upgraded to the lat­est ver­sion of Logic Stu­dio, I’ve updated the dri­vers for my Roland UA-25 inter­face, I’ve got a decent micro­phone, a midi key­board, a Fender Tele­caster and soon my Pico. Now, if I can find some tal­ent some­where inside me, I’ll be laughing.

And don’t worry, my plan remains the same…to record 10 songs which you can down­load for free, burn onto CD, put on your iPhone or iPod and just groove out with the hippy.

To give it the full title, it will be called:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins: 10 songs about sex & death”

The seven deadly sins are my make believe band. I don’t really have a band, but if I did that’s what they would be called. And they would rock hard and be tight as fuck, but mainly they would do every­thing they could to make me look good.

I’ll prob­a­bly never really have a band.

“10 songs about sex & death” is rather self-explanatory as ulti­mately they are the only 2 things in life that really mat­ter. All the rest is just to kill time in-between.

I reckon I’ve got at least one album in me, but then I think most peo­ple do if they knew how to tap into it. Its the same with nov­els, screen­plays, what­ever. If I can tap into it, it should be fun.

And I’ll say it again, if I get one mil­lion down­loads, I’m book­ing Wem­b­ley for a con­cert. Not the Sta­dium, but the Arena. I’m not com­pletely crazy.

I won’t get a mil­lion down­loads in a mil­lion years, so I think I’m safe. And let’s face it, if a com­plete nobody like me can rack up 1 mil­lion down­loads, then some­one will wanna spon­sor and pro­mote my big Wem­b­ley gig.

Tick­ets won’t be free, but they’ll be afford­able. The real money will come from the con­ces­sion stands, tee-shirts and northlon­don­hippy sou­venirs, as long as my fac­to­ries in China can keep up with demand. If they can’t, I’ll just have another school closed and bring in more chil­dren. They work for candy.

Do you keep up with my musi­cal tastes on Last.FM? You should, because every song I play, at home or on the move, is scrob­bled to my account there. User­name is: n_londonhippy

I used to have a Last.FM wid­get here on my web­site, but it broke after a recent Word­Press update. I will get it replaced as soon as there’s a work­ing ver­sion of the plug-in again.

You might have caught that cannabis has been back in the head­lines here in the UK as the government’s chief advi­sory on drugs pol­icy was sacked for telling the truth. Well, a truth that com­pletely con­tra­dicts the gov­ern­ments own policies.

I’m not going to re-hash (see what I did there?) the whole thing now, because it hasn’t reached its con­clu­sion yet. I expect there will be some move­ment tomor­row, as the Home Sec­re­tary who sacked the chief advi­sor is meet­ing with the rem­nants of the advi­sory board to dis­cuss its future.

In a nut­shell, since 1971, the Advi­sory Coun­cil on the Mis­use of Drugs has been advis­ing the UK gov­ern­ment on drugs pol­icy. No sit­ting gov­ern­ment has ever ignored the ACMD’s advice, until a cou­ple of years ago when they returned weed to Class B from Class C, against the rec­om­men­da­tion of the panel.

The only thing that changed by rein­stat­ing cannabis’s Class B sta­tus is the penalty for pos­ses­sion, which at that level is 5 years in the slam­mer for even a small amount. That’s madcrazybatshitstupid.

Polls have shown that the major­ity of peo­ple think a 5 year sen­tence for sim­ple cannabis pos­ses­sion is too much, but the same polls also say the pub­lic wanted to see cannabis returned to Class B. Guess why? Because no one explained that Class B meant 5 years. If you don’t give them all the facts, then how can your poll be accurate?

The head of the ACMD, a smart and emi­nently qual­i­fied gen­tle­man by the name of Pro­fes­sor David Nutt has refused to par­rot the govt’s lies. He has also been quite vocal in point­ing out the many flaws in the cur­rent anti­quated drug laws. Since he was sacked, he went from vocal to angry and he’s been extremely forth­right in his rather accu­rate crit­i­cisms of the government.

Two other mem­bers of the ACMD quit in protest over Nutt’s sack­ing and the rest of the mem­bers may very well do the same, if the Home Sec­re­tary can’t sort this all out. My guess is he can’t, and the British government’s drug pol­icy will descend even fur­ther into chaos.

As you can imag­ine, I’ve been fol­low­ing this one quite closely and if you fol­low me on Twit­ter, I’ve tweeted dozens of links to news sto­ries per­tain­ing to all this.

Do I think this will lead to a break through in drugs pol­icy? Nope, but I’m usu­ally a pes­simist any­way. What I do think is its brought the debate back to the fore and that’s never a bad thing. And if more peo­ple in this coun­try wake up to the truth about weed, that’s not a bad thing either.

Even­tu­ally the drug laws will change, I just hope I live long enough to see it happen.

Like I said, I’m plan­ning to do a lot more on this rather com­plex story after tomor­row. I just want to see how it all plays out.

I think I’ve ram­bled enough now, if you’ve made it this far, well done you. You are clearly some­one of excel­lent taste, a supe­rior intel­lect and noth­ing bet­ter to do to do with your free time. I think I’ll join you on that third one, its time to go veg­e­tate in front of some fine tele­vi­sual enter­tain­ment. Fam­ily Guy here I come.

So Mrs. Hippy turns to me last night and says, “Don’t you post on your blog any more?”

She was surf­ing the inter­net on her iPod Touch, which she does quite a bit, pre­fer­ring it to using our iMac.

“Of course I do”, I said slightly defen­sively, try­ing to remem­ber when I last posted some­thing here. I had to check.

It was three weeks ago. That’s long, even by my some­what lax stan­dards. So what have I been up to in that time?

I was kind of hop­ing you could tell me.

I haven’t been work­ing that much. I haven’t been doing much of any­thing, if you must know. I think I am per­fect­ing the art of being and noth­ing­ness. I’m not even sure if I exist any more or even ever existed in the first place.

I might not even be fic­tional. I could just be imag­i­nary, liv­ing only in your mind.

You’re star­ing at a blank screen right now, only your mind thinks you are see­ing words writ­ten by some weird make-believe, north London-based hippy. How’s your imag­i­nary grammar?

See, this is what hap­pens when you start the day with a strong cof­fee and a skunky spliff pep­pered with bubble-hash. Every­one should start their day this way.

I spend inor­di­nate amounts of time sim­ply lost in thought. I dis­ap­pear into my own lit­tle Utopia, where I right the world’s wrongs and allow my cre­ativ­ity to flow freely.

I used to do all that in the real world, but at some point, I stopped.

Oh I’ve worked out when it stopped and why. It was when I first got sick with my stu­pid Hashimoto’s Dis­ease a cou­ple of years ago. I didn’t realise it at the time, it prob­a­bly took another year before I twigged that some­thing was actu­ally phys­i­cally wrong with me, but in ret­ro­spect, it all fits.

Between 2004 and 2007, I wrote 2 nov­els and was rea­son­ably pro­lific here on my web­site too. Towards the end of that period, the 2nd book fiz­zled out while I was writ­ing it and remains one chap­ter shy of being com­plete. The first book was pub­lished, but I didn’t do enough to pro­mote it and it lan­guishes on vir­tual shelves, unread.

The first book was nearly com­mis­sioned as a TV series too, but the media is a fickle and fucked up mis­tress. The guy who liked it and could have com­mis­sioned it with a flick of his pen, moved on; his replace­ments were far less enthu­si­as­tic and the pos­si­bil­ity of pro­duc­ing the series faded away.

Rather than con­tinue to plug away try­ing to do some­thing with it, I let it go too. At the time, I just thought I had lost my enthu­si­asm for the project, but in truth, it was prob­a­bly my ill health that robbed me of my fire.

I haven’t done much of any­thing since.

Of course, that’s not strictly true as I still work (mostly) full time and I do post the odd piece here, but my out­put is not even close to the lev­els I reached a few years ago.

I’m still being treated for the Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my doc­tor is still adjust­ing my med­ica­tion lev­els. If they ever get it right, I should feel bet­ter and be back to my old self. That’s what they tell me, anyway.

In the mean time, I’ll con­tinue to dis­tract myself with my vivid imag­i­na­tion and soft drugs.

Now, aren’t you glad Mrs. Hippy asked if I still post here? Blame her for the 5 min­utes of your life I just wasted, not me.

That’s an actual photo of a Lon­don bus advert placed by Release, an organ­i­sa­tion com­mit­ted to reform­ing UK drug laws.

Here’s Release’s mis­sion state­ment, from their website:

“Release is the national cen­tre of exper­tise on drugs and drugs law – pro­vid­ing free and con­fi­den­tial spe­cial­ist advice to the pub­lic and pro­fes­sion­als. Release also cam­paigns for changes to UK drug pol­icy to bring about a fairer and more com­pas­sion­ate legal frame­work to man­age drug use in our society.”

Release have launched this new pub­lic aware­ness cam­paign, please visit their site for more details. Its sen­si­ble, log­i­cal and very true.

And click here for the The Guardian’s take on the campaign.

Could this be the first step in the right direc­tion? Let’s hope so!

Update 10th June 2009:
Since post­ing this a few days ago, the ad cam­paign has been cen­sored by adver­tis­ing reg­u­la­tors and taken down. Click here to read more.

Happy 420 everyone!

If you’re not famil­iar with 420 (four-twenty), click the above link. Its prac­ti­cally a national hol­i­day in Amer­ica and if we’re lucky, it could very well catch on here in the UK.

Amer­ica is usu­ally sev­eral steps ahead of the UK and the US’s atti­tude to cannabis is a great exam­ple of this fact. Its where the point­less “war on drugs” began and it just might be where it ends too.

Since Obama got hit with a “legalise cannabis ques­tion” from an over­whelm­ing num­ber of peo­ple online, all of Amer­ica is rolling with fren­zied momen­tum towards legal­is­ing this hippy’s favourite plant.

The O-man shouldn’t have been so dis­mis­sive of such a seri­ous and rel­e­vant ques­tion, but he’s a pop­u­lar politi­cian so he can’t be seen to be soft on drugs.

That hasn’t pre­vented Sen­a­tor Ron Paul, who is also a pop­u­lar politi­cian, from call­ing for an end to the war on drugs, but he is a hero and lib­er­tar­ian and not afraid to express an opinion.

Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zine can see the pace of change regard­ing cannabis laws in Amer­ica. And the con­ser­v­a­tive right seem down with it too.

Even the main­stream press is get­ting in on the act, with Time Mag­a­zine ask­ing and answer­ing, “Why Legal­is­ing Mar­i­juana Makes Sense”.

Not only that, Time Mag­a­zine also asks and answers, “Is Pot Good For You?” Of course it is!

Why the sud­den shift in America?

Two things right now are forc­ing peo­ple to rethink their stance on cannabis in the states, one of which already applies here in the UK.

Its the econ­omy, stupid.

With this whole recession/depression non­sense, can any­one dis­re­gard the effect a legalised cannabis mar­ket would have on a nation’s GDP?

Legal­is­ing weed, in an instant, would cre­ate legit­i­mate jobs that would be taxed, not to men­tion a tax on the actual prod­uct itself. It would raise a lot of money and fast.

Wait, let me revise that. It would bring an already estab­lished and thriv­ing black mar­ket econ­omy into the main­stream. Ka-ching!

Its been said that if weed were legal and 420 were a proper hol­i­day, it would have the same sort of effect on the econ­omy as xmas. Ka-double-ching.

Weed smok­ers would will­ingly be taxed in return for not being crim­i­nalised, so says Salon Mag­a­zine. I sure as hell would be ready to pay tax on my dope, if I didn’t have to worry about being arrested for toking!

The other prob­lem in Amer­ica is one that hasn’t reached Europe yet, but it could in the future and that is gang related violence.

The south­ern bor­der of Amer­ica is where the real drug war is tak­ing place, but not between law enforce­ment and crim­i­nals, but between rival drug gangs. Police on both sides of the bor­der have been inef­fec­tual and pos­si­bly cor­rupt, when they’re not get­ting caught in the cross­fire. The death toll is sadly, quite high and its bad for busi­ness on both sides of the border.

The trou­ble on America’s bor­der is forc­ing peo­ple to realise that the drug mar­ket should be under some sort of gov­ern­ment con­trol and reg­u­la­tion, for with­out that, it leaves crim­i­nal gangs run­ning the show.

Just as the pro­hi­bi­tion of alco­hol in the states in the early part of the last cen­tury cre­ated gang­sters like Al Capone, the pro­hi­bi­tion of drugs cre­ated Pablo Esco­bar and those like him who con­trol the indus­try today.

America’s finally grasp­ing that legal­is­ing cannabis would solve more prob­lems than it could ever cre­ate. By legit­imis­ing an exist­ing indus­try, Amer­ica will reap the rewards finan­cially and it would help cre­ate a new sta­bil­ity along the Rio Grande.

Check out this report from the very respected Cato Insti­tute, which looks at the pos­i­tive effects of the decrim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of all drugs in Por­tu­gal. Its very enlight­en­ing and worth a quick read.

You’ll notice in all of debate and dis­cus­sion in Amer­ica, there hasn’t been any talk of cannabis-induced psy­chosis or schiz­o­phre­nia, nor the demon­i­sa­tion of the stronger strains of cannabis known as “skunk”. That’s because its all spin and bull­shit cre­ated here in the UK to allow our politi­cians to use weed as a polit­i­cal foot­ball that scores easy own-goals with the ill-informed electorate.

In the states, stronger weed is prized and cel­e­brated for being par­tic­u­larly “med­i­c­i­nal” and is seen to be more ben­e­fi­cial, not less. There are no “cannabis hys­te­ria mums” and no men­tion of unproven links to men­tal ill­ness. Remem­ber, a for­mer Sur­geon Gen­eral in Amer­ica (C. Everett Coop if mem­ory serves), called mar­i­juana “the most ther­a­peu­ti­cally ben­e­fi­cial sub­stance known to man”.

Con­fu­sion con­tin­ues to reign where cannabis pol­icy is con­cerned here in the UK, with ran­dom, point­less changes in clas­si­fi­ca­tion and penal­ties every cou­ple of years whether we need them or not.

Even the government’s own drug coun­selling ser­vice, Ask Frank, is telling younger callers that “cannabis is safer than alco­hol.” Its com­pletely true and in line with what the experts say, but its incon­sis­tent with the government’s own stated pol­icy, which of course, ignores the advice of the afore­men­tioned experts they employ.

There are already whis­pers in White­hall, many politi­cians here can see the scrawl on the wall, but are won­der­ing how to right all of the wrongs of the last few years. The gov­ern­ment has used the media to paint a totally false pic­ture of the dan­gers of cannabis, so how do they turn it back around?

Sim­ple, just let the lies qui­etly fade away and replace them with the promise of cold hard cash.

Is it going to take open gang war­fare on the streets of Britain for our lead­ers to deal with cannabis respon­si­bly? I hope to god it doesn’t come to that, but I don’t see any other way for them wake up and start deal­ing with reality.

The Guardian pub­lished a great report last week, which states that end­ing the pro­hi­bi­tion on drugs would save the UK around £14 bil­lion pounds. That’s an amount that can’t be ignored, espe­cially in these dif­fi­cult eco­nomic times. Law enforce­ment, the penal sys­tem could all be over­hauled and the resources could be redi­rected to actual crimes with vic­tims and everything…!

They’re search­ing for the green shoots of recov­ery, per­haps cannabis is lit­er­ally the cash crop green­ery we’ve all been seeking.

And maybe one day, we’ll all be able to openly com­mem­o­rate 420 in the man­ner appro­pri­ate to the event. And that’s exactly what this hippy is going to do right now, as I spark up a juicy, skunky spliff.

The Econ­o­mist, a rather con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tion, has come out strongly in favour of the legal­i­sa­tion, tax­a­tion and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of drugs.

All drugs.

The arti­cle I am refer­ring to is RIGHT HERE and is well worth a few min­utes of your valu­able surf­ing time because it lays out a very ratio­nal, sen­si­ble and per­sua­sive argu­ment for this rad­i­cal suggestion.

As the UN meets in Vienna to decide the next decade’s drug pol­icy, why won’t they lis­ten to the experts?

There are so many intel­li­gent, edu­cated, thought­ful mem­bers of respectable soci­ety who believe legal­i­sa­tion is the only solu­tion. There are loads of senior police­men who believe this, many civil ser­vants and politi­cians do too, but they are too afraid to speak up because of the false hys­te­ria sur­round­ing the issue.

David Cameron, most likely the next Prime Min­is­ter of this coun­try is sym­pa­thetic to the idea of rad­i­cally chang­ing our approach on the sub­ject as men­tioned in this, another well writ­ten and thought­ful piece on the sub­ject from politics.co.uk

I’ve always thought we’ve had more of a chance of chang­ing the laws under a con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment, because it takes a strong party to take deci­sive action.

If David Cameron would take one key step in that direc­tion, he could have my support.

Mr. Cameron, I implore you to shift your pub­lic posi­tion based on facts and sci­ence. Please con­sider decrim­i­nal­is­ing or legal­is­ing cannabis as soon as you are in power.