The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘drugs’ Category

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.

Finally, a gov­ern­ment drug pol­icy I agree with completely…

Ille­gal factory-style cannabis farms should be closed down.

Check out THIS REPORT from the BBC.

Fac­tory cannabis-farms are often set-up in rented accom­mo­da­tion, with the land­lords none the wiser until they receive a phone call from the police telling them their income prop­erty has been trashed.

Ille­gal cannabis farm­ers steal elec­tric­ity from neigh­bours or from the an energy sup­plier; either way its theft and its wrong. Safety is ignored and fires are not uncom­mon. And sad­dest of all, they are fre­quently staffed by ille­gal aliens trapped in a type of hell­ish inden­tured servitude.

Where I split from the gov­ern­ment is their choice of solu­tion; police raids won’t make the prob­lem go away, it will only make it relo­cate to yet another unsus­pect­ing venue. The trade is far too lucra­tive for those involved to give it up. Raids are sim­ply a cal­cu­lated risk bal­anced against a very reward­ing return.

Its sup­ply and demand, the very cor­ner­stone of our cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. To ignore or deny this very sim­ple truth, is to be blink­ered and ostrich like.

There’s a bet­ter way.

There’s always a bet­ter way, but it would involve our lead­ers shift­ing their cur­rent posi­tion, which is one of dis­in­for­ma­tion and lies, towards a more open and hon­est approach.

Its time to legalise the indus­try and take it out of the hands of crim­i­nals. Its time to reg­u­late and tax cannabis, bring the mar­ket under some sort of control.

To be against a legal cannabis indus­try is to be against the very heart and soul of capitalism.

Don’t let the con­di­tion­ing the media has been force-feeding you colour your view on this. They’ve been sys­tem­at­i­cally try­ing to dis­credit cannabis and per­vert your per­cep­tion of it for quite some time now.

Why?

Its easy to score points with the pub­lic by appear­ing tough on drugs. Also, it diverts your atten­tion from more impor­tant issues, like Iraq, cli­mate change or the economy.

The time is now for this unadul­ter­ated bull­shit to end.

Back when Blair and Blun­kett were in charge, cannabis was down­graded and they even toyed with a police pol­icy of mak­ing arrests for pos­ses­sion of cannabis the low­est pos­si­ble pri­or­ity. Things were finally mov­ing in the right direc­tion, the gov­ern­ment was lis­ten­ing to advi­sors and sci­en­tis­tis and using a bit of com­mon sense.

Mean­while in Amer­ica, the “war on drugs” was still going strong, along with fed­eral raids on med­ical mar­i­juana clubs and impris­on­ment for pos­ses­sion. This wasn’t that long ago.

Under Obama, things have already changed with an end to fed­eral raids and an offi­cial pol­icy that secedes power to indi­vid­ual states with regards to cannabis.

Cal­i­for­nia is now con­sid­er­ing legal­i­sa­tion and tax­a­tion, because the state is nearly bank­rupt. Des­per­ate times clearly call for cre­ative mea­sures, this one will bring Cali an esti­mated annual tidy sum of $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) dollars.

Many other states have decrim­i­nalised pos­ses­sion and have made it the low­est pos­si­ble polic­ing priority.

Our out-of-touch, out-of-step gov­ern­ment is about as un-Obama as possible.

If peo­ple won­der why Obama didn’t make more time for Gor­don Brown, they’re not really look­ing closely enough. They couldn’t be more polar oppo­sites when it comes to gen­uine lib­eral thought and policy.

Legal­is­ing weed would cre­ate legit­i­mate jobs, for legit­i­mate farm­ers and dis­trib­u­tors; jobs that already exist in the black econ­omy, fuelling a rather size­able black mar­ket that exists out­side the tax and social secu­rity system.

A legal and con­trolled indus­try would insure that safety stan­dards were met at the point of pro­duc­tion, for the facil­i­ties, the staff and the prod­uct. You would know the weed you were get­ting was pure and unadul­ter­ated. You would know the per­son who grew it was paid a rea­son­able, tax­able wage.

As much as I wish to see these dan­ger­ous and ille­gal cannabis farms closed down, I’m smart enough to realise that police raids alone are not the answer. If you really want to end the ille­gal cannabis trade, there is only one prac­ti­cal, work­able solu­tion: Legalise!

Even the UN may come to this con­clu­sion as they pre­pare to finalise an agree­ment this week in Vienna, but as this report in today’s Guardian sug­gests, there are still deep divi­sions with some EU and Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries favour­ing a more ratio­nal approach, with the US pre­fer­ring to con­tinue the point­less “war on drugs”.

Oh Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama, are you lis­ten­ing? The “war on drugs” has been an abysmal fail­ure and many knowl­edge­able and respectable peo­ple believe its been worse than the actual harm caused by the drugs them­selves. Could you please call your min­ions in Vienna and sort this sorry mess out?

If you want to know more, please check out my Cannabis Truth Series

Promises, promises. Politi­cians make them all the time when they are cam­paign­ing, only to con­ve­niently for­get about them once in office, but not Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama.

This week, US Attor­ney Gen­eral, Eric Holder con­firmed that fed­eral raids on Med­ical Mar­i­juana facil­i­ties would end and indi­vid­ual states could deter­mine their own poli­cies regard­ing my favourite plant. He said this is “now Amer­i­can policy”.

How cool is that?

This is a huge shift in the way the law deals with weed in Amer­ica. I wish the UK could be equally enlight­ened, but the gov­ern­ment here works very hard to be as un-Obama-like as possible.

And they don’t want to stop there either. Leg­is­la­tors in Cal­i­for­nia are now con­sid­er­ing tak­ing it one step fur­ther, with a pos­si­ble plan to fully legalise and tax cannabis to help bale out the finan­cially des­ti­tute state. They say it could bring in $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) in tax rev­enue to the state annually.

That’s a lot of green­backs for a lot of green­ery! Its com­mon fuck­ing sense! Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work, never has, never will. If you can’t beat ‘em, tax ‘em.

Obama’s motto through­out his cam­paign was “Yes, we can.” Now that he’s in office, the new motto is: “Yes, we cannabis!”

Roseanne Barr, domes­tic god­dess, come­dian and now radio talk­show host is sell­ing some very cool tee-shirts in Amer­ica with that very slo­gan on them, Yes, we CANnabis.

We should all order our­selves one to show our sup­port for this long over­due change in pol­icy. Let’s hope that it spreads out from Amer­ica to the rest of the world.

Six months ago I was diag­nosed with Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, oth­er­wise known as Chronic Thy­roidi­tis. At the time I didn’t really grasp the sig­nif­i­cance or seri­ous­ness of my diagnosis.

I do now.

I’ve prob­a­bly had this stu­pid dis­ease for a while, longer than I’ve known. I had symp­toms that I didn’t know were symp­toms for at least a year prior to being told of the cause.

I just thought I was get­ting old.

I am get­ting old, but age was not caus­ing my prob­lems, my use­less thy­roid was…and is.

I’m still not well. I find myself say­ing that a lot lately, in response to peo­ple ask­ing me why I look tired, or pale.

I’ve been under­go­ing treat­ment for Hashimoto’s since my diag­no­sis. Treat­ment comes in the form of a small pill taken daily to replace the thy­roid hor­mone my body no longer manufactures.

The side effects caused by the pills are very sim­i­lar to the symp­toms of the dis­ease. I get heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, headaches, dizzi­ness, light-headedness and these get worse every time the dosage is raised.

The dosage gets raised every cou­ple of months as I am still not on a ther­a­peu­ti­cally effec­tive level yet. I started out on 25mg, then went to 50mg and now I am on 100mg of Levothy­rox­ine. Its about to be raised again, prob­a­bly to 150mg, though I am await­ing for the results of a blood test for confirmation.

Lately, extreme exhaus­tion and lethargy have been added to the mix. I con­stantly crave sleep, but I don’t sleep deeply or for very long. I get phys­i­cally tired very eas­ily and don’t have any of my usual stamina.

My nor­mal walk to my local high­street used to take me well under 10 min­utes, it now takes me closer to 15 and the return jour­ney is stretch­ing to the 20 minute mark.

I’m hav­ing con­cen­tra­tion prob­lems too. “Brain fog” is another symp­tom and there’s a real pea-souper in my head most of the time. I find it dif­fi­cult pay­ing atten­tion to peo­ple when they tell me any­thing com­plex, my mind wan­ders and I am eas­ily dis­tracted. The same is true of my read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, if a para­graph drags on too long, as this one seems to be doing, I for­get what it says.

I get waves of nau­sea, my appetite vac­il­lates between hav­ing none at all, to sud­denly being rav­en­ous and I’ve been hav­ing mood swings too.

All of this sucks the big one in a very real, demon­stra­ble way and I am tired of it.

To com­pli­cate mat­ters, I haven’t been hav­ing much fun with the NHS.

My GP referred me to a spe­cial­ist and after wait­ing months for an appoint­ment, I ended up leav­ing the clinic with­out see­ing the con­sul­tant endocri­nol­o­gist. The clinic was over­sub­scribed, there weren’t any seats in the wait­ing room, the nurses were surly and rude and after wait­ing way too long, I left.

I did receive a let­ter of apol­ogy from the con­sul­tant for my poor treat­ment, but that is a small con­so­la­tion. The entire expe­ri­ence left me with a bad taste in my mouth and no desire to ever return to that clinic.

It gets even worse, my reg­u­lar GP, who I have been see­ing for nearly a dozen years has been hav­ing health prob­lems of his own. He’s cut back his hours and for the last sev­eral weeks, I’ve been unable to see him. I finally gave up and saw the surgery’s senior partner.

The senior part­ner imme­di­ately said she would take over man­ag­ing my care, which makes me think my reg­u­lar doc­tor won’t be back full time any time soon.

Being sick seems to be hard work and I worry if I ever had some­thing seri­ously big wrong with me that I wouldn’t have the patience to fight my way through the sys­tem to get the treat­ment I would need to survive.

And speak­ing of sur­vival, peo­ple can and do die from Hashimoto’s Dis­ease. One of the things it does to you is weaken your heart and one can suf­fer from heart fail­ure. I’m not say­ing that’s what I am head­ing for, but quite often it does feel that way to me.

I’m told that once I am on an effec­tive dose of med­ica­tion, I’ll feel like a brand new per­son. I’ve heard that a lot for the last six months. I’d be happy if I could just feel like the old per­son I used to be, before I was diag­nosed and on this stu­pid medication.

The exhaus­tion caught up to me this week and pre­vented me from get­ting to work. I’ve been liv­ing on adren­a­lin and my sup­ply must have finally depleted, I sort of col­lapsed the other night. I’m now signed off work for a week to rest.

I feel like this is my life now and I’ll never feel like my old self again. I know I’m an impa­tient patient, but I just can’t see a path back to good health. Let’s hope my doctor’s vision is clearer than my own.

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.

A year ago, I spent far too much money on my cof­fee mak­ing set-up. I say that, sit­ting here a year later, sip­ping the finest cap­puc­cino I’ve ever had.

Since yes­ter­day.

Every day I drink the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted and I have absolutely no regrets on how much money I spent.

I have an Izzo Vivi espresso maker and a Macap M4D grinder as well as var­i­ous acces­sories that help me pur­sue the per­fect coffee.

The Izzo Vivi is on the low-end of the pro-sumer cof­fee maker scale, but is an excel­lent piece of kit. Its been reli­able, depend­able and rel­a­tively easy to use and main­tain. Most impor­tantly, it cranks out shot after shot of deli­cious espresso and has plenty of steam power to turn your milk into light and pour-able mirco-foam.

The espresso maker, as I quickly learned, is not the most impor­tant machine com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing, its the grinder. To really make good espresso, you need a grinder that is up to the task and what­ever you think you should spend on one, its prob­a­bly not enough. Any cof­fee web­site or forum will tell you exactly the same thing.

My espresso maker has no real con­trols on it, except for the lever that oper­ates the pump. You fill the portafil­ter with freshly ground cof­fee, lock it into place and then lift the lever to the pump. When you’re done, flip the lever down and the pump stops. That’s really it.

All of your con­trol comes from adjust­ing the fine­ness of the grind and once you find your espresso range, requires min­i­mal tweak­ing depend­ing on the type and fresh­ness of your cof­fee beans.

Which leads me to what I think is the sin­gle most impor­tant com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing: freshly roasted beans.

I’ve read of some­thing called the “rule of twelve’s” when it comes to cof­fee which goes like this:

unroasted, green cof­fee beans stay fresh for 12 months
roasted cof­fee beans stay fresh for around 12 days
ground cof­fee stays fresh for 12 minutes

I buy my cof­fee online, about every fort­night, to insure I have the fresh­est, tasti­est beans pos­si­ble. I grind my beans directly in the portafil­ter, only sec­onds before I brew my espresso. You can’t get any fresher than that.

Cof­fee oxi­dises quickly and releases gasses which break it down and the flavour suf­fers for this. If you’re buy­ing your cof­fee pre-ground, or you are buy­ing roasted beans with­out know­ing the roast­ing date, you are cheat­ing your­self out of the best cof­fee you can drink.

And if you are using those pre-filled cof­fee pods, you are trad­ing con­ve­nience for taste.

You don’t have to spend as much as I have, but you really owe it to your­self to grind your own cof­fee and there are plenty of more afford­able options for grinders than mine.

And freshly roasted beans aren’t that expen­sive, a quar­ter kilo of a decent sin­gle estate or blend costs about the same as a tall cap­puc­cino from one of the high street chains and you’ll get at least 8 dou­ble espres­sos from it.

And it doesn’t have to be espresso, a decent Bodum press-pot with freshly ground cof­fee will make an out­stand­ing cup and if you are only grind­ing for fil­ter cof­fee, you can find some real bar­gains on grinders. I promise you, you will taste the difference.

My grinder is used every day, but the same can’t be said for the espresso maker. When I don’t have the time to heat it up, or clean it down after use, instead I use an Aeropress.

The main fea­ture of the Aero­press is that it will work with the same fine­ness of grind as the espresso maker, so no need to read­just the grinder. The Aero­press is made of plas­tic, very sim­ple to use and clean and pro­duces a very con­vinc­ing espresso-like cof­fee. I heat up some milk in the microwave and use one of those battery-operated hand whisks to froth it and in less than 5 min­utes, have some­thing which approx­i­mates a cappuccino.

But when I have the time, I always make the extra effort to use the Vivi. It takes longer and requires more clean-up, but its worth it.

My daily cof­fee rou­tine is some­thing like this:

Switch on the Vivi
Wait 30–45 min­utes for it to warm up
When ready, brew a dou­ble espresso
do a 2 sec­ond flush to clear loose grounds from the shower screen
back­flush for 10–15 sec­onds to clear oils from the brew path
froth my milk
flush the steam wand to get any milk residue out
build my drink
enjoy

Most days, I have a sec­ond cup as well, after that, I switch the machine off to let it cool. Then I clean out the drip tray, wipe it down and every other day, I refill the water reservoir.

I also back­flush with deter­gent occa­sion­ally, I soak the bas­kets and portafil­ters in the same deter­gent, I soak the tip of the steam wand in milk deposit remover and every few months I descale the boiler. None of this is dif­fi­cult or time consuming.

My acces­sory col­lec­tion includes 2x lined shot glasses to check I am get­ting the cor­rect vol­ume of espresso in the cor­rect amount of time (2 ounces in around 30 sec­onds), a cou­ple of shot pots, a stain­less steam jug for milk froth­ing, a 58mm Reg Bar­ber tam­per, a portafil­ter holder for tamp­ing, and a shot timer. The tamp­ing stand and the shot timer are use­ful, but not essen­tial, every­thing else I couldn’t do without.

I also have 4 portafil­ters; one with 2 spouts and a dou­ble bas­ket, another with one spout and a dou­ble bas­ket, a third with a blank­ing disk for back­flush­ing and a fourth that’s bot­tom­less with a triple bas­ket. The bot­tom­less portafil­ter was use­ful when I was learn­ing how to pack a portafil­ter prop­erly, as it showed me where to look for my mistakes.

I spent a good part of the year sam­pling dif­fer­ent beans and blends, but for many months now, I’ve been stick­ing one par­tic­u­lar bean, called Yemen Mokha Matrar which is the rich­est, tasti­est of all I tried. It works par­tic­u­larly well in milk-based drinks, like my amaz­ing cappuccinos.

You can get Yemen Mokha Matrar from a vari­ety of sup­pli­ers, though the roaster I use, roasts to order. I place an order on his web­site and he roasts the beans for me and ships them out the same day. Its a great ser­vice and they arrive the fol­low­ing day.

If any­one wants the name of the roaster I use, please feel free to email me. I’d like to include a link to his site, but would you want to be known as my offi­cial cof­fee roaster? I’m not cer­tain he would either.

Since I started mak­ing my own proper cof­fee at home, I haven’t had a cof­fee any place else that even comes close, not from the high street chains, not from the cof­fee ven­dor in my office, nowhere!

Life is far too short to be drink­ing sludge and you owe it to your­self to pro­vide your­self with the finest cof­fee pos­si­ble. Put it this way, if I had to pay high street prices for every cap­puc­cino I’ve had at home in the last year, I could have bought three sets of cof­fee mak­ing gear.

And if you are won­der­ing why an old trippy hippy like me digs cof­fee so much, its sim­ple. Cof­fee is a drug, like any­thing else that has an effect on your mood and per­cep­tion. Don’t believe me, read this and learn if you drink too much, you can have proper hallucinations.

Our stu­pid gov­ern­ment went ahead and reclas­si­fied weed today, against the advice of the sci­en­tists, med­ical experts and drug advi­sors. Cannabis has been returned to Class B, which means penal­ties for sim­ple pos­ses­sion have increased, but penal­ties for deal­ing and pro­duc­tion remain the same, sort of…

While not in place yet, a 3-strike sys­tem is to be imple­mented later in the week. On your first offence, you will be given a warn­ing, on your sec­ond, you will be fined 80 quid and on your third, you will be charged. Nat­u­rally, this new penalty sys­tem is not in place today and won’t be until at least mid­week. The gov­ern­ment couldn’t even co-ordinate the change in clas­si­fi­ca­tion and the new penal­ties so they started on the same day and they’ve had over a year to plan it. Losers!

So why did they change the classification?

I don’t know, there isn’t a sin­gle good rea­son for the change. Laws regard­ing cannabis are even more mud­dled and con­fus­ing now than they ever were!

The advice from the var­i­ous gov­ern­ment advi­sory boards was to leave it in Class C, but if they did that, they couldn’t score any polit­i­cal points with our poorly informed electorate.

Check out this BBC report for more details.

No one in the UK gov­ern­ment is inter­ested in the truth, or doing the right thing where cannabis is con­cerned. I am so dis­ap­pointed and depressed by this stu­pid out­come, words can­not begin to express my distress.

I found this list of Cannabis Myths from a drug organ­i­sa­tion in the US state of Indi­ana. Even they know more about weed than Gor­don Brown and his idi­otic cab­i­net. Please read it so you can be armed with the truth being denied us by the media and the gov­ern­ment here.

Gor­don Brown may still not be long for pol­i­tics as the cur­rent eco­nomic depres­sion (some­one has to say it) may sink his career yet. If it does, it will be the one good thing to come from an oth­er­wise bleak finan­cial out­look. Here’s hoping!

I think they located some of this hippy ancestor’s in China.

Go on, clicky the linky good! You know you wanna!

(The northlon­don­hippy apol­o­gises for any per­ceived racist humour in the above post. You can’t be too care­ful these days.)

Since receiv­ing my diag­no­sis of Hashmimoto’s Dis­ease and writ­ing about it here, the word “Hashimoto” is appear­ing with greater and greater fre­quency, in var­i­ous forms in the list of search terms plugged into Google that get you to my site.

Don’t worry, “northlon­don­hippy” remains the num­ber one search term that finds me. I’m a proper online destination.

But very high up on the list, sits Dr. Hashimoto. Con­sid­er­ing the first time I ever heard of it was as it passed over my doctor’s lips pre­ceded by the words “you have…”, I’m some­what sur­prised at how com­mon it is.

It seems quite a few of you out there in inter­net­land have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease too, or at least you think you do.

Peo­ple search for symp­toms, search for cures, search for clues on how to live with this auto-immune disease.

I’m far from an expert, hav­ing only known of my own con­di­tion for sev­eral months, but I have been dis­cov­er­ing loads of peo­ple I know who have thy­roid problems.

Every­one wants to know what “your dose” is.

“What’s your dose?”, they all say to me, look­ing vis­i­bly dis­ap­pointed when I tell them I am cur­rently on a pal­try 50 micro­grams of levothy­rox­ine, com­pared to their 150–200 micro­gram dose.

Its true my dose is cur­rently low, but that is about to change, again. My GP is mon­i­tor­ing my thy­roid lev­els at reg­u­lar inter­vals and increas­ing my dose grad­u­ally. The key, he says, is to find the low­est ther­a­peu­tic dose, because too much can cause dif­fer­ent prob­lems. I’m due for another blood test next week and I would expect my dose to go up again as soon as I receive the results.

With me, I didn’t know I had a prob­lem for quite a while, I ignored or dis­missed all the symp­toms I now know I had. It wasn’t until my back seized up and my legs gave out that it dawned on me I might have a health problem.

Clever, eh? I had heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, nau­sea, dizzi­ness, no appetite, no energy, aching joints and a slow heart beat and I just thought it was just the nor­mal age­ing process catch­ing up to me.

My doc­tor assures me that all of this is very treat­able and once my dosage is cor­rect, I will feel like my old self again. I’ve felt crappy for so long, I’m not sure what that really means.

So if you’re already diag­nosed, just be patient. Give the med­ica­tion time to even you out, just like I am.

And if you think you have Hashimoto’s, just go see a doc­tor and you are a sim­ple blood test away from diag­no­sis and treatment.

And if it turns out you don’t have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, per­haps this arti­cle in today’s New York Times, might give you pause for thought.

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!