The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘the hippy’ Category

Twit­ter recently intro­duced a new fea­ture you might have noticed if you access the ser­vice via their web­site. This new fea­ture is called “Who to Fol­low” and it gen­er­ates a list of sug­gested users and accounts Twit­ter thinks you should fol­low based on some algo­rith­mic com­puter magic voodoo.

To say this new fea­ture has been con­tro­ver­sial would be an under­state­ment. I’ve seen scores of tweets from peo­ple who hate the idea of being told what to do and who to fol­low. Most have dis­missed this new fea­ture as a dis­trac­tion. Many wish to know how to remove it.

I don’t think you can.

Instead of shun­ning this new fea­ture, I decided to embrace it fully, by mind­lessly fol­low­ing every account Twit­ter sug­gested to me.

Every day, I vis­ited the page with the sug­gested users and sim­ply fol­lowed them all.

Some days, Twit­ter would only have a hand­ful of accounts, other days they could have sev­eral pages worth for me. They’d even refresh it later in the day, with more accounts for me. There was no pat­tern or rea­son to the way they popped up and I just relent­lessly clicked on the fol­low button.

From the first day it went live for me, I started adding accounts. When I began, I had around 1,200 accounts that I fol­lowed and I added around 800 more, reach­ing the exact total of 2,001 fol­lowees, which is my limit.

One les­son I learned from this lit­tle exper­i­ment, is that there is a limit to the num­ber of accounts you can fol­low. Every­one has a limit which is cal­cu­lated based upon the num­ber of accounts fol­low­ing you. My ratio, if it has any mean­ing or rel­e­vance to any­one else, is:

1 fol­lower = 3.66 fol­lowees (approximately)

The point is, there’s a limit and it didn’t take me that long to reach it.

If I wanted to fol­low more peo­ple, I had to either: a) gain more fol­low­ers of my own so my ratio changes or b) unfol­low some accounts.

Here’s the funny thing, even though I had reached my limit of accounts to fol­low, Twit­ter con­tin­ued to sug­gest users to me and it was dri­ving me crazy that I couldn’t fol­low them.

When I hit my limit, I also couldn’t fol­low back any­one new who had fol­lowed me. I like to fol­low back if the account seems like it has a gen­uine per­son behind it and I felt bad that it wasn’t possible.

So what were my new 800 close friends like? They’re mainly polit­i­cally minded or politi­cians, but not exclu­sively. Many of them were British Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment, or for­mer MPs, or unsuc­cess­ful can­di­dates from the last election.

Why?

Twit­ter sug­gests users by look­ing at who the peo­ple you fol­low, fol­low them­selves. Every account sug­gested has a lit­tle foot­note, list­ing three peo­ple you fol­low, who also fol­low the account.

One of the ben­e­fits of this is it increases the num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions you can see, if your new fol­lowees inter­act with your old ones. I’ve noticed a big increase in crosstalk in my time­line, between two or more peo­ple that I follow.

It cer­tainly is engag­ing, being able to fol­low the con­ver­sa­tions of oth­ers, but the reverse of that is you can end up feel­ing a bit left out too, if you’re not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the discussion.

And you’re prob­a­bly not par­tic­i­pat­ing in any dis­cus­sions, because just about every­one Twit­ter sug­gests is impor­tant, famous, pop­u­lar or all three.

I’ve had very few, if any users sug­gested that were just plain ol’ reg­u­lar Twit­ter­ers, like me. That’s a big flaw in the sys­tem, as I would much rather be inter­act­ing with real peo­ple, who share com­mon inter­ests with me, than the great and the good.

What skewed my expe­ri­ence in this exper­i­ment is the recent gen­eral elec­tion in the UK.

How so?

As a con­cerned cit­i­zen and news junkie, I had a keen inter­est in the elec­tion. That meant I fol­lowed lots of accounts related to it, from news sources, to jour­nal­ists, to can­di­dates and sit­ting MPs that I was inter­ested in already.

When Twit­ter looked at that, it gen­er­ated a list of sug­gested users that included more of the same. But the more I fol­lowed, the more the sug­gested user list became a haven for MPs, polit­i­cal activists and think tank members.

My fol­lowee list read like a who’s who from the British polit­i­cal scene. Clearly that wasn’t what I was aim­ing for with this exper­i­ment, but its what I ended up creating.

After reach­ing my fol­low­ing limit, I ended the exper­i­ment and the great unfol­low­ing ensued.

I have now purged around 400 accounts, mainly MPs from obscure con­stituen­cies, but I also used an online tool to find the most inac­tive accounts and unfol­lowed them as well. Sur­pris­ingly, many of the accounts sug­gested hadn’t gen­er­ated a new tweet in months, which actu­ally made it eas­ier than I expected to rid myself of them.

I’m still check­ing the sug­gested user list daily, but I am much more selec­tive in who I choose to fol­low. There’s usu­ally one or two accounts that appeal to me, many turn out to be peo­ple I’ve heard of, but didn’t know were on Twitter.

Any­one I don’t wish to fol­low, I click on the “Hide” but­ton and I don’t see them sug­gested again. The whole process only takes a minute or two each day and has become part of my daily online routine.

The sug­gested user sys­tem is far from per­fect, but it is worth a look. If you can spare a cou­ple of min­utes each day, have a peek. While you might not fool­ishly fol­low every­one as I did, I am pretty sure you will find a hand­ful of inter­est­ing accounts that might appeal to you.

Oh and don’t wait for Twit­ter to tell you to fol­low me, you’ll be wait­ing a long, long time. Just add @nthlondonhippy to your time­line and you can in share my every thought and action. Lucky you.

Hello. How’s tricks?

I’ve been off work for weeks and haven’t posted a god­damn thing here. The usual non-excuse, excuses apply.

I did have a list of fun things I wanted to write about while I was off, but I haven’t touched a sin­gle one.

I’m on Twit­ter a lot, so if you’re miss­ing your reg­u­lar hippy fix, you could always fol­low me there. You could try fol­low­ing me in the street, but Twit­ter is more reli­able, I assure you.

I’ll be try­ing to give myself a kick in the ass soon, aim­ing to do a bit more around here. I’ve said this before and look how that worked out.

Just so you all know I’m still alive and acces­si­ble online, I haven’t dis­ap­peared up my own ass just yet.

Don’t give up on me, because I haven’t given up. I’ve just slowed way down to a near-stop, but there’s still a bit of momen­tum left in this old hippy.

Maybe all I need is a lit­tle push.

Took this photo this morn­ing on my iPhone 3GS. Passed it through a cou­ple of photo edit­ing apps. Thought it looked cool.

I really did it, I spent the bet­ter part of yes­ter­day try­ing to do good deeds on Twitter.

So how’d I do?

Well, I wouldn’t call it an unqual­i­fied suc­cess, but I wouldn’t count it as a fail­ure either. I was able to give some gen­uine help to a hand­ful of peo­ple, but I do feel like I could have done a lot more.

The hard­est part was find­ing peo­ple in need of gen­uine help. I started by search­ing my own stream, ie peo­ple I fol­low, for ques­tions or pleas for help — there weren’t many at all. So I switched to the pub­lic time­line and searched for “help me”.

Turns out, the only help most peo­ple on Twit­ter seek, falls into three categories:

- Help me get more fol­low­ers
– Help me to get Justin Bieber to fol­low me
– Help me to get Miley Cyrus to fol­low me

I couldn’t help with any of those things, even if I tried. What this meant in real terms was that using the pub­lic time­line to find peo­ple in real need was like search­ing the prover­bial haystack for the prover­bial nee­dle, and I don’t even shoot-up. I had to wade through lit­er­ally thou­sands of tweets just to find one that was genuine.

So what did I actu­ally help with? Here’s a rough list:

- I re-assured some­one who was fright­ened by stormy weather
– I rec­om­mended the best places for a day of shop­ping in Lon­don
– I helped some­one trou­bleshoot an iPhone/Twitter app
– I pro­vided advice to some­one look­ing to adver­tise adult edu­ca­tion courses in the media
– I wel­comed a new user to Twit­ter and gave them some basic advice

That’s just the high­lights, I also retweeted loads of other people’s tweets and exchanged friendly tweets with loads of other peo­ple, includ­ing some I fol­low and some I don’t. Many of my #help­ful­hippy tweets went ignored, but that’s to be expected. Peo­ple are not accus­tom to strangers offer­ing assis­tance with­out ulte­rior motives, espe­cially online.

Over­all, I found the entire expe­ri­ence pro­vided me with a weird mix of frus­tra­tion and sat­is­fac­tion, much like real life. I was frus­trated at how dif­fi­cult it was to locate peo­ple I could help, but found it very sat­is­fy­ing when I was actu­ally able to, in a very small way, make a dif­fer­ence to someone’s life.

I’ve come away from the day with the desire, not to do a #help­ful­hippy day again, but to include this gen­uinely help­ful approach into my life online on a more reg­u­lar basis. It cost me noth­ing to help out strangers, my knowl­edge is free, so is my time fre­quently, so why not try to give some­thing back all the time?

Life is indeed incred­i­bly bleak, dreary and point­less, but it doesn’t take much to occa­sion­ally make it into some­thing more, even in almost imper­cep­ti­bly small ways. It felt good help­ing strangers and I’m going to try to do it more often.

So if there’s ever any­thing I can do online to help you, just ask. I might sur­prise you with the per­fect answer. Or not.

I’ve just woken up, parked myself down in front of my desk­top com­puter and I am ready to begin my exper­i­ment in social media engage­ment. I’m aim­ing help any­one online, in any way I can.

If you need any­thing today and you think I can help, just ask. I’m not long awake, so no heavy duty math-based equa­tions for at least an hour, but any­thing else is cool.

Ladies, gen­tle­men and any one in between, wel­come to #help­ful­hippy day.

Go on, tweet me, I’m here to help.

Hello. My name is the northlon­don­hippy and I’m here to help.

As I men­tioned a few days ago, on Weds 16th June, I will be mostly spend­ing the day online, try­ing to offer help and assis­tance to as many peo­ple on Twit­ter as I can, whether its try­ing to answer ques­tions, retweet­ing impor­tant and wor­thy mes­sages, or, well, pretty much any­thing else I can think of that might help.

I’m call­ing it #help­ful­hippy day and that will be the hash­tag I use on all my attempts at being help­ful. If you would like to play along at home, you can also tag things with #help­ful­hippy or you can just tweet me old school-style to my Twit­ter name, @nthlondonhippy — either way, I’ll hope­fully see it and respond quickly and helpfully.

I’m doing this because I want to give some­thing back to Twit­ter because I get so much from it. I’m hop­ing that by try­ing to engage with peo­ple on a pos­i­tive, life-affirming level will help alle­vi­ate my per­ceived debt to you all.

I’ll give you a small exam­ple. There are lots of peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, who I think fol­low me, yet I’ve never (or rarely) tweeted them directly. That’s my fault, what with being a some­what shy, with­drawn, socially awk­ward mis­an­thrope, who lives in his own make-believe hippy world. On #help­ful­hippy day, I hope to let these peo­ple know I enjoy fol­low­ing them. If I played along with #fol­lowfri­day, I could have done it already, but I don’t, remem­ber the whole mis­an­thrope thing?

What I am not really aim­ing to do is exploit #help­ful­hippy day as a way to raise my online pro­file or increase my fol­low­ers. For a change this is not about shame­less self pro­mo­tion, its about gen­uinely help­ing oth­ers. If any­thing, I’ll prob­a­bly lose fol­low­ers because I plan on being a very full-on, #help­ful­hippy — search­ing for unan­swered ques­tions and pleas for assistance.

Tomorrow’s the big day, I’ll either fall flat on my face or in some small way, I’ll make the world a bet­ter place for a short time. Either way, I’ll know I’ve tried my best to pay some­thing back and maybe, just maybe I’ll despise myself just a lit­tle less.

Nah. Self-loathing is for life, you can’t shake it like you shake the com­mon cold.

See ya on Weds!

This is a post mainly about Twitter.

I like Twit­ter, I find it incred­i­bly use­ful. Its become my go-to source for cur­rent infor­ma­tion and you’ll often find me get­ting my tweet-fix peri­od­i­cally through­out the day.

I’ve been using it that way for about 2 years, since I got my iPhone 3G and played around with the early Twit­ter clients avail­able at the time. I had a dif­fer­ent account back then, one that I sub­se­quently deleted.

Why?

Because like many peo­ple, I really didn’t get Twit­ter at first. I didn’t know where to start. I tried to dive into the deep end, before even read­ing a pam­phlet on how to swim. I expect this expe­ri­ence is not uncommon.

I did con­tinue to flirt with Twit­ter, search­ing for top­ics of inter­est, or using the iPhone GPS to search for tweets local to me. It worked, to a point, but I really wasn’t that engaged or con­nected to any of it.

Around 6 months after my ini­tial explo­ration, Twit­ter started to make more sense. It didn’t hurt that the main­stream media was start­ing to get on the Twit­ter band­wagon. I learned more about Twit­ter and it started to make sense to me and in Jan­u­ary 2009, I signed up for another account, which is my cur­rent one: @nthlondonhippy

I now fol­low over 1,000 accounts. I thought about tweet­ing to mark this mile­stone, since peo­ple are always tweet­ing when they reach big round num­bers of fol­low­ers, I thought it would ironic and amus­ing to tweet the exact oppo­site by brag­ging about the num­ber of accounts I fol­low. Its funny, because all num­bers on Twit­ter are unim­por­tant, how many fol­low­ers you have, how many you fol­low, the num­ber of tweets you’ve sent, it doesn’t matter.

What mat­ters is what you get out of Twitter.

When peo­ple I know ask me about using Twit­ter, that’s usu­ally my first ques­tion back to them: What do you want to get from Twit­ter? Most of them don’t know, because they don’t know what Twit­ter can offer.

It offers a lot, it offers every­thing. It offers far more than you could ever want or need and with­out some sort of focus on what you hope to gain, you’ll never get any where with it.

I take a lot from Twit­ter, but that which I take is will­ingly given. What I really mean by that is that many of the 1,000 plus accounts I fol­low belong to web­sites and are tweeted, not by peo­ple, but by ser­vices such as TwitterFeed.

When a web­site updates with a new story, or blog post, a tweet is gen­er­ated by Twit­ter­Feed via the website’s RSS feed. My web­site does this and these days most do. When I post this finely crafted and immi­nently rel­e­vant bit of copy to my web­site, it auto­mat­i­cally updates its RSS feed, which is then picked up and tweeted within 15 min­utes or less via my Twit­ter account. I’m not going to get any more tech­ni­cal than this, so don’t worry.

There is so much use­ful infor­ma­tion avail­able on Twit­ter, what­ever your par­tic­u­lar inter­est, its just a ques­tion of start­ing an account for your­self and look­ing for inter­est­ing sources to fol­low. This takes time and some per­se­ver­ance, but the rewards are immense.

But Twitter’s not just about the lat­est news, its also about what real peo­ple, like you and me (I’m not actu­ally real) had for break­fast. This is where I fail at Twitter.

I’m nowhere near as engaged with indi­vid­u­als on Twit­ter as I should be or as I would like to be. I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that social media is just an exten­sion of nor­mal, real world soci­ety and if you are socially awk­ward in the real world, then you’re going to be socially awk­ward online.

I don’t mean I am some sort of unwashed pariah, fart­ing and belch­ing when­ever I’m in the com­pany of nor­mal folk, I save that for when I’m in the com­pany of super­mod­els. What I mean is, I’m quite a loner in real life, happy with my own com­pany and the world inside my head. I only really have a few peo­ple close to me and that’s prob­a­bly been true my whole life.

I don’t actively seek out indi­vid­u­als with sim­i­lar inter­ests to fol­low on Twit­ter, and I should. I would say most of the peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, I didn’t find, they found me and I fol­lowed them back. I don’t actively look for peo­ple to fol­low with the same vigour I seek out news and infor­ma­tion sources. I’m com­ing to realise this is a mistake.

By my own admis­sion, I take a lot from Twit­ter, but now I would like to try to give some­thing back.

Here’s my cun­ning plan:

On Weds 16 June 2010, I will be con­duct­ing the very first #help­ful­hippy day. For the entire day, I will be avail­able on Twit­ter to help other users in any way I can, whether they fol­low me or not. I will be actively, pos­si­bly even aggres­sively, search­ing for unan­swered ques­tions and other pleas for assis­tance and doing my best to help out.

I won’t be directly pro­vid­ing cash, drugs, hook­ers or any­thing else peo­ple really need, but it is my sin­cer­est hope to, in what­ever small ways, lend sup­port, offer assis­tance, exper­tise and advice to any­one I can.

Maybe you need some­one to retweet a char­ity plea because you’re look­ing for spon­sors for your 10K run, or per­haps you’re strug­gling to remem­ber the name of an actor from an obscure film you saw. Maybe you just need some­one to tweet with you, I can do that. If its within my abil­i­ties and I can help via a tweet or two, I will.

I don’t know if this will be suc­cess­ful and at the point I’m not too wor­ried about that, I am going to be here ready to help regard­less of how it goes. I’m not going to be shy, either. I’m aim­ing for pos­i­tive, life-affirming inter­ac­tions with as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. I want to con­tribute some­thing, I want to pay back some­thing to Twit­ter, because I think my debt is too high.

Play­ing along at home couldn’t be eas­ier, if you think I can help with some­thing, tweet me (any time, not just next Weds) at @northlondonhippy and I’ll see it. Or you can use my spe­cial hash­tag that I will be tag­ging all of my tweets that day with: #helpfulhippy

Think of this as not only me try­ing to give some­thing back, but also an exper­i­ment in social engage­ment. If it does work, this won’t be the last time I attempt some­thing like this.

So remem­ber, this is hap­pen­ing next Wednes­day, 16th June, from when­ever I wake up, till when­ever I go to bed, exclud­ing breaks for the toi­let and pay­ing for take-away deliv­er­ies. You didn’t think I was going to cook too, did you?

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

As an exper­i­ment, I have restored the facil­ity to com­ment on my posts. I’ve done this because I am test­ing out a new plug in that is sup­posed to deal with spam comments.

That’s the rea­son com­ments were dis­abled, because of the over­whelm­ing amount of spam com­ments I was receiv­ing on a daily basis. At its peak, I was attract­ing over 1000 spam com­ments a day, for any­thing from porn and via­gra to online casi­nos and life-extending med­ica­tions. It was more than I could keep up with as I had to mod­er­ate each one.

Mod­er­a­tion will con­tinue and I will need to approve any com­ments before they are pub­lished. I will try to approve gen­uine com­ments, good or bad, as quickly as I can. If this spam plug in actu­ally works, I will con­sider turn­ing mod­er­a­tion off.

So that’s it kids, feel free to chip in with your 2 cents and let’s all hope I don’t get hit with more wacky spam com­ment crap. Enjoy!

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?