New Year's Revolutions

Happy nearly New Year, y'all.

Hopefully, you realise tomorrow is just another day, and you don't need to make lifechanging decisions while drunk tonight that will transform into mid-January bouts of guilt as you fail.

You could stop smoking, lose weight or try to get a new job starting any particular day. Why do it alongside the rest of the herd? Is there camaraderie in failing en masse? I don't know.

What I do know is that I think New Year's Resolutions are about as pointless as those 'Caution: Hot!' warnings on takeaway coffees - they're really only needed for the truly remedial.

So I've decided to go with some New Year's Revolutions instead. Here are the revolutions I'd like to see in 2010:

1. A Chinese counter-revolution. Seriously, fuck the Chinese Communist Party. I'd love to see them overthrown and subjected to a quick round of real people power, the human-abusing thug junta. This same prescription also applies to the scum ruling Belarus, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and a host of other thugocracies.

2. A drugs revolution. The war on drugs is lost. Why are our governments still fighting it? Increasingly, world leaders, health experts, religious minorities and influential commentators have come out in favour of a complete reversal of current failed policies.
I hope that either the lawmakers start listening, or else a proper grassroots movement comes along and makes ongoing prohibition unworkable for good. If the EU reverted to the Portuguese model, we might finally get a handle on drug crime and on harm reduction for addicts.

3. An economic revolution. The return of the gold standard? The end of fractional banking? Back to barter? Jail for banksters?
I'm no economist (and am suspicious of that pseudoscience in any case), so I will refrain from being prescriptive.
But since the current system just went pop for the umpteenth time, you'd like to think we might rebuild with some new method that doesn't unerringly result in a bubble and collapse every decade or two.

4. A democratic revolution in Ireland. Take a look at the Dail. Do those people really represent you? Do they look after your interests? Well, why keep voting for them?
I'd love to see an end to the cronyism, the parochial parish pump politics, the gombeens, the brown envelopes and the nepotism in Irish politics.
But that would require an electorate to grow up and take responsibility for those they elect.

What revolutions would you like to see next year? And are there any that you're prepared to man the barricades to bring about?

The unanswerables

At what point does just wanting to chill out in the house become clinical sociopathy?

How many nightly headaches are required for a diagnosis of brain tumour or loss of libido?

In a time of rising prices and recession, is installing a bar in the house a shockingly unnecessary luxury or a money-saving scheme?

Does food you buy in IKEA have to be assembled before eaten?

If you can't control your own currency, can you be said to manage your economy? And is that as relevant for people as countries?

Why does Coca-Cola need to take eight litres of water to make each litre of their toxic waste sugar drink? And why do they keep locating their bottling plants in drought regions of the Third World? And why do people still drink the stuff, anyway?

Where will they put all the unused aircraft currently parked in Nevada if it starts raining there?

Can whiskey ever really be considered an investment?

Would it be better to be spectacularly successful early in life and then spend the rest of your existence in a sort of afterlife, or would it be better to be moderately successful late in life, when you might appreciate it better and go out on a high?

Why doesn't democracy work? Would more work, or less? Do we really get the governments we deserve?

Why are the worst recreational drugs legal and the least addicting, least socially hurtful, least personally damaging ones prohibited?

What are we here for? What if we're not here for anything?

Jetlag makes me pensive. Time to crack open the duty-free, perhaps.

UN prohibitionist website hacked

The UN office on Drugs and Crime, long run by notorious "Drugs are baaaad, mkay?" moron Antonio Costa, has had its website wonderfully hacked.

Before normal prohibitionist service is resumed, I thought I'd take a screengrab of their hacked jobs page for all to see and enjoy.

While it's still up, feel free to enjoy reading some sense about drugs policies on the UNODC's website for possibly the first time ever here.

But you better be quick. They'll be back to hiring shills to sell the world on prohibition very soon.

Congrats to the publicly minded IT wizards behind this splendid hack.

Time to free the weed?

Are economic times so tough that it's finally time to free the weed and tax it?

That's the question posed by this article from the United States, which makes a series of excellent points in relation to both President-elect Obama's former dope proclivity and the economic stimulus that legalising cannabis could potentially provide.

It's a fascinating idea for a number of reasons. Clearly prohibition has not prevented people from taking drugs identified under legislation as illegal. People who want to get wasted will get wasted whether it's against the law or not.

But it's not my intention to re-hash old arguments about whether cannabis is a 'gateway drug' (it isn't - that would be tobacco) or whether the current prohibition policy criminalises otherwise law-abiding people (obviously it does) or even whether cannabis is more or less dangerous to health and society than currently legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco (depends on how you measure the danger.)

Instead, I'd like to explore what might happen if we capitulated to Ming the Merciless and this campaign by legalising cannabis.

In estimating the transposition of illegal commodity into legal taxable product, a certain element of guesswork is inevitable. But Mr Reinertson guesstimates that the USA would reap $2.4 billion to $6.2 billion annually in regulated marijuana tax revenue.

On a scaled population level, that would translate into $32 to $82 million, or €25 million to €65 million. So, not so much really. Hardly worth the reefer madness that legalisation would lead to, really, is it?

Well, then again, that's quite a lot of cervical cancer vaccines or teaching salaries. Every penny counts in a recession, y'know. And we're talking tens of millions in revenue here.

And then there are the hidden revenues, like savings on imprisoning people simply for growing and selling a particular plant, such as these people who were arrested recently. After all, it costs us around €100,000 a year to keep each prisoner incarcerated.

How many people are behind bars currently solely for growing, smoking, possessing or selling weed? If all of those people were free, how much would we save? Now how many teaching salaries or hospital beds are we talking about?

And there are the social benefits too. More weed smokers may well mean an eventual upturn in lung cancer and possibly (the causative effect is disputed by many medics) a small upturn in schizophrenia.

But it would definitely mean fewer pissed-up loons causing fights and criminal damage on our city streets every night. It would likely mean less suicide too, as the euphoriant effects of cannabis are unlikely to lead to suicidal ideation as much as the depressive qualities of alcohol, which is found in the bloodstreams of over 70% of suicide victims.
Can we put a price on that?

Wikipedia (I cite with the usual caveats) has a useful table of the legality of cannabis by country here.

As can be seen, since there are almost no countries where cannabis is legal and very few where it is even decriminalised, anti-cannabis campaigners would no doubt latch onto this as a reason for maintaining the status quo.

They would scaremonger that any country that took the move to legalise first would be swamped by 'drug tourists.' I would cast that in a different light. Any country brave enough to take this step first would benefit from a significant upswing in tourism revenue. Again, what price on that?

In any case, as the Wikipedia table indicates, in large tracts of Western Europe cannabis is de facto decriminalised already, and we haven't yet seen the end of European civilisation as we know it.

We in Ireland already have laws dealing with driving or operating machinery while intoxicated. We already have an indoor smoking ban in place. We have the infrastructure and legislative framework in existence to legalise, tax, monitor and administrate a cannabis market.

Which mainstream party will be the first to back the legalisation of cannabis?

And will they wait until Obama undoes the American-led global prohibition (which only ever benefited big tobacco and vintners anyway) or will they be brave and take the lead in Europe (which is moving that way anyway) and reap innumerable social benefits, a tourism boost and substantial revenue increases as a result?

Asian babes not good enough for marketing mongs

Apparently Asian babes aren't good enough for the marketing morons at chav outfitters, the incorrectly named Top Shop.

When they decided to foist their tacky, ill-fitting clothing on the people of China, the advertising wonks didn't think to hire some local models to try to make their clobber look wearable.

Nope, instead they spunked 24 million euro on ageing addict Cocaine Kate.

According to one fashion victim, the reason why people keep giving this human car crash so much money for effectively just standing about looking bored while wearing clothes is because of her 'look.'

Now, I'm no fashion expert. So I rely on those morons who are to inform me as to what this magical 'look' is (since to my untutored eye she looks exactly like what she is, which is a skinny, coked-up chav from Croydon.)

And here's what they say:

"Kate Moss was so different when she first arrived on the fashion scene," says Jen Stevens, editor of U Magazine. "At the time the catwalks were filled with six-foot goddesses and then suddenly along came this short, pretty ordinary girl from Croydon. It was this 'difference' that drew everybody's attention and upon which she managed to build a career."

So it isn't her look, because she looks short and ordinary. My eyes weren't actually lying after all. Even the fashionistas think she looks like a chav.

Okay, let's try again. Maybe it's her winning personality? Nope again. In fact, she almost never speaks in public and barely ever in ads. One assumes her paymasters in the fashion industry are aware that the sound of her grating estuary tones would shatter the glamorous image they've spent a fortune on creating.

Is it perhaps her life story that inspires people? That's definitely what one fashion victim believes:

"Maybe it's because she's fallen so low and fought her way back up again," says model agency boss Celia Holman Lee. "She's shown a vulnerable side that people can relate to."

Yes, you heard that correctly. Cocaine Kate's tabloid fall from grace, not to mention her house-trashing antics and association with hard drugs and hard druggies, is something that we can all relate to. What a load of shit.

Which brings me back to the news item I began with. What the fuck are Top Shop paying this cokehead chav tens of millions for?

And if they really must pay people preposterous amounts of money to stand around looking bored while wearing clothes, what's wrong with paying some stunning looking Chinese babe who doesn't do tons of hard drugs and isn't closer to forty than twenty?

Losing the war on drugs

If there ever was a war on drugs, I can only assume that it was fought in order to secure cheap and easy access to illegal drugs for all.

If they fought against the proliferation of 'recreational' drugs, then they have badly lost, a long time ago.

It doesn't matter how many 'Just Say No' campaigns you run, or how many Colombian fields you napalm when illegal drugs are now freely available in rural primary school classrooms, as I became aware of last week.

At that point, if not many years before, you've lost the war.

Anyhow, if there still is some sort of a war on drugs, then the battlefield is about to shift, at least in Britain, where leading medics and scientists have sat down and examined the potential negative effects of twenty different recreational drugs and ranked them for how much damage they cause.

The results aren't surprising to me, but no doubt they won't make a lot of anti-drugs campaigners very happy.

Top of the list? Why, heroin and cocaine of course. Now heroin you can understand. Nasty smelly junkies with their lives in a mess. Of course heroin is poison. But cocaine? Trendy, upmarket, middle class cocaine?

Surely some mistake. Let's look at how they conducted this 'survey':

* They asked a group of 29 consultant psychiatrists who specialise in addiction to rate the drugs in nine categories.
* Three of these related to physical harm, three to the likelihood of addiction and three to social harms such as healthcare costs.
* The team also extended the analysis to another group of 16 experts spanning several fields including chemistry, pharmacology, psychiatry, forensics, police and legal services.

So basically, it's about as comprehensive and scientific an examination as you can get. And yup, cocaine is one of the worst there is. Bad news for marketing executives, catwalk models and Ulster paramilitaries there.

But there's even worse news for the alcohol and tobacco industries. Alcohol was ranked as the fifth most dangerous commonly used recreational drug in Britain, and tobacco the ninth.

Let's just pause and ponder that for a moment. When you abuse alcohol, it is more dangerous than smoking. It is more dangerous than addiction to amphetamines. Think about that one next time you go binge-drinking on St Patrick's Day. It's not a pleasant realisation.

But what about that dangerous gateway drug cannabis and all its scarily potent skunk variations? What about ecstasy, the pill that kills?

They clocked in at 11th and 18th place respectively.

In other words, smoking fags is worse than smoking pot, and a good ecstasy pill is better for you than either.

So to summarise, two of the most dangerous drugs of abuse are currently legal, while much more benign substances are banned.

If the war on drugs had ever been really about saving lives and people's futures from drug dependency, then surely we lost it back in the early 20th century, when alcohol prohibition was lifted in America and cannabis and most other more benign substances were banned.

Then we lost it again when we permitted big tobacco to keep selling their cancersticks, despite discovering the health risks they cause and the fact that they are extremely addictive.

The experts in Britain are to be applauded for applying the rigours of the scientific approach to a subject that for too long has been placed beyond debate by those who sought to demonise drugs as a cause of all society's ills.

But they aren't telling the kids anything they didn't already know.

For every kid like Leah Betts who died on ecstasy, there are literally millions who didn't. Who danced their asses off and went home sweaty and happy.

For every time some pompous suit or judge has lectured about how cannabis is a gateway drug, the highway to dopefiend hell, there are literally millions of people who puffed a joint, munched a spacecake and listened to some music, rather than reaching for a heroin needle and a gun to mug someone with.

And everytime someone watched an older relative wheezing in the pulmonary ward of a hospital, their lungs rotted by carcinogenic tobacco, or fell victim to a raging drunk incapable of reason who beat them, raped them, robbed them or mowed them down in a car, those people realised what the really dangerous drugs are.

It's time to reclassify our opinions on drugs. Then reclassify the drugs themselves.

Tobacco should be banned. Being drunk should in itself carry a legal penalty. And cannabis, LSD and ecstasy ought to be legalised with the sort of caveats about heavy machinery and driving that currently apply to alcohol.

And that's not just my opinion. That's got the latest scientific research backing it up, which is more than the 'Just Say No' brigade have.

One dead hack

To some people, the concept of a dead tabloid journalist is a good thing.

These people are usually the sort who 'take' the Irish Times at their desk each morning and think that McDowell's forthcoming censorship law, or privacy law as he calls it, is great because it'll stop people from rumbling their off-shore accounts and payments to Fianna Fail in future.

To most right-thinking people, the idea that a journalist should die in the course of their work is abhorrent. It is a frontal attack on the nature of a free press, as well as a personal tragedy for a family.

Hence, after Veronica Guerin's death, there was a stunning public outcry which led to the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau and stringent new legislation relating to organised crime, as well as a massive manhunt for her killers.

But there was no such response for the other Irish journalist murdered in the course of their work. Today, Martin O'Hagan's inquest heard how he was shot dead by a Loyalist death squad after writing repeatedly in the Sunday World about their drug-dealing activities in September 2001.

Over five years on, not a single person has been arrested for the murder, despite strong suggestions from the NUJ that the police know who his killers are. Why won't they arrest them? They say they have insufficient evidence. The NUJ says the killers were informers and are being protected by the very people who should be arresting them.

Where is Martin O'Hagan's Hollywood movie? Where is the manhunt for his killers? Most importantly, where is the public outcry?

Martin O'Hagan RIP.

Getting a rise out of Chinese 'medicine'

It came as no surprise to me to hear that some unscrupulous Chinese medicine practitioners in Northern Ireland have been dosing their Oriental snake oils for impotence with Viagra.

This doesn't surprise me for two reasons. Firstly, I have first hand experience that Chinese medicine doesn't work, and secondly, Chinese people rarely pass up a genuine business opportunity.

If the GP's research is correct, and I appreciate the vested interests involved in his motivation for researching this, then it seems like some naughty Chinese medicine practitioners saw fit to take a substance that ought only be sold subject to a doctor's prescription and add it to some amusingly exotic looking and sounding herbal treatments to make them actually work, while simultaneously quadrupling the price for gullible Westerners.

Nice mark-up if you can get it. Since there are no formal qualification requirements to open up a Chinese medical practice, anybody of an Asian extraction can open up premises with some inscrutable Asian qualifications mounted on the wall, and sell quack cures to the gullible with relative impugnity.

And it's only when they get supergreedy and start adding generic Viagra to their impotence snake oil, and a vigilant doctor catches them out, does anyone stop to think of the potential dangers of these charlatans.

Does Chinese 'medicine' work? No doubt some of their herbal remedies have certain physiological effects. In fact, some of them are actually downright dangerous. And when they include prescription drugs, you can see how dangerous it can be to permit people with no medical training to be handing these substances out.

Once, on a trip to Beijing, I decided to visit the Great Wall of China and the Ming era tombs of the Emperors. Like so many tourists before me, I was kidnapped into a traditional Chinese medicine centre near the tombs, so that the operation could try to sell us shit we didn't need.

Or as they put it, 'to permit us the pleasure and excitement of diagnosis of our ails by the most estimable doctors of China.'

The brief backstory is that I was actually viciously hungover and also suffering the after-effects of a kidney infection I'd caught in Russia. My travelling companion, however, was in rude good health.

The experts of the clinic, dressed in white lab coats gave us a talk and then mingled to 'diagnose' us, by drumming lightly on our pulse points with three fingers. These people made a great deal out of having treated Chairman Mao no less back in the Seventies. It seemed churlish to point out he died shortly afterwards.

I was declared hail and hearty by my attendant consultant, albeit in need of something anti-inflammatory for my entirely unpained ankle. Its yin and yang were allegedly out of kilter, requiring a $20 purchase of some random ointment that was swiftly produced from a box and waved in my face.

My colleague, however, was warned severely about heart, kidney and liver troubles, and it was sternly advised that she part with nigh on $100 for seemingly randomly chosen boxes of pills and tinctures.

I refused and so did she, at first politely then with increasing annoyance and frustration. It became evident that our tour group was captured until someone parted with money for some quack cure.

Eventually, an American gave in and on we went. I noticed that he smartly dumped the 'cure' in a bin at the tomb site, later.

As with all placebo cures, there will be some who will claim miraculous results from the kindly attentions of their local well- (or ill-) meaning Chinese quack doctor with his amazing exotic array of Oriental herbs and preparations, so evocative of a medieval apothecary.

But the bottom line for me is that Chinese medicine is not evidence based medicine.

And medicine that is not evidence based,
medicine that seeks to diagnose by drumming on the pulse points only,
medicine that proffers expensive and potentially dangerous cures without first investigating whether patients are already taking medications,
medicine that thinks it is okay to adulterate snake oil cures with knocked-off prescription drugs,

- such medicine is bad medicine indeed.

No Blow Area

The PSNI made the biggest ever drugs bust in Northern Ireland yesterday when they cracked open a lorry in a Newtownards warehouse and found 3.5 tons of cannabis.

This news is likely to be greeted with dismay among the stoners of the island, which like Britain has been suffering a 'drought' for some months, ever since the UDA decided to cease its dealing operations.

In fact, one local paper recently splashed the headline 'No Blow Area' on their front page while reporting the shortage of cannabis locally and throughout the two islands.

Reports of the bust, in which two men in their thirties were arrested, reveal that the police feared that the dope would be distributed quickly throughout the whole island, and possibly to Britain too, such was its scale.

But what those reports do not indicate is why people want to smoke cannabis despite health risks and illegality, nor why this current drought has come about.

There are a number of interesting factors at play here. The first is Loyalist paramilitary involvement in drug dealing. The recent purging of the UDA's Shoukri brothers from North Belfast, curiously coincided with the onset of this drug drought.

Yet PC Plod from the PSNI refused to be drawn on whether paramilitaries were involved in this particular consignment at today's press conference, or on speculation that the drought itself was caused by the UDA moving out of the drugs business.

To get cannabis into an island like Ireland, you need to export it from somewhere (usually Spain or Holland) and have guys on the ground to distribute it when it arrives. Little comment has been passed on the demise of a series of Dublin criminals in Spain and Holland in recent months. It appears likely that their removal from the scene has drastically reduced the availability of drugs to the Irish market.

So at one stage, we had Dubs in the Costas shipping dope to Egyptian UDA men in the North. And now? Well, judging by Newtownards, someone still wants to import a lot of cannabis to the well established market in Ireland. But who?

Either the UDA, or another paramilitary grouping, have decided to cash in on the drought, or else we have a new paradigm for drug dealing in the North, where entrepreneurial gangsters move in on the trade with violent consequences, such as the Westies once were in Dublin before their untimely demise in Spain.

In which case, how long before other gangs of young, gun-toting psychos decide to fill the gap left behind by the paramilitaries in the North? Having put the Troubles in the past for now, is Northern Ireland set for a Dublin-style wave of gangland activity?

The final point is the most obvious of all. A lot of people clearly want to smoke cannabis and are even prepared to break the law to do so. Why? Because they do not respect that law.

There is already plenty of debate elsewhere about the prohibition of cannabis, its rights and wrongs, and of the pros and cons of cannabis from a health perspective. But it would seem to me that one way to eradicate the possibility of a Belfast gangland developing, never mind the financial benefit, is to legalise the cannabis market now.