"No sir" replied the US Secretary of Defence, thus enabling me to write the following:
HA HA HA WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, YOU BASTARDS, HA HA HA HA!
Gloating over.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Friday, December 1, 2006
Hey Man - Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out...
Just finished writing an article for my university's student newspaper - The Beaver - on drug use at the LSE with specific reference to cocaine (now the UK's second most popular illegal narcotic amongst students, and widely known to the Metropolitan police force as the 'middle-class drug'). I finished the article with a snide comparison with alchol, a perfectly legal narcotic which has a much higher profile and a bigger effect on the School.
For example. Last year, the Athletics Union's Barrel Run got somewhat out of hand after several hours of consumption of free alcohol, and around 200 or 300 students went round to King's College (AKA Strand Poly) and smashed the shit out of the English Lit department. Several thousand pounds worth of damage later, the Barrel got banned and the AU got in the shit.
None of those AU members were off their faces on anything more illegal than a badly-designed cocktail.
Yet my friends, who snort coke and drop pills, who smoke pot and generally tune in, turn on, and drop out, have done nothing like that. The drunken fights that occur outside Crush every Friday night are just that - drunken fights. Despite the consumption of cocaine by Crush-goers, no-one's smashed in someone else's face because they had one line too many. I've read an accounts by a journalist who covered Bosnia in the early 1990s that he needed Heroin to function properly when he came back to Britain because Bosnia had fucked him up so badly. He wasn't harming anyone but himself.
It's interesting to note that before 1916, most drugs were widely avaliable at your local chemists'. Cocaine, or opium, laudanum, heroin, hasish, you name it. Why did they make it illegal in 1916? Answer - it was a bad show that the chaps at the front were too fucked by withdrawal or various drugs to fight. So, cut the problem off at source and defeat the Boche!
And, like taxes (Napoleonic Wars) and passports (World War One again), once implemented, the law was never rescinded. As a result, it's now a criminal offence to lie bag and take a drag of the finest weed. Sherlock Holmes shot cocaine and smoked opium. He'd've been arrested for that, never mind the boxer revolver, nowadays, by the good Inspector LeStrade.
Yet everyone knows at least one person who takes drugs, illegally. There's another name for this - it's called a market. And there are plenty of very nasty and unpleasant people (even for capitalists, although most drug dealers are small fry compared to the likes of BAT or BAe) who will happily step in and cater to this market. And they, of course, set the prices. A good quality gram of cocaine can set you back £60 in London, and a friend of mine thought nothing of snorting £180 worth every week for several months.
All of this despite the US War on Drugs (even less successful than their latest war on an adjective, The War Against Terror - hereafter referred to as TWAT), our own government's fear of the media outcry if they relaxed their stance on drugs, and the lessons of the Abolitionary movement. Illegal drugs, as they tell us, fund terror, and more pertinently, contribute massively to petty crime and serious crime. Most shootings are drug-related. Most petty theft (muggings, burglary and the like) is to pay for drugs.
Now, back to our pre-1916 environment. Imagine this, updated, and put on the NHS. Suddenly, the bottom drops out of the criminal market - that gram of cocaine that cost £60? Now we're paying £10 or less at Boots. That heroin that travels from Afghanistan and funds the Taliban (amongst others)? Now we're buying it at source from the poppy farmers, contributing to the Afghan economy, undermining the Taliban and the warlords, and making it availiable over the counter at chemists, dirt cheap, thus screwing over the drug lords.
What we have now is a massive reduction in petty theft (why steal a handbag to raise £60 when you can go to your chemists and get your hit for a fiver?) and criminal gangs with serious holes in their finances. Suddenly, crime really won't pay.
Legal drugs will provide revenue for the (hated) government, which they can then spend on 'defence' and other, more useful things - such as education, social welfare, and healthcare - and a safer route to a better high for the users. After all, that cocaine won't be cut with baking soda. Your ecstacy will be produced in a drugs company's lab, and will meet stringent safety requirements. You'll have a place to leave your needles and get new, clean ones.
Don't think it'll work? Look at Holland and tell me it doesn't work.
The best society is the freest society. Legalising drugs is a tiny baby-step towards that society, but an important one nonetheless!
For example. Last year, the Athletics Union's Barrel Run got somewhat out of hand after several hours of consumption of free alcohol, and around 200 or 300 students went round to King's College (AKA Strand Poly) and smashed the shit out of the English Lit department. Several thousand pounds worth of damage later, the Barrel got banned and the AU got in the shit.
None of those AU members were off their faces on anything more illegal than a badly-designed cocktail.
Yet my friends, who snort coke and drop pills, who smoke pot and generally tune in, turn on, and drop out, have done nothing like that. The drunken fights that occur outside Crush every Friday night are just that - drunken fights. Despite the consumption of cocaine by Crush-goers, no-one's smashed in someone else's face because they had one line too many. I've read an accounts by a journalist who covered Bosnia in the early 1990s that he needed Heroin to function properly when he came back to Britain because Bosnia had fucked him up so badly. He wasn't harming anyone but himself.
It's interesting to note that before 1916, most drugs were widely avaliable at your local chemists'. Cocaine, or opium, laudanum, heroin, hasish, you name it. Why did they make it illegal in 1916? Answer - it was a bad show that the chaps at the front were too fucked by withdrawal or various drugs to fight. So, cut the problem off at source and defeat the Boche!
And, like taxes (Napoleonic Wars) and passports (World War One again), once implemented, the law was never rescinded. As a result, it's now a criminal offence to lie bag and take a drag of the finest weed. Sherlock Holmes shot cocaine and smoked opium. He'd've been arrested for that, never mind the boxer revolver, nowadays, by the good Inspector LeStrade.
Yet everyone knows at least one person who takes drugs, illegally. There's another name for this - it's called a market. And there are plenty of very nasty and unpleasant people (even for capitalists, although most drug dealers are small fry compared to the likes of BAT or BAe) who will happily step in and cater to this market. And they, of course, set the prices. A good quality gram of cocaine can set you back £60 in London, and a friend of mine thought nothing of snorting £180 worth every week for several months.
All of this despite the US War on Drugs (even less successful than their latest war on an adjective, The War Against Terror - hereafter referred to as TWAT), our own government's fear of the media outcry if they relaxed their stance on drugs, and the lessons of the Abolitionary movement. Illegal drugs, as they tell us, fund terror, and more pertinently, contribute massively to petty crime and serious crime. Most shootings are drug-related. Most petty theft (muggings, burglary and the like) is to pay for drugs.
Now, back to our pre-1916 environment. Imagine this, updated, and put on the NHS. Suddenly, the bottom drops out of the criminal market - that gram of cocaine that cost £60? Now we're paying £10 or less at Boots. That heroin that travels from Afghanistan and funds the Taliban (amongst others)? Now we're buying it at source from the poppy farmers, contributing to the Afghan economy, undermining the Taliban and the warlords, and making it availiable over the counter at chemists, dirt cheap, thus screwing over the drug lords.
What we have now is a massive reduction in petty theft (why steal a handbag to raise £60 when you can go to your chemists and get your hit for a fiver?) and criminal gangs with serious holes in their finances. Suddenly, crime really won't pay.
Legal drugs will provide revenue for the (hated) government, which they can then spend on 'defence' and other, more useful things - such as education, social welfare, and healthcare - and a safer route to a better high for the users. After all, that cocaine won't be cut with baking soda. Your ecstacy will be produced in a drugs company's lab, and will meet stringent safety requirements. You'll have a place to leave your needles and get new, clean ones.
Don't think it'll work? Look at Holland and tell me it doesn't work.
The best society is the freest society. Legalising drugs is a tiny baby-step towards that society, but an important one nonetheless!
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