More Drugs

Well, I've just returned from my holidays during which I spent a fantastic weekend at Glastonbury festival. Things are going well in both my love life and career. The friends I now have are about as dear to me as friends can be. And if that weren't enough, I've got 2 new playful pet cats. Bearing in mind how well things seem to be going for me right now, it would be churlish and ungrateful of me to work myself up into the state of indignation that I need to write these rants.

If there is one thing that has been getting up my nose recently, it's drugs. And unfortunately, I don't mean in a good way. After a year which has seen an MP (a conservative MP at that) calling for the decriminalisation of cannabis, the setting up of Amsterdam style cannabis cafes in the UK and, if reports of tomorrows announcement by the Home Sec David Blunkett are to be believed, the reclassification of cannabis as a class C drug (meaning that possession would no longer be an arrestable offence), I was beginning to think that perhaps the powers that be were starting to see that perhaps smoking a spliff wouldn't bring about the collapse of civilisation. As per usual, fate and the media have conspired to vomit out more bilious bad news for the express purpose of ruining my day.

The Tories (and one Labour MP) are saying that the cannabis trial scheme in Lambeth, whereby cannabis users are basically left alone in order to free up police resources so that they can tackle the problem of hard drugs, is a failure. They say it is a failure because "it encourages drug taking". I look forward to the next release from Tory central office, when I expect them to declare that legalised alcohol encourages drinking, cigarettes encourage smoking, and chocolate encourages lardy fat bastards. I mean, for fucks sake! Have the Tory leadership allowed their brains to lie fallow for the summer? It smacks of opposing an issue for the sake of opposing it, and it certainly shows their lack of political daring and acumen.

The reason I say this is because their major complaint is that some people are buying their cannabis from dealers who also try and sell them harder drugs. No shit Sherlock! Why, who would imagine in this land where free enterprise and profit have been worshipped by successive governments for 30 years, that a dealer would try and sell someone a drug that will mean more profit for him? However, rather than use this complaint as a platform to push for decriminalisation (to which most people are...well, not opposed to; only the Daily Mail brigade provide any objections and they rather spoil their case by talking reactionary old shit about cannabis and crack cause the same damage for most of the time) and thus increase their popularity among the young (a large and mainly untapped source of votes), they simply spew out the same tired lumps of froth about how all drugs are banned, and how cannabis is a "gateway drug" that leads on to harder drugs (question; how many people were drunk when they first tried drugs? Most of you? Hmm...and yet we never hear complaints of beer being gateway drugs do we?). Their best argument seems to be "Well, it's not that bad for you, but it leads you into other things that are!", and the only people it appeals to are a small and vocal minority.

And if that were not enough, I now find that Blunkett's announcement concerning drug laws tomorrow is not a bold statement by a political party intent on change. It is, in fact, the rather soggy underpants of a drunk and incontinent old tramp. Sure, cannabis is being reclassified as category C. However, the sentences for dealing cannabis are to be doubled. So what we are being told is that it's alright to use the drug, but you're not allowed to buy it. I hate to break this to anyone with an ounce of idealism in them, but we're not getting a country where personal liberties that don't infringe on the rights of others are being increased. No, if I'm optimistic we're getting a rather badly performed sleight-of-hand trick where we think our little freedom's are being increased, but in fact nothing is changing at all. If I'm pessimistic (and, depressingly, realistic), we're seeing the set up for the return of draconian and illogical drug laws, with the excuse that the half cocked, half arsed pilot scheme in Lambeth didn't work.

Of course, when it comes to draconian and illogical drug laws, we're still quite some way behind our friends across the Atlantic. In some states of the land of the free, possessing enough cannabis for a reasonably pleasant night in is enough to get your arse thrown in prison for 10-20 years. Just recently, the war against terror has given the blockheaded anti-drug propagandists in their government yet another excuse to sink their vampire fangs of guilt and fear into the neck of America. You see, now when you buy drugs you're not just committing a crime. Oh no, you're personally responsible for prolonging the war against terror because the terrorists are getting a lot of their funding from drugs.

To which my response is "Then fucking well legalise them all and make sure that if anyone is going to profit from drugs it's going to be the government!". However, as I accept that I'm in the minority in that respect, I'll move on. It boils my piss that these simpleminded fuckwits honestly believe that the average cannabis smoker is happy to hand over money that aids in the running of any criminal enterprise. Speaking personally (and for most dope smokers I've ever met in my life), I absolutely LOATHE having to go to some of the places I do in order to buy cannabis. This is almost certainly going to sound like an intellectual's fear of the working class, but I don't like going to a shitty estate to buy a quarter ounce from somebody who may do me the pleasure of burgling my house later in the week. I hated defending the little fuckstack's in court and I hate having to be all matey with them when all I want to do is get out in one piece. This is why I, like many other smokers of my slightly repressed and middle class ilk, prefer to get their dope via a friend who only deals to his friends. It's all very suburban isn't it? And the attempt to remind people like me just where the drug money may be going will not result in a flood of people throwing away their rizla's in a fit of self-loathing. It will result in people being more secretive about it for fear of being demonised by a bunch of morally dubious hypocrites.

Of course, I would be naive if I thought that the twinning of anti-drug propaganda with anti-terrorist propaganda was being done in the interests of reducing drug use in America. America, along with the rest of the western world, has been fighting a rather pointless War on Drugs for years. It's had next to no impact so far, and I don't imagine that the US government expects this latest trick to have much effect on anyone who wouldn't unquestioningly swallow whatever rancid pile of stinking old dog-smeg that they've collectively spunked out in any given week. What it will do is deflect attention rather neatly from another major US source of terrorist income and training; their government.

Was it drug cartel money that paid for Osama bin Laden's training by the CIA in the 80's? Or for Pinochet's CIA sponsored Chilean coup? Or for Dubya's attempt to depose the Venezuelan president a few months ago? (which shows that Dubya handles international politics like Joey Deacon handled a basketball...) Maybe it was drug money that paid for the School of the America's in Georgia, where the glut of Central and South American sadists and murderers who laughably call themselves the governments of their nations can learn the fine arts of torture and murder in the idyllic surroundings of the USA? No? Oh, that's right; it was the US government who sponsored and paid for every last one of those, wasn't it? The War on Terror is nothing more than the US reaping what it's Government has sown worldwide since the end of WWII. The Newer, more Improved War on Drugs is not much more than another way to try and distract attention from this.

Which is a shame, because I find it funny. No, actually I find it hilarious. Not the death of innocent people or the muddlesome war. Rather, it is the firmly held belief among some Americans that the imperialistic attitude that was the downfall of the Romans, the Persians, the Imperial Chinese, the Japanese, the British Empire...hell, every nation that has ever held sway over world events and opinion, is a perfectly acceptable one and that the rest of the world will just have to accept it that has me chuckling in that smug way that only a European can manage when discussing America. Of course, I'll have to wait a couple of hundred years to see if I'm proved right about that (though all recorded history is on my side), so in the meantime, would it really hurt anyone if I sat and had a spliff whilst I'm waiting?