Kings Cross Times

Richard Branson nails prohibition

2012-01-24T13:59:00.002+11:00

The silver-haired chief of Virgin, Richard Branson, has achieved major international coverage with an eloquent and cleverly constructed piece slamming prohibition. He neutralises all the usual prohibitionist furphies, leaving his critics with only the weakest of arguments, as can be seen in comments to today's article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Meanwhile a Herald Poll attached to the article is running at 81% in favour of decriminalisation.

When will Australia get a politician with the intelligence and fortitude to stand up on this? The time is ripe.

Shouting into the wilderness - another letter in the SMH

2012-01-20T10:07:00.000+11:00

The Sydney Morning Herald perspicaciously published another of my letters today, as follows:

Why is it that every crime story set around 1930 in the US clearly links the public violence of gangsters like Al Capone with the prohibition of alcohol, while reporting of Sydney's shootings never ever mentions the prohibition of drugs? Illegal drugs are the main source of cash driving our criminals and corrupting police, and the solution is the same now as then - repeal prohibition while regulating and taxing the ongoing trade. After all, you don't see rival liquor companies shooting it out on the street. They fight for territory in the boardrooms and on the stock exchange.
Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo

It's almost funny watching the likes of Barry O'Farrell flounder about trying to be seen to be doing something about the violence while spouting vapid nonsense every time he is asked about legalising cannabis. While my point in the letter will seem obvious to those who know, we all should take every opportunity to link Al Capone's era and today's violence via their common cause, prohibition. Once that takes root in the public mind, BOF and other prohibitionists will have to retreat to even less credible arguments.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/dont-target-gun-enthusiasts--make-drugs-legal-20120119-1q8ao.html#ixzz1jwmeua54

Drugs, cops, snitches and Kings Cross still in the news

2012-01-15T15:53:00.003+11:00

Wendy Hatfield. Picture: Ken Irwin/SMH

The former Kings Cross policewoman who was portrayed as a raunchy party girl in Underbelly, after successfully suing Channel 9 over the series, is now on the warpath against the book Snitch. Both were informed by the pseudonymous KX1, a snitch who Ms Hatfield says lied about her.

She denies claims that she had an affair with local nightclub entrepreneur John Ibrahim, and that she tried to buy drugs in a nightclub. She is moving to have Snitch taken off the shelves, and has threatened to name KX1 in the face of a possible jail sentence over court orders concealing his identity. She says he would prove to be "an appalling witness". It's all in the SMH today.

NCPIC at it again, this time in bed with Big Pharma

2012-01-10T10:57:00.000+11:00

Anti-pot propagandist Professor Jan Copeland from the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC) continues her campaign to portray cannabis as a highly addictive drug with these unchallenged comments published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

The story concerns the cannabis-based mouth spray Sativex, developed by GW Pharmaceuticals and licensed to Bayer among others, and its potential to wean pot smokers off their habit. Federally funded NCPIC is conducting a trial of Sativex, a move which is of concern since GW's tactics in getting approval for Sativex in the UK are being questioned by law reform group CLEAR which claims several lies were told in the process.

The SMH story misleads by comparing cannabis 'addiction' with the far more habit-forming drugs nicotine and opioids, even using the term 'cold turkey'.

Anyone who has experienced cold turkey would laugh at the comparison - it's a bit like comparing a train-wreck to a parking ding. Listen to John Lennon's song Cold Turkey or read Keith Richards' gory descriptions in his autobiography to get the picture.

But NCPIC is happily spending our tax dollars on a randomised trial to test the efficacy of Sativex in weaning smokers off pot, inviting participants to spend eight days in hospital during the trial. Hospital? Sheesh, pot smoking MUST be really serious. Lucky we have so many hospital beds to spare.

The story then quotes a woman who has written a book about her attempts to get off this deadly drug. She claims it is so addictive "you get to a point where you would rob your own grandmother to get some.'' Oh dear, shades of Reefer Madness here.

No mention of the vast majority of people who simply stop when they want to, with little or no ill-effect, and who wouldn't dream of robbing their grandma.

I've previously written about an acquaintance who gave up smoking cannabis after 40 years of regular use, with little or no after effects. In a comment to that story, Dr Ray from Kings Cross says about ten percent of heavy users experience withdrawal symptoms.

So while there appears to be some substance in the addiction story being peddled by Professor Copeland and her ilk, the comparison with harder drugs is invalid. So is the implied support for prohibition, which strangely never stopped any of these addictive types getting hold of the drug in the first place.

Melissa Davey who wrote this sad piece of moral-panic raising makes no attempt to get a balancing opinion, thus contravening the most basic principle of quality journalism. Nor does she question any possible commercial implications around benefits to GW Pharmaceuticals following approval of Sativex here. Her story contributes to the propaganda war being waged to deceive the public into supporting prohibition, in which Jan Copeland is an intrinsic player and which GW is arguably a stakeholder given that the demand for Sativex is underpinned by prohibition. Let's hope the suppliers of Sativex are not supporting NCPIC in any way, because that would compromise this study and could be seen as corrupt. Such a study has the potential to underpin approval of the drug in Australia, opening up a new market for a product dubbed "the most expensive cannabis in the world". This puts it into a different category from other research into illicit drugs.

[Sativex was developed to ease the symptoms of people with Multiple Sclerosis and is under trial for the relief of cancer pain. It is a processed form of medical marijuana approved by medical regulators in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Spain. The makers claim it has no psycho-active effects]

Research shows prohibition doesn't work

2011-12-14T08:32:00.001+11:00

Here's a scientific evaluation of the impacts of drug decriminalisation vs prohibition over a decade in the Czech Republic. It contradicts all those prohibitionists who say 'going soft on drugs' will lead to more users, greater availability, negative social and economic impacts etc etc. Anyone asserting those furphies is either a fool, a liar or both (or someone who gains from prohibition!). They have no evidence for their empty claims.

When will Australia move into the 21st century? It's such a backward colony.

Bouquets to the Czech government, where even the conservatives listen to evidence.

Turon River in a flash flood

2011-11-30T20:25:00.001+11:00

My fortnightly river escape is known for its flash floods, having destroyed my great-great granpa's gold fossicking venture in 1851, killing some of his mates. I have thought about the risks of camping on the riverbank and keep note of the rain outlook. I didn't go up last weekend but if I had this is what I would have faced: Video shot by James DeVere at Green Point, just upstream from my usual campsite. This is the actual camping area. Hmmmn.

Interesting takes on the extended GFC and the occupy movement

2011-11-24T16:37:00.001+11:00

As Europe lurches towards its crisis, youth unemployment in Spain is already 50% and American kids graduate in deep debt with little prospect of a job, no-one is confidently predicting the future. I liked this story in The Guardian and the perceptive comments below it, both pro- and anti-. Two comments that impressed cut-and-pasted here:

From Joe McCann:

Something most people do not understand about the form of capitalism we have.
The central idea is that all wealth should be extracted from the general population and handed over to a tiny "capitalist class", as supposedly they can more "efficiently" apply that wealth as capital. It's a similar idea to Soviet state capitalism - except in our instance, it's a social class confiscating property and not the state. And yes they have been confiscating your property and wealth, with a little trompe l'oeil.
Of course what the capitalist class really do is apply the capital to buying big houses and private jets, gated compounds, armed guards.
We've been duped into a system that just makes most of us poorer and poorer.
In the US in 1960, a single average wage was all it took to support a family, buy a house and a car, and not live in poverty. Supposedly we're wealthier than we've ever been. When you take rubbishy hi-tech gadgets out of the equation we're worse off than 1960. Though our rich are outrageously better off than they've ever been. How in a democracy can the majority chose a path that makes their live worse.
Our elites are just as bad as Mummar Gaddafi when it comes to screwing their own people.

From 'Raffine':

Public demonstrations still seem to have an effect in nations where civil society is restricted or non-existent (see the "Arab Spring") and in France (in the form of the general strike), but this political style is pretty much exhausted in the USA, almost to the point of becoming a cliché. The declining significance of street protests is made worse when organizers promise more than they can deliver, in this case occupying Wall Street. Until what happens? The closing of the DJIA? What Graeber purports to be one of the signs of the fall of the American empire, the tribal drumbeats echoing through the canyons of lower Manhattan, is nothing more than a local spectacle; meanwhile, for criminal banksters and feral traders (like the USB thug Kweku Adoboli) it's back to business as usual.
The anarchist vision apparent in this commentary ("This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged") is no substitute for a real political theory of how the widespread change its author envisions might be actualized. Hardt and Negri suffice for the sound bite imagination of the well-meaning demonstrators; the rest of us can still hope for something more profound.

Meanwhile, up on the river...

2011-11-16T17:38:00.001+11:00

Click to see the full animated image. Watch it for a while for a deeply peaceful feeling. Enjoy!

Prohibitionists Drug Free Australia well rebutted

2011-11-11T12:49:00.001+11:00

The usual prohibitionists recently commissioned a critique of the Vancouver injecting centre, Insite, but the critique has been shown to be without scientific merit and dependent on false methodology.

Gary Christian

Drug Free Australia (DFA) and its honorary secretary Gary Christian passionately oppose harm reduction measures such as injecting centres. Mr Christian has lately turned his attention to Vancouver's Insite, a facility comparable to the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross, which itself was previously targeted in a DFA attack based on a particular interpretation of statistics.

This time, DFA's ally the Drug Prevention Network of Canada (DPNC) critiqued a peer-reviewed study published in Lancet that had demonstrated significantly reduced overdose deaths from illegal drugs in Insite's local area. This was unacceptable to the prohibitionists. Their critique, which was not peer-reveiwed, claimed the original Lancet study was flawed and denied that the centre had saved lives, a claim DFA had also made in Kings Cross. This is remarkable as what these centres DO is professionally treat people who have overdosed, immediately and on site. Getting to the OD victims so quickly means nearly all can be treated simply with oxygen.

It's a bit like saying that people who suffer heart attacks in an emergency ward have worse outcomes than those who have heart attacks at home.

Now the critique itself has been critiqued, and found wanting. The response, by the authors of the original study, maps the many flaws in the DPNC work, starting with the following:

Using BC Vital Statistics data, they argue that overdose deaths increased rather than decreased during the period considered in our study. This apparent discrepancy is explained by several flaws in their analysis. First, our study in the Lancet focused on a defined area of interest in close proximity to Insite that included 41 city blocks... However, the data considered in the... DPNC report examined the entire Downtown Eastside Local Health Area (LHA)—an area that is much larger and includes approximately 400 city blocks.

That's comparing 400 city blocks with 41, a 10x difference. If you ignore the tyranny of distance you can come up with all sorts of wonderful conclusions. The DNPC critique seems to assume that addicts will travel up to 200 blocks or more before they inject. From what I've seen, addicts desperate for a hit can't wait to inject - in Kings Cross they almost run to the MSIC the second they score.

And that's only point 1.

I won't quote the whole document here - if you want to read the full story you can download the easy-to-read 5-page pdf at the link above or, for your convenience, here. If DFA or its allies have a credible rebuttal to this rebuttal, feel free to comment. They seem to have gone pretty quiet on this one though.

Remind me please why I am subsidising oil companies?

2011-11-10T11:05:00.000+11:00

You know how climate sceptics go on about the chardonnay-sipping tree-hugging socialists who are dependent on the nanny state, and how governments shouldn't subsidise renewable energy projects because that would be "picking winners"? Well today's Australian Financial Review lists $10 billion in annual subsidies we the taxpayers give to coal, oil and gas companies. (Story summary below)

Meanwhile today's Australian reports that squillionnaire Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest, the most aggressive critic of the mining tax, admits that his Fortescue Metals Group has never paid a cent of tax (although they say they will start this year).

That's awesome - I pay them to pollute the planet while they avoid tax and lobby against a sustainable economy. The big end of town is truly running the place to their benefit at our expense.

Here is my paraphrase of the AFR story by Marcus Priest (I can't link because of the AFR's paywall):

While Prime Minister Julia Gillard said coal would supply energy in Australia for at least another four decades, Greens leader Bob Brown said he had lobbied treasurer Wayne Swan to abolish subsidies to fossil fuel companies and apply the savings to education, health and transport.
Treasury and the Department of Resources last year identified $8 billion in fossil fuel subsidies including a concession to North West Shelf gas. After Greens deputy leader Christine Milne marked the passing of the carbon tax legislation with a call for a “national conversation about how we can move away from fossil fuels”, Nationals leader Warren Truss said The Greens would never be satisfied.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has identified further benefits of up to $2 billion from depreciation allowances to the oil and gas industry under rules which should be overhauled according to the Henry tax review. But David Byers, chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association said the depreciation provisions had attracted investment that helped Australiawithstand the GFC.

How much we pay to pollute

2011-11-03T12:24:00.004+11:00

OK we know this is Wallerawang and that's steam rising
in the background but steam still requires energy and
this is the most relevant power station shot in my photo library.

I know most people don't get excited about politics but I think you and your families need to know just HOW MUCH our governments subsidise coal-fired power stations, as recent inquiries in NSW have established. You are paying a fortune to subsidise the big polluters, a far cry from the bullshit being spread by climate change deniers. Note this quote:

"In short, this inquiry tells us, the coal-fired power stations in NSW are unable to compete... unless their coal is supplied at around one quarter of the cost of export coal. Given that Cobbora has the potential to supply 30 million tonnes of coal to the state’s coal fired power plants by 2020, as noted by the Australian Energy Market Operator, the lost export revenue potential from the mine could amount to some $2.7 billion a year, at current prices."

That's $2.7 BILLION a year from one publicly owned mine alone. Even the Arab states are investing heavily in solar because they can't afford the price of their own oil... Full story at http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/nsws-great-big-coal-subsidy-scandal

[And read the comments to see how this doesn't even include the power price hikes we are all paying.]

Echoes of Max Dupain

2011-11-02T13:05:00.001+11:00

A bit of fun - an animated update of Max Dupain's famous shot of the same intersection in Kings Cross C1940, which was shot from the opposite corner and had trams, not buses. Note the guy exercising in the gym, top right. I snapped this from the Kings Cross Hotel during intermission last Thursday night at the highly recommended "Mum's In" show. Might be fun to set up a Saturday night version.

The utter misery prohibition creates

2011-11-01T10:29:00.000+11:00

Always my favourite and perhaps the most visually stunning gallery in Sydney, White Rabbit in Chippendale is exhibiting among its typically quirky offerings a photographic journey into prisons for drug users in the Shan states between Burma and China, shot by Lu-Nan. There, inmates are shackled for the length of their term; the longer the term, the heavier the shackles, up to 63 kg and most hobble around holding them up with a short cord as their ankles chafe. They are also caned and subject to harsh conditions typical of jails in autocratic countries.

This is drastically unjust because on the whole these men and women (and their children who are also sometimes incarcerated) have done nothing wrong, just fallen foul of prohibition which arbitrarily allows some drugs like alcohol while banning others. It's especially ironic as opium and heroin are the main exports from this area and I would bet my butt to a barnacle that the very government which imposes these sentences is making big bucks from the trade. These ruined lives illustrate once again that prohibition does more harm than the drugs it fails to control, and all prohibitionist governments bear some degree of responsibility for this travesty of justice, this almost invisible crime against humanity. You can also bet the rich in these countries escape this outrageous fate.

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MEANWHILE former Mexican president Vicente Fox has implored the US to end prohibition, blaming it for the 40,000-50,000 murders committed in his country's US-financed drug wars in recent years (give or take 10,000 souls).

Getting real about Kings Cross nightlife

2011-10-31T17:21:00.004+11:00

Police arrest a male in Roslyn St after he randomly
smashed his bag into a passing girl and
knocked her over, according to a witness. (File pic)

There seems to be a new wind blowing in Sydney, and it's a pleasant one. Good street art is staying on walls longer, new live venues are proliferating, and this: After years of we locals saying the best solution to violence in Kings Cross (or anywhere) is to arrest the thugs, not shut the place down, it seems that's what's happening:
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/police-back-kings-cross-guards-who-are-helping-in-fight-against-crime-20111030-1mqet.html

I've reported on this as it developed, and while the move seems to be a good one, there are reservations about privatising policing. We'll see how it travels.

Hard data backing the Occupy Wall Street movement in Australia

2011-10-22T09:07:00.000+11:00

The following is my paraphrase of an analysis by Andrew Cornell that appears in today's Australian Financial Review, Perspective section, page 50 under the headline 'Arab Spring, American Fall'. As the AFR paywalls its website I can't link directly to the full story. But given the shrill, near-moronic critiques of the Occupy Wall Street movement coming from conservative apologists for the rich, I thought it important to spread this information.

A parallel can be argued between the cosying-up of right-wing shock-jock Alan Jones with Greens Leader Bob Brown over coal-seam gas, and traits shared between the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and the Tea Party in the US. While both movements are political opposites, they are both internally contradictory and unfocused, but so was the Arab Spring a year ago, showing that is no barrier to effectiveness.

Australia’s OWS movement might have less to complain about than its US parent but the distortion of executive remuneration at the expense of workers and shareholders (ie our superannuation) is a common cause.

Here, the annual general meeting of GUD Holdings has already seen its remuneration report voted down by shareholders, while Wesfarmers has been linking remuneration more strongly to performance targets and ANZ Banking Group’s Mike Smith has frozen executive salaries, recognising that “the market is on springs”.

The weak empirical data underpinning executive pay rises is causing anxiety among those who receive them and those who award them, two groups that are joined at the hip as demonstrated by Lucian Bebchuck and Jesse Fried’s Pay Without Performance: the Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. Harvard-qualified economist Diane Coyle uses orthodox economics to justify similar conclusions in her work The Economics of Enough.

When a shareholder raised OWS concerns about executive pay at Thursday’s Amcor AGM, chairman Chris Roberts responded with a flawed argument, urging the questioner to do some “serious study”, then referring him to an opinion piece by the rabid right that agreed with his views. But he ignored the rigorous works cited above, indicating it is perhaps he who needs to do some "serious study".

Ann Byrne, chief executive of the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, says the past ten years have been far better for CEOs of the top 100 companies than for investors when remuneration is compared to share value. Australian Bureau of Statistics data show wages equated to nearly 57 percent of economic output in 2001 but have now dropped to just under 37 percent.

Meanwhile, management typically looks at tightening labour conditions to make productivity gains without applying the same criteria to itself. But productivity is more closely linked to quality of management, concludes Roy Green, dean of the faculty of business at the University of Technology, in Management Matters in Australia: Just How Productive Are We? He notes Australia’s productivity has fallen since 2009 compared to OECD countries. Ernst & Young support this conclusion in the firm’s “Australian productivity pulse”.

And here's another interesting take from the God's politics blog:

"From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector peaked at 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In the 1990s it reached postwar period highs by going between 21 and 30 percent. But this decade it hit 41 percent. These profits weren’t from products, and weren’t always from finding the best use for capital, but from money making more money for a new class of super-rich financial traders. And now, when their risk taking, greed, and selfishness created a mess for so many others, we bailed them out and left everyone else to suffer in the economic wilderness of unemployment, home foreclosures, pension losses, deep middle-class insecurity, and rising poverty rates."

Prohibition makes drugs easier for kids to get

2011-10-19T09:17:00.002+11:00

Just as drug law reformers have been saying all along, these figures appear to show that prohibited cannabis is indeed easier for kids to get than legal and regulated alcohol. Medical consensus agrees that young teenagers are the most vulnerable to cannabis-related harms, so it seems that prohibitionists are responsible for an increased level of harm to kids. I hope they are proud.

From the Brisbane Courier Mail:

Alarming figures obtained by The Sunday Mail show almost 3500 charges laid against children aged between 10 and 15 over drug-related offences in the three years to June 2010, with a 26 per cent spike between 2009 and 2010.
In contrast, 1100 liquor offences by children in the same age range were recorded during the same period.
Police and health experts are worried children are increasingly taking a casual approach to drugs, especially dope, because it is cheaper and more accessible than grog.

How conservatives equate free speech with telling lies

2011-10-03T11:37:00.003+11:00

News Ltd columnist Andrew Bolt's recent conviction under the Racial Discrimination Act unleashed a perfect storm of conservative backlash which was remarkable in the similarity of its line from many different quarters. All of them relied on the same serious omissions and misinterpretations of the judgement, each commentator precisely mirroring Bolt's original crime. This has polarised the press, with News Ltd backing Bolt while other outlets report the judgement in a more balanced way. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott even wants to amend the Act to allow this sort of deception.

Typically the conservative commentators do not mention the serious errors of fact and distortions by Bolt that underpin the judgement. They all claim his free speech was curtailed ("gagged") because of political correctness and simply ignore that the judge explained this was not the case, because had the complaint been brought under defamation laws Bolt also would have lost.

The sheer scale of this misinformation will be effective because of the tremendous reach of Rupert Murdoch's press - he owns 70% of Australian titles. Many of his readers do not also read other more reputable titles and so will never hear the full story, with the result that voters, for instance in marginal seats in Sydney's western suburbs, are seriously misinformed on many issues News Ltd campaigns on, such as climate change. This has the power to tip elections and change history based on, effectively, lies.

Below is a typical defence of Bolt from the right, this one from Adam Creighton, a research fellow with the Centre for Independent Studies. I emailed Creighton pointing out his errors but he has not replied, apparently ignoring my analysis. Life would be so simple if you could just ignore inconvenient realities. But then that's the conservative outlook.

[The boldings in the following text are mine, highlighting suspect phrases]

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Bolt tongue tied
Sometimes it takes an injustice to beget justice. So it may be with Andrew Bolt’s infringement of the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act 1975, as a result of articles he wrote in 2009 suggesting that some people claim ‘aboriginality’ for personal gain (a logical certainty at the very least).
Probably not many Australians knew the extent to which courts and government curtail freedom of expression. They do now.
Snuck into the Act by the Keating government in 1995, Section 18C outlaws expressing views in public that encompass ‘race’ and offend people of a particular ‘race.’ Australian courts are now spending valuable public resources inquiring into whether and to what extent people have been offended.
If that is not gratuitous and silly enough, Judge Bromberg’s interpretation appears sorely wanting. Section 18D allows exemptions for ‘fair comment on any event or matter of public interest if the comment is an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment.’
Judge Bromberg, a former Labor party pre-selection contender, ignored that part because ‘of the manner in which the articles were written [which included] inflammatory and provocative language’! It is not for the judge to pass judgment on the quality or tenor of a particular communication when such criteria are absent from the relevant law.
Moreover, he ignored the title of the relevant sections of the Act, which explicitly refer to ‘behaviour based on racial hatred.’
Bolt’s articles patently had nothing to do with racial hatred. Nevertheless, the judge believed the term had a ‘broader field of operation ... infused by the values of human dignity and equality.’ That’s a lovely sentiment, but it’s not what the law says.
It will be surprising if the High Court does not strike down this verdict.
This outcome is also a reminder of the inconsistency and hypocrisy such laws engender. It is quite OK, for instance, for Larissa Bernhardt (one of the complainants in the case and NSW Australian of the Year) to claim in public that fellow Aborigine Bess Price is more offensive than a man having sex with a horse [Is it? - ed] because of Price’s views on Aboriginal policy. But it is not OK for Bolt to highlight the perverse incentives created by well-meaning laws.
More generally, using laws to shape people’s morals is ineffective and wasteful. To paraphrase former High Court Justice Harry Gibbs, if we reach a point where we need to codify our morals, then there’s probably not much worth codifying [Isn't that exactly what the law does? - Ed.] .
Adam Creighton is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies

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Oh - the prize headline in this imbroglio has to be Mike Carlton's "Nuts come out as truth has bolted"

Rockin' friends at Toy's birthday

2011-10-01T13:02:00.001+10:00

Rockin' at Danny's La Bussola

Toy & Mie

Mie, Toy and guest in the frame

Mie + Toy, mine hosts

The letter they didn't publish

2011-09-06T09:49:00.002+10:00

Yet another home invasion and shoot-up in Sydney's south western war zone last night, with the bad guys pouring petrol over a woman. These acts of terror are now a daily occurrence. Yet no-one will mention the major root cause of all this mayhem, so I poured my heart out the The SMH but they didn't publish my letter!!! For the record, here it is:
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The street shoot-ups in Sydney's suburbs have a stark precedent – the lawlessnes of the Al Capone era in the US. While our Police Minister and his shadow debate whether to increase penalties or address the root causes of this terrifying epidemic, no-one is mentioning the war - the war on drugs, that is. Sydney's criminals and Al Capone both grew fat under prohibition: then of alcohol, now of other drugs. Prohibition does not reduce demand but creates a black market more reliable and lucrative than any other field of crime, so criminals will always fight it out for control of territory, with the rest of us caught in the crossfire. Until we switch to policies that legalise, regulate, tax and treat, the violence will continue (Shootings turn quiet streets into a war zone, 3 September).

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo
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Prohibition corrupts cops - here's a great short history

2011-08-25T15:43:00.000+10:00

Malcolm Brown in The SMH today describes a litany of police corruption scandals in Australia without even mentioning the recent Mark Standen conviction in NSW. And these are only the ones we know about.

Apart from the problem of of big drug money tempting otherwise good officers onto the slippery slope, there must be many injustices done to others along the way as the legal process is tampered with.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced – Albert Einstein.

Prohibition does not work and should be ended in favour of tightly regulated legal supply.

PS (11/9/11) The stench emanating from the NSW Crime Commission is widening now its former senior member Mark Standen has been convicted, reports the SMH. It seems the drug money flowing into the Commission was being well and truly taxed by its financial analyst and his solicitor girlfriend who acted for the crooks doing deals. She was regularly overpaid with no accountability, according to my namesake, Jeremy Gormly SC who is acting for the Police Integrity Commission. Prohibition brings a spreading cancer into law enforcement, eating away at the very foundations of our civilisation. Why do Australian media and governments ignore this?

WA cops use technology to persecute people with drug convictions (but not other criminals)

2011-08-25T09:16:00.001+10:00

WA police are using number plate scanning to identify drivers with previous drug convictions, pulling them over, searching their cars and testing their saliva, reports The West Australian.

In a recent trial 4,000 cars were pulled over and four people were found in possession of drugs. Another 18 drivers were either unlicensed or were driving unregistered vehicles - and I have no problem with this as the scanning revealed an offence being committed, and one that potentially created danger to others.

But searching people because they have a prior drug conviction is wrong for two reasons.

First, having a prior conviction is clearly not the grounds for suspicion normally required to justify a search. Presumably the convicted person has paid their 'debt to society' and should be treated with the rights of a normal person. This is why prior convictions are not revealed to juries in a trial until after a verdict has been reached.

Second, targeting people who have been found guilty of a crime which is not only victimless but in the opinion of many should not even be a crime, is a strange priority. If you were serious about using this technology to protect the community, why not pull over convicted drunk drivers, pedophiles, murderers, thieves and hitmen?

No, it's another example of the obsessive anti-drug ideology driving the WA Liberals government into a systematic campaign of social persecution.

Four out of 4,000 is 0.001% - hardly an effective use of police time and resources.

As there is not a single valid argument for prohibition, persecuting a sub-culture in its name is pernicious.

Climate change deniers disappear up their own propaganda

2011-08-11T10:01:00.003+10:00

Professor Ian Plimer, a rock star of the climate sceptic
movement - rebutted but keeps on keeping on.
Photo by Spainy via Flickr

Rupert Murdoch's minions continue their shameless and nonsensical propaganda against the carbon tax. Janet Albrechtson in the Oz today recycles the old "Australia is so small we won' t make any difference anyway" furphy.

A correspondent on one of my email lists rebutted it this way:

When my dog shits in the park, why should I pick it up? My costs are quite high - you tell me how big the benefit is for the Australian dogshit problem. It's 0.00001 percent. I'm not doing it!

Perfect.

Albrechtson trots out some remarkable fallacies, for instance that Henry Ford didn't need a Horse Tax to usher in the age of the motor car.

But even more amazingly she again trots out the repeatedly discredited Ian Plimer, apparently ignorant of the many rebuttals to his work and apparently too poor a journalist to do the research.

So here's a helping hand for Janet (and anyone else interested in grounding the debate in fact instead of fiction): Just Google 'Ian Plimer rebuttal' and you will find a wealth of links doing just that. Perhaps the best collection (from Wiki) is here.

I have not seen Plimer or his mates rebutting these rebuttals, but rather continually reverting to their discredited positions, indicating they are simply trying to convince the ignorant. Therefore any argument or event that features these people is similarly discredited.

Oh wait: Plimer has replied to a series of sharp questions from George Monbiot about his nonsense. Tellingly he didn't answer any of the questions but posed a list of technobabble questions in return. A very patient scientist took the time to unravel Plimer's questions here. Warning: the technobabble here will make your eyes cross.

Prohibition fuels crime wave in the north

2011-08-07T12:27:00.002+10:00

Armed robberies on 'soft targets' in northern NSW have risen alarmingly as Gold Coast police crack down on violent crime there, reports the Sun Herald today.

The crime wave is linked in the report to post-GFC hard times, rising unemployment and drug addiction.

Assistant Police Commissioner Paul Wilson attributes the crime wave to "desperate gun-wielding drug addicts targeting convenience stores, bottle shops and chemists."

This is what happens under prohibition, you see, but as usual both the newspaper and the plod see the problem only in terms of more police crackdowns. Don't mention the War.

With the world seemingly on the brink of the mother of all recessions, expect more of the same. Yet the War on Drugs is so precious to most governments they don't even consider it in their search for spending cutbacks.

Meanwhile another bikie-criminal story in the same paper tells of the ransom-kidnapping of a Greek Orthodox priest caught unwittingly in a dispute among bikies over drugs. Truly the harms of prohibition are greater than the harms of drugs.

PS (11.8.2011) It seems the men who kidnapped the priest also kidnapped another man and shot him in the leg during an interrogation. Sweet.

Retro a go go reference

2011-08-03T21:32:00.005+10:00

Found an awesome blog thread tonight, the most incredible collection of '60s arcana, mostly not on iTunes. I mean, how quaint is retro erotica? WARNING: Anyone watching this might be corrupted into a world of SIN! If you are under 18 years old, DON'T show this to your parents. It might remind them of something. If you are a moralist who likes underground '60s music (is that an oxymoron?) just close your eyes and listen.

Some samples:

This is enough to turn my gay friends straight - or vice versa?

And saving the best till last:

Forbidden images found cut from old film reels in a Pennsylvania cinema. Why does censorship always date so quickly? Some lovely scenes here.

And if you're not totally corrupted by now, this will do,it:

Great soundtrack to this Bettie Page tease

More hot Bettie Page:

Funniest letter ever

2011-08-02T21:32:00.001+10:00

In comment on Tony Abbot's crusade against the carbon tax, this letter in today's SMH:

Tony Abbott can relax. If he's right, and the gas is ''invisible, odourless, weightless, tasteless'' as he claims, our entire output of it will weigh nothing. At the very reasonable $23 per tonne, none of his polluting friends will ever have to pay a cent.

Terry McGee Malua Bay

Why didn't I think of that?

Policing Kings Cross goes private

2011-08-02T10:37:00.003+10:00

Do we want Bobbies on the Kings Cross beat - or bouncers?

Despite a long-standing offer from Kings Cross venues and businesses to fund extra police on the late night weekend beats, it seems the only extra policing will come from a privately funded security force.

The private force will have limited co-operative links with the Police.

An editorial in today's Sydney Morning Herald documents the risks of giving private businesses and nightclub owners the power to exile certain people from their "feifdom". This informal business group intends to formalise an existing database of troublemakers it has compiled to protect each other from hosting violent incidents and attracting government sanctions. The SMH lists other concerns:

Yet many will wonder about the wisdom of setting up a private security service to carry out normal policing functions. What are the powers of the roaming guards? How are they selected? What privacy rules cover the troublemaker database? How will the information on it be used, or secured?

This raises the question: Why have the state government and the police refused to consider the long-standing offer to fund "DIY Policing" using the Police force. I'd rather have them, for all their faults, than another army of bouncers pushing people around.

The informal database of troublemakers began after Newcastle instigated its early pub shutdown and venue managers noticed a spike in violence in Kings Cross. They realised groups of young men were taking the train down from Newcastle, arriving drunk and then behaving badly. It's a perfect example of the balloon effect - the displacement of problems often caused by prohibition strategies.

Another letter in the SMH

2011-07-23T15:49:00.000+10:00

What do you think about this, published today?

Multimedia stance on monitoring minors
I can understand why some parents want to police their children's Facebook activities (''Facebook could become adults-only in Australia'', July 22). But would they also think it's OK to open their snail mail? Same principle.

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo

http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/why-stop-at-halftime--theres-a-buck-in-injuries-20110722-1hsxf.html#ixzz1Su7401ph

Journo's link endemic police corruption to bikies - but not to prohibition

2011-07-19T09:32:00.003+10:00

The extraordinary lead story in today's Sydney Morning Herald details deep and ongoing leaks from key Victorian police in the pay of bikie gangs. The leaks have seriously compromised several high-level investigations.

The central role of prohibited drugs is mentioned only tangentially towards the end of the story, which stays firmly within the usual media mindset of not connecting the rot to that proverbial elephant in the room, not questioning prohibition itself.

The gangs have million of dollars at their disposal, most probably earned through drug dealing. In one attempted transaction alone the bikies reportedly tried to buy a $700,000 phone tapping device from the Middle East. The Herald reports:

Senior bikie figures have also been given information about the contents of one of the most secret documents held by a police force - a joint state and federal law enforcement organised-crime target list.

So it's clear that law enforcement in this country is rotten and a major source of the rot is illicit drugs. No matter how the authorities crack down on such corruption, the enforcers themselves remain vulnerable to the sweet allure of easy cash.

While prohibitionists go on about the harms of drugs, the harms of prohibition are far greater - not least because it fosters an international drug distribution network which ensures unregulated drugs are easily available to anyone who wants them, including under-aged teens.

Meanwhile the SMH continues its moronic verbatim reporting of some drug junk-science produced by Dr Wendy Swift from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre. The study recycles the myth that cannabis is a gateway drug but the story contained no opposing or expert comment. I'll look further into this but it looks to me as if the study proved only that people who like drugs, like drugs.

Nor does the story recognise that all the study subjects, under prohibition, appear to be able to get any drug they want... That would mean exiting the prohibition mindset. Result: The uncritical reader will have their belief in prohibition reinforced. It's brilliant propaganda (Yes I know I said it was moronic but that refers more to the idiots who reported and edited this tripe. The brilliance lies in the slick prohibitionist machine behind it and the ability of these researchers to produce results that guarantee more funding from a government which needs to justify its unjustifiable drug policies.)

Near carbon-copy echo in the room?

2011-07-12T10:18:00.001+10:00

Just joking. Ian Verrender in the SMH today began his article on the carbon tax almost identically to my post from yesterday, writing:

Brace yourselves for the onslaught of the ideologues.

He presents some interesting points which confound climate-denier rhetoric. While deniers scream 'why should Australia go it alone?' Verrender points out that 32 other countries have similar schemes including all of Europe, which now wants to increase its 2050 carbon cuts to 95 percent and has started taxing all airlines that fly into Europe.

He concludes his story:

If you truly believe that the amount of crap we've pumped into the atmosphere during the past 200 years has had no impact on the environment, good luck getting the sand out of your ears when you finally extract your head...

A price - whether through a carbon tax or a trading scheme - minimises the heavy hand of government.

And there we have the ultimate irony. Both sides of Australian politics are committed to reducing carbon emissions. But in an odd twist, Labor is pushing for a market-based solution while the Coalition advocates government intervention. It's a funny old world.

Carbon tax will put the cat among the pigeons

2011-07-11T10:25:00.006+10:00

Rupert Murdoch's screamers today - The Tele is totally negative
(they could have said 'What the tax will do for the planet') and
The Australian, which declared last year it would "destroy
The Greens", affirms the end of Gillard's government. The lead headline
actually read: "Gillard's clean energy crusade", 'crusade' implying
an ideological folly. That's not news, it's propaganda.

Brace yourself for a propaganda battle now Australia has a firm carbon price, modest though it is. I think the package and its compensations go a long way to making a nonsense of the naysayers' predictions of economic disaster. Opposition leader Tony Abbott unsurprisingly declared war on it, urging TV viewers to join him in a campaign to stop it becoming law before it is due to kick in next July.

Personally I'm very happy about the $18,000 tax-free threshhold. It's a good progressive reform that helps every taxpayer but is of proportionately greater benefit to low income earners, unlike the Coalition version which always most-benefited the rich. It will also encourage people to get off welfare and into work as such a move will more likely offer an immediate increase in income.

The commentariat this morning predictably split into their ideological niches but I liked this story from two scientists in the SMH. It concludes with the following paragraphs which I think put it all into perspective:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 indicated that industrialised countries must reduce their aggregate emissions by between minus 25 and minus 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 if we are to have a hope of staying below 2 degrees average warming. The Climate Commission rightly calls this the critical decade for action.

Yesterday's announcement adjusts Australia's long-term emissions reduction target to minus 80 per cent below 2000 levels by 2050. But in the short-term, we still are only pursuing a cut of minus 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. Despite Australia being the world's 10th biggest aggregate emitter, with the world's highest per capita emissions, our mitigation effort and short-term target are among the weakest among all industrialised and major industrialising nations.

The United Kingdom has already cut its emissions by 23 per cent and aims to halve them by 2025. Germany has cut by 22 per cent and has a target of minus 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. By contrast, we are setting an example that says to others, ''It is OK to go slow''. The science says otherwise. Understood in this larger context, it is clear that the real price of our modest carbon tax will be paid for by our children and by countless future generations.

Associate Professor Peter Christoff teaches climate policy and Professor Robyn Eckersley teaches political science at the University of Melbourne.

Surprise surprise - Kings Cross residents like the nightlife

2011-07-01T10:08:00.001+10:00

As reported in the SMH today:

The University of Western Sydney's City After Dark project found 88 per cent of residents in neighbourhoods such as Kings Cross and Darlinghurst said nightlife added to the appeal of their suburb, a view particularly strong among younger renters.

Fortunately even Clover Moore seems to have got the message that the local temperance union are a minority who simply moved into the wrong suburb, and pandering to them is a vote loser. Her rhetoric has changed from talking about "shocking evidence" of alcohol fuelled mayhem to a more balanced approach of fostering a diverse night time economy. Let's hope.

Now if I could only find a small bar where I could afford the drinks...

'Post-truth politics'

2011-06-22T23:04:00.000+10:00

Well I doubt that truth has ever had much to do with politics but we do seem to be entering a new era of fact-free debate.

Here's a link to an excellent Crickey post that lays it all out, in this case dissecting Australia's boat people hysteria. I like the quote:

As the late Senator Daniel Moynihan, of New York, said “everyone is entitled to their own opinions but no one is entitled to their own facts”.

I heard two gay guys walking past the front door today, one saying "and then they come to our country and use our own legal system against us". I hope they watch that SBS series screening tonight about people taking the refugee trip in reverse, and somehow read the Crikey post.

But you have to be careful of 'facts'. One of the best inversion techniques is to head your piece "10 facts about XXX" and then list 10 lies, or near lies that are difficult fore people to check up on. I got onto this one when I used to read a religious journal called The Plain Truth at my dear late Grandma' place. The "big lie" was always in the second paragraph. After that it all made sense.

Debating with climate change sceptics

2011-06-22T12:59:00.001+10:00

This morning I received an email from a friend who thinks the whole climate change thing is a fraud. He forwarded a speech by David Evans who is part of the new 'Galileo movement', ie climate sceptics who compare themselves to Galileo who on this very day some centuries ago was forced by the church to recant his view that the earth revolved around the sun. This is a neat inversion of the facts I have researched because these sceptics are the ones using dodgy science, not the other way around.

This technique of inversion is used ruthlessly by aggressive conservatives worldwide and it is winning them a lot of undeserved traction. An example is the current editorials in The Australian claiming it is the fair and unbiased journal despite its declaration last year that it had set out to destroy the Greens - much like Fox News describing itself as 'Fair and balanced'.

Normally I don't bother debating with these types as they simply ignore all the arguments and hold their view. But my friend IS a thinker and a genuine person so I replied. I linked him to some excellent climate science websites that soberly debunk the sceptic claims, and reproduce the thread below. The original David Evans' speech is at the bottom; my response with links at the top.

-----------------------------

This Galileo Movement stuff, sponsored by Alan Jones and ilk, is the true fraud. It is mostly recycled nonsense featuring massive inversion of fact and argument. On the 'cheating fat cat scientist' argument, this is like saying a mouse is bigger than an elephant, the elephant being the global fossil fuel and power industries and their vested interests and the mouse being scientists who mostly publish their arguments unpaid, and green industries which are struggling in their infant stages. We know the massive fossil fuel industries bankroll denialism. If global warming were not true, climate scientists would still get their grants to study that, so the argument is deeply flawed

The science behind denialism is at best shaky, at worst outright fraud. See this excellent new site for an exposé of the abuse of peer review by deniers. Check the home page for a lot more.

On the thermometer story (here recycled for about the 100th time I have seen), see this site for a rebuttal (it seems scientists are not as dumb as the sceptics claim because they adjust for thermometers located in artificially hot places).

On the tropical hotspot, the argument is a lot more complicated than David Evans makes out, and the climate scientists acknowledge the evidence is ambiguous.

While you can argue any of these points, I note that deniers (notably Ian Plimer) keep repeating arguments long after they have been thoroughly discredited, relying on public ignorance to gain traction. This severely discredits them.

Don't debate it with me unless you can genuinely discredit my sources with science, not rhetoric. Here's a quote from the last link re the Quadrant Online scientist/deniers (including David Evans) :

"So the number of peer-reviewed papers that adequately expose the ideas of Carter and co-authors to the scientific peer-review system on the climate change issue is 0, 0, 0 and 0."

"Searching for articles by David Evans and William Kininmonth revealed no peer-reviewed scientific literature that tests their claim that climate change is not happening."

They have little crediblity in this field.

The upshot is, climate changers ('alarmists') have a lot more credibility than the deniers so we should take precautions. And if we do build clean green power and transport systems, where's the downside, as the cartoon above neatly says?

------------------------------

And here's the speech by David Evans. read his convincing CV beneath and wonder why he still peddles debunked arguments.

-------------------------------

Will the full truth only come out here after the carbon tax is passed?

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen.

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro thin half-truths and misunderstandings.

I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, I understand the evidence, I was once an alarmist, but I am now a sceptic.

Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying.

This issue is tearing society apart, making fools and liars out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess which was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now cheat and lie outrageously to maintain the fiction about carbon dioxide being a dangerous pollutant.

Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next?

The planet reacts to the extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: for each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three – so two thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors), only one third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

I'll bet you didn't know that. Hardly anyone in the public does, but it’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements, lies, and misunderstanding spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism. Which is why the alarmists keep so quiet about it and you've never heard of it before. And it tells you what a poor job the media have done in covering this issue.

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot-spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10km up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above.

During the warming of the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the weather balloons found no hot-spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves the climate models are fundamentally flawed and they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

At this point official “climate science” stopped being a science. You see, in science empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — this just happens to keep them in high-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbances, otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.

But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. Surprise - surprise, their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the US Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.

They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade – yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected”. These people are not scientists. They over-estimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they cheat and lie to conceal the truth.

One way they cheat is in the way they measure temperature.

The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at wastewater plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewerage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in tenths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the US, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source. Nearly 90%! The photos of these thermometers are on the Internet; you can get to them via the corruption paper at my site,sciencespeak.com. Look at the photos, and you’ll never trust a government climate scientist again.

They place their thermometers in warm localities, and call the results “global” warming. Anyone can understand that this is cheating. They say that 2010 is the warmest recent year, but it was only the warmest at various airports, selected air conditioners, and certain car parks.

Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off.

So it’s a question of trust.

If it really is warming up as the government climate scientists say, why do they present only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results? And why do they put their thermometers near artificial heating sources? This is so obviously a scam now.

So what is really going on with the climate?

The earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after WWII, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 – 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.

We are now at an extraordinary juncture.

Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory which is based on a guess about moist air and is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only way to curb emissions is to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!

A carbon tax?

Even if Australia stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the stone age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate tenfold – in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!

Sorry, but you’ve been had.

Finally, to those of you who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: sorry, but you’ve been had. Yes carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming, but it’s so minor it’s not worth doing much about.

Dr David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The area of human endeavour with the most experience and sophistication in dealing with feedbacks and analysing complex systems is electrical engineering, and the most crucial and disputed aspects of understanding the climate system are the feedbacks. The evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006, causing Evans to move from being a warmist to a sceptic.

PS - Speaking of bias in The Australian:

From today’s Crikey

Greens leader Bob Brown describes The Australian’s misreporting as "extraordinary" but believes this kind of "verballing" is not uncommon. In fact, he’s been keeping a dossier on the topic. In January he requested the parliamentary library investigate how many times the paper had mentioned the Greens or himself in editorials over the previous decade and how many of these mentions were favourable, neutral or negative. The findings are revealing.

There were 252 editorials over that period. Of these, 188 were negative, 59 were neutral (because they expressed no opinion) and only five -- or 2% -- were positive. The report stipulated the positive editorials were "not glowing endorsements, but rather simple agreement with a statement that they [the Greens] had made".

Do not be alarmed (or even alert)

2011-06-16T14:24:00.000+10:00

This video opinion piece is designed to reassure climate change sceptics that their opinions are really sound. Ostensibly. It's excellent and only four minutes 11 secs. Have a look!

Big-time prohibitionist speaks big-time nonsense

2011-06-09T14:44:00.002+10:00

The rhetoric of key prohibitionists is being pushed back as the debate about regulated legalisation of drugs develops and receives more balanced media exposure, with US 'Drugs Czar' Gil Kerlikowske, admitting on a government blog that you can't arrest your way out of drug problems.

However he then launches into an almost amusing assertion that his policy of prohibition is science-based, quoting a whole lot of 'associations' between drugs and Bad Things, again based on fallacy as all the Bad Things are either highly disputable or apply to a fraction of one percent of drug users, hardly a reason to criminalise the other 99%.

He then asserts that drug use is not a victimless crime, quoting "the tragic impact drug use has on newborn babies". He links to an article which turns out to be about prescription drugs, not illicit drugs, a sly twist that typifies prohibitionist rhetoric.

But it convinces some of the ignorant, so truth becomes secondary to convenience. It apparently has not occurred to Mr Kerlikowske that, as men don't have babies, the cohort so affected would be cut by yet another 50%. Nor are drugs like cannabis or MDMA addictive in any real sense so his baby argument fails to justify the prohibition of those drugs.

But the tricky part is his implication that all drug use (not abuse) creates victims. His wording is revealing and typical of prohibitionist propaganda.

On top of that, all the Bad Things he quotes are happening in a country with one of the toughest prohibition regimes among western countries, so, prima facie, prohibition is not working.

Mr Kerlikowske also asserts that "legalising illicit drugs increase drug use" (sic) but provides no evidence for this, ignoring the fact that more Americans use more drugs than most countries despite his precious prohibition.

If he admits you can't arrest your way out of dug problems, how else would his prohibition work? It's self-contradictory.

It's remarkable that such a senior government official can produce this nonsense with a straight face.

A whack at climate change sceptics

2011-06-03T04:28:00.000+10:00

The SMH published a letter from me today - always nice. It's on climate change and is the first one after all the Penny Wong 'miaow' letters, although at 4.23am the headline is placed after the letter on the website!

Text of letter as published:

Two severe weather events helped tip our economy into the worst contraction since 1991 (''Mining slide drags down the economy'', June 2). Whether or not these natural disasters are linked to human-induced climate change, more severe weather is exactly what scientists predict as a result of global warming.
Maybe now climate sceptics will comprehend the massive economic costs we risk if we fail to address the problem. These would make the price of a carbon tax look like child's play.

Carbon tax dwarfed by cost of wild weather

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo

Culture jam of the year

2011-06-02T09:29:00.001+10:00

Have to pay these people who stopped a football match in Italy with their anti-nuclear banner. The impotence of the authorities to act is quite funny. Italy is about to to the polls to vote on a resumption of nuclear power generation in the country. Note the applause from the crowd.

Ex-Prosecutor explains what's wrong with the War on Drugs

2011-05-31T20:01:00.002+10:00

Nick Cowdery speaking at Aprés restaurant
in Potts Point this morning

This morning on World No Tobacco Day Nick Cowdery, until recently head of Public Prosecutions in NSW, spoke at a business breakfast in Kings Cross hosted by the Potts Point and Kings Cross Partnership.

His message supporting the regulated legalisation of drugs was well crafted, emphasising the criminal enforcement sanctions that would still exist under legalisation, neatly heading off the usual 'legalisation would lead to a free-for-all' assertions of prohibitionists.

The rate of tobacco smoking is steadily being reduced, he pointed out, even though it was legal. Illicit drugs on the other hand are as popular as ever.

"Criminal law is a singularly inappropriate mechanism for dealing with a market," he said before explaining that since people first chewed on a plant and found that it altered the way they thought and felt, or ate some fermented fruit, they "have rather liked the idea".

This produced a demand and that always inspires someone to create a supply, and voila, you have a market.

Enter the War on Drugs, modelled on the failed prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s, and the players in the market, competing for market share, are by definition criminals. This market worldwide turns over many billions of dollars each year, and has unsavoury offshoots such as narco-terrorism.

Criminal sanctions are notably ineffective against this international gravy train, because the easy profits are a certainty and the risk of capture relatively small.

Meanwhile in the USA, home of both prohibition and the GFC, $51 billion per year is being spent on the War on Drugs and 1,660,582 people have been arrested on non-violent drug offences. One in 100 adults in the USA are in jail, the highest incarceration rate in the world. A million of these are the parents of 2.2 million kids, 1.7 million of whom are under 12 years old.

This is why reformers say prohibition causes more harm than drug abuse.

Meanwhile in cash-strapped California, where a proposal to legalise cannabis was recently narrowly defeated, prisons are at 200% capacity and the Federal Supreme Court has ordered the state to reduce it to 137% of capacity within two years.

Mr Cowdery cited Portugal's experience, where the decriminalisation of all drugs in 2001 has not resulted in increased use, contrary to the fear campaigns of prohibitionists.

Beware a new police state in NSW

2011-05-19T10:26:00.005+10:00

David Clarke at home in Cherrybrook,
heart of the hills district bible belt
Photo: Hills Shire Times

Inner city subcultures beware: hard times are a-coming.

I was dismayed this morning to hear that hard-right Christian Liberal prohibitionist David Clarke ha been appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Attorney-General AND head of the Standing Committee on Law and Justice. He had held these positions in the shadow government before the elections. On top of a $17,000 pay rise, this gives him powerful influence over the NSW law and order agenda.

This is where the nice avuncular face of Barry O'Farrell, who supported Clarke in his preselection, gives way to persecution and intolerance. Front and centre will be a crackdown on users of illicit drugs as Clarke is hand-in-glove with a worldwide network of fanatical right-wing Christian prohibitionists who really want to use the law to force everyone else to live like them.

Organisations such as Drug Free Australia (linked to Drug free America) incessantly lobby politicians to get tougher on drugs, wilfully ignoring mountains of evidence showing that prohibition causes more harm than drugs, and stereotyping drug users (other than alcohol, prescription drugs or tobacco, of course) as crazy dysfunctionals as per the film Reefer Madness.

They call for mandatory drug testing and ever-harsher penalties for drug offences. For a taste of what we may face, see Florida USA* which has just brought in mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients (who have to pay for the tests!). Those caught face a year or more without benefits - can you imagine the crime, distress and mayhem that will result from creating a new underclass of unemployed drug users with no income.

But Florida is not the worst state in the USA. Oklahoma has mandatory minimums and up to life sentences for people caught with small amounts of cannabis, and multi-decade sentences for possession are common. The USA imprisons a greater proportion of its citizens than any other country, with drug offences leading the statistics, and ethnic and cultural minorities suffering most.

Unfortunately, and despite the lack of any credible evidence showing that this incarceration rate reduces drug use or harm in the community, I fear David Clarke will lead NSW down the same path.

If he succeeds in his heartfelt desire to toughen drug sentencing, look forward to a rising prison population (including perhaps some of your friends and family) which will mean more prisons. No doubt these will be privately built and run, most likely with contracts ensuring a minimum number of prisoners to shore up the profits.

Thus we will see the tail wagging the dog, a requirement for prisoner numbers driving the law.

Don't underestimate Clarke - he is the numbers man behind all the ugliness in the Liberal Party around branch-stacking to get far-right candidates pre-selected. He seriously wants medieval Christian authoritarianism to underpin our society, and is happy to use state force to bring it about.

One of the chief subcultures to suffer will be the LGBTI community, who live a life despicable to God according to Clarke and his confederates.

These people represent only a tiny minority of Australian society, but have no regard for democratic principle as they enforce what they KNOW is RIGHT.

Watch this space - I have predicted Barry O'Farrell's apparent commitment to allow continuation of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, something David Clarke pathologically opposes, will come at the price of major trade-offs in law and order. The foundations have now been laid in Clarke's new positions.

* Florida's Tea Party Governor Rick Scott founded a medical centre chain that provides (you guessed it) drug testing. When he became Governor he handed the $62 million business to his wife. Hey, as long as God is on your side, what's wrong with making money out of it?

Urinators wanted for city survey

2011-05-18T13:58:00.002+10:00

Weeing in Springfield Plaza Kings Cross
Photo: Steve Lunam/SMH

The City recently trialled portable pissoirs in Kings Cross and Oxford Street, and now wants feedback. Apparently 5,500 people used them during the trial (who was counting??).

This seems to mark a bit of a turnaround in Council's attitude to Kings Cross, from a simplistic 'shut it down' to finding ways of improving the late-night situation. They also deployed late-night ambassadors in George Street, and claim they prevented lots of potentially ugly scenes and helped a lot of people. Sounds reasonable to me.

The SMH says 1600 litres of urine were collected, about 33 beer kegs. Makes you think. One thing's for sure, it's not me taking the piss.

Fitzroy Gardens in the SMH today

2011-05-18T10:04:00.000+10:00

The community's win over Fitzroy Gardens gets a good run in The Sydney Morning Herald today, quoting yours truly and that doyen of the local cool set, the robust Bill Pilkington who betrays potential talent as a media spokesman.

Kelsey Munro reports the planning and 'consultation' cost $623,000.

There's something unfair about the way Council can throw so much public money at winning support for its own projects while the unpaid public has to struggle along in their spare time to oppose them.

The consultation process is fundamentally broken, a deep gulf yawning between street-level reality and Council's ivory tower view.

Locals win over Fitzroy Gardens but fake consultation reigns

2011-05-17T14:12:00.003+10:00

Word has already raced around Kings Cross: After a massive local campaign of opposition, Clover Moore has backed down over Council proposals to redevelop Fitzroy Gardens and nearby Lawrence Hargrave Reserve.

Ms Moore made the surprise announcement via a Lord Mayoral Minute at last night's Council meeting.

You can read the details via the link above, but the language and content of the Minute reinforces the fake consultation processes Ms Moore has perfected since becoming Lord Mayor in 2004.

The minute opens with yet another lengthy spiel about the enthusiastic support the project had according to Council's consultation process. This support of course was never there, but was spun like fairy floss out of cherrypicked snippets and Council's biased analysis of feedback.

A prime example was the reporting on the first consultation session in 2008, when we residents were asked to use sticky notes to post what we liked or didn't like about the Gardens as they are. An avalanche of comments appeared on the 'like' board with relatively few on the 'don't like' board. Among them were many notes saying 'Leave it alone' or 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

A dispassionate Council might have interpreted this as community support for the Gardens as they are, especially as the leading 'Don't like' was the Ibis poo which the new plans did not address anyway.

But Council classified the comments according to theme, from 28 complaints about Ibis poo down to 11 similar comments on other matters. Tellingly the 13 comments saying 'Leave it alone' were not themed, instead being scattered among other categories or relegated to 'Miscellaneous'.

To find them, one had to delve into the depths of the report to read the actual comments verbatim.

Then in the next round of 'consultation', residents were given feedback forms which asked only which of three designs we liked. The issue of whether the project went ahead at all had vanished.

At this point I left the meeting (at which residents were not given an opportunity to speak to the audience, that privilege being reserved for Clover and her minions) along with several others. Sadly most of those attending, trusting in our democratic process, went ahead and commented, unaware of the trap laid for them.

Then there was a third public meeting along the same lines where a final design was presented, Council staff making me see red when they reported on feedback under the modern cliché "What you told us you wanted".

"You told us you wanted the trees preserved." said an unctuous staffer, leaving most of the audience under the impression that the new plan would respect that.

In fact Council's tree removal diagram, not provided at the meeting, showed by far the majority of the trees in the park would go and their Arborist's report, also not provided to the meeting, showed that even the grand old trees allowed to stay would be put at risk by the excavations.

At no stage were we told that the Gardens were listed as having both state and local significance, and nor were we told about the groundbreaking design of the City's first landscape architect, Ilmar Berzins who designed the Gardens in the late '60s. Nor were we told that approximately 5,000 convict bricks in the Gardens would go. The bricks in fact were not mentioned at all.

Unsurprisingly, the feedback from this session was also somewhat positive.

That's when a few locals decided 'enough's enough' and started an email campaign urging people to register their opposition. A trickle became an avalanche and locals organised, resulting in a petition of over 3,500 signatures, a new website giving the true facts, a well attended public rally in the Gardens and wide media coverage including in the Sydney Morning Herald.

But Council ignored all this, conducting their own separate comment process. They were puzzled to find comments now ran overwhelmingly against them. One report made an excuse for this, suggesting the turnaround was because the latter commenters did not have the benefit of seeing the nice colour A1 artists impressions of the proposals, implying that no-one could object to these pretty pictures.

During the rally, Council had a stall spruiking the project, at which staff blatantly lied to people, claiming only four trees would go. When we showed them their own tree diagram, they backpedalled with weak excuses, one relatively innocent younger staff member visibly shocked when shown the duplicity of her superiors.

Since the public were apprised of the facts about the Gardens, opinion has remained steadily against the project, showing the stark difference between Council's spin and proper information.

At the recent state election, Ms Moore's vote dropped by an alarming 25% at the Potts Point polling booth, 24% at St Canices in Rushcutters Bay and 8% in the strongly Housing Commission dominated Woolloomooloo. No doubt this was also because of public disgust at Clover's ruthless demolition of the caretaker's cottage by the tennis courts in Rushcutters Bay and eviction of popular coach/manager Rory Miles.

The next Council election is a year away and many think Ms Moore's backdown has that election in mind where the loss of only on of her team of six would make it necessary to use her casting vote more often, and the loss of two would remove the majority she has enjoyed since taking office.

Then, at least, we might get some real debate in Council and some handbrakes applied to the Ms Moore's present runaway authority which, at least in this case, has clearly been overstepped.

Now if only she would admit that her consultation is more like dictation and get real about it! You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time but never all of the people all the time!

Stop Press: A Council media release just issued outlines significant work that will be done to the gardens. Comment on the Fitzroy Gardens website.

The MR continues the fairy floss with statements like: "Those plans were drawn up following years of community feedback." Hmmmn.

Kings cross visuals

2011-05-10T20:32:00.003+10:00

'Are you good?' asks this sticker on a fire hydrant at the top of William
Street. In the background, out-of-focus, are three blue Piano Bar logos
under the Coke sign. 'Good at what?' I ask.

And here's the reverse shot, looking from the Piano Bar down
William Street. Beautiful people, uptight bar-tabbing protocols but
no drive-by shootings as yet. (It's an Ibrahim venue).
The Kings Cross Road sign locates it if the Westfield neon doesn't.

Mediawatch busts climate sceptics

2011-05-05T10:03:00.001+10:00

I enjoyed the episode of Mediawatch titled Balancing a hot debate in which the outright propaganda from shockjocks about global warming is exposed. Most of them interview only two scientists, active deniers Professors Ian Plimer and Bob Carter. Plimer's nonsense has been detailed on this blog here and here.

You have to give him credit for having the hide to continue presenting as an expert, but you have to wonder at the motivations of shockjocks like Alan Jones who continue to give him credibility, a wondrous approach for a so-called journalist.

Particularly astonishing is the continuing shockjock assertion that human-induced C02 is only 0.001% of the total. That figure is probably arrived at because charlatans count all the C02 in the history of the world and calculate human emissions as a percentage of that. However if you take CURRENT figures, it's more like 30%, as outlined in my posts linked above and evidenced several ways in the Mediawatch episode, eg this from Professor Matthew England:

... Atmospheric CO2 is now around 390ppm up from 280ppm pre-industrial -- and humans have emitted more than enough to be responsible for all of this rise and more (I say this as [fortunately!] the oceans and terrestrial biosphere have absorbed just over 1/2 our emissions to date). So 110ppm rise due to us out of 390ppm there today, or approx. 28% of today's atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

If Alan Jones and the like had the any integrity they would give people like this a run. Unfortunately their audience listens, believes, and the lie is spreading to the point where it will topple governments trying to address the reality.

facebooking

2011-05-03T10:50:00.001+10:00

OK, social networking experiment -- I'm trying to link the blog to my facebook page, on which I've just posted some pix and text about the launch last night of Mandy Sayer's new book Love in the years of lunacy. So here's another pic, to my eyes the most beautiful girl in the room (she's from Katoomba and her girlfriend is a hot drummer, forgot their names sorry!)

Let's see if I can get this up on facebook.

You find it ugly?

2011-05-02T12:25:00.000+10:00

Every time it rains in Kings Cross I am reminded of the first stanza of Kenneth Slessor's poem William Street.

So here is the poem, and my pix taken in William Street during last week's downpour as I ventured out to get some nice Italian wine.

William Street

The red globe of light, the liquor green,
the pulsing arrows and the running fire
spilt on the stones, go deeper than a stream;
You find this ugly, I find it lovely

Ghosts' trousers, like the dangle of hung men,
in pawn-shop windows, bumping knee by knee,
but none inside to suffer or condemn;
You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish
and puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,
of grease that blesses onions with a hiss;
You find it ugly, I find it lovely.

The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze
(death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)
Ranging the pavements of their pasturage;
You Find this ugly, I find it lovely

This shot shows the 'running fire'. It was PISSING down!

How prohibition screws the environment, too

2011-05-02T12:17:00.000+10:00

A new report from the US claims that modern cannabis cultivation, which largely happens indoors under lights so people can hide it from police and dobbing or thieving neighbours, uses a frightening amount of energy creating massive greenhouse pollution.

It seems that in the US 415,000 indoor plants were eradicated but this has not affected supply. It's the nation's largest crop by value -- yes, worth more than corn, wheat or canola. Each joint produces the equivalent energy of running a 100-watt light globe for an hour. Each kilo equates to driving a car across the country five times; Each 4-plant module is like running 30 refrigerators; and nationwide cultivation equates to the energy consumption of 2 million average homes.

If it was legal and commercially grown this energy bill could be reduced by 75%.

An enterprising designer has wrapped it all up in a nice green graphic at http://www.lumininteractive.com/

How Mexican cocaine supports Australian organised crime

2011-04-19T15:47:00.002+10:00

A new report from the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) documents both the immense size of the international cocaine market and the way the immense profits from it made possible because of prohibition support organised crime.

Of course the report does not seem to admit that prohibition is a self-defeating failure but the following quote from the SMH speaks volumes [my bolding]:

"We are dealing with an ever-evolving transnational phenomenon of immense size - and a recognised national security threat,'' [ACC chief] Mr Lawler says in his speech.

The report outlines a series of what it deems are the most significant criminal risks to Australia, noting that organised crime costs Australia between 1 and 2 per cent of GDP, or about $15 billion, annually.

''Organised crime reaches into many sectors - sometimes almost as a direct competitor and, increasingly, intermingled with legitimate businesses,'' Mr Lawler will say.

Drugs continue to be the most profitable black market and the principal source of profit for organised crime.

''Australians are among the world's highest per capita consumers of illicit stimulants, and drug prices in Australia far exceed prices overseas, making domestic drug production and importation highly profitable,'' the report states.

More drug busts but Sydney city getting safer

2011-04-19T13:10:00.002+10:00

A story in today's SMH curiously contradicts various themes of moral panic and popular myth that dominate other areas of the media.

It reports a steep rise in victimless prostitution and drug 'crimes' - ie people being caught with cocaine, cannabis or amphetamines - but a reduction in crimes against person and property like assault, robbery or murder.

The City of Sydney along with parts of the north shore are the safest areas of Sydney. This curiously contradicts rhetoric about 'out of control alcohol-fuelled violence' that fills pages of media and the emails of serial complainers to Council.

The increase in 'drug crime' contradicts law and order rhetoric that the War against Drugs is working.

A passage from the story follows:

But the number of recorded cases of dealing in amphetamines rose more than 63 per cent, while possession of the illegal stimulants was up almost 55 per cent.

Cocaine possession was also up 23.3 per cent and trafficking in cannabis rose more than 33 per cent.

Prostitution offences also rose from 176 recorded incidences in 2009 to 275 the following year.

Across the state, motor vehicle theft fell 9.3 per cent, malicious damage was down about 10 per cent and stealing from a person also dropped more than 10 per cent.

The City of Sydney and Ku-ring-gai were the safest places to be, according to the bureau report released this morning. Sydney recorded fewer incidences of six of the 17 major offences and in the Ku-ring-gai council area the numbers fell in five of those categories.

But violent crime in two council areas – Ashfield and Cobar – rose almost 40 per cent and 50 per cent respectively over the two years.

The more Kings Cross changes the more it stays the same

2011-04-11T19:16:00.002+10:00

I shot this from the balcony of the re-opened Kings Cross Hotel, now enjoying
the fruits of an inside renovation that does the outside justice.
Somehow the elements of this picture seem to sum up
certain eternal themes of The Cross!

Documenting more official bullshit about drugs

2011-03-10T09:41:00.000+11:00

Another two snippets showing how deeply research into cannabis etc is twisted: US organisation MAPS has spent ten years challenging the Feds' monopoly on growing cannabis. The Feds have one licensed farm which sells pot to researchers. But, according to MAPS, they sell it only to people researching the potential harms of the weed. As I have pointed out before, anything researched this way would paint a bad picture (eg cars, football, rock fishing), so it's not science, it's junk science.

Our own federally funded National Cannabis Prevention and Research Centre (NCPIC) is on the same mission as the US feds and has the same problem.

MAPS researches the medical uses of currently illicit drugs (which might actually benefit people!), so they can't get any of the Federal pot and want to legally grow their own, hence their ten-year court battle.

That info is in their bulletin #6 on the link. But scroll up to #4 and there's a very interesting story "New Harvard Study Shows No Link Between Ecstasy and Cognitive Damage". Strangely that one has not seen the light of day in the major media, which continue to become less and less relevant to anyone interested in the real world.

Christchurch shakes

2011-03-04T12:52:00.000+11:00

This amazing photo of Christchurch during the recent earthquake is doing the rounds on the internet. (I wish people would credit the photographer.) The shot reminds me of a Turner painting. You have to feel anguish for the people caught in such a huge event. You can see there is nowhere to turn. And apparently not a breath of wind, as if the earth is holding its breath. The upward travel of the peaks of dust show the power of the ground waves pushing it.

Junk Science rules the world

2011-03-04T12:46:00.001+11:00

This blog themes on junk science which all too frequently underpins prohibitionist drug policies but the Bad Science site of Ben Goldacre, Guardian journalist, shows that the rot is much more widespread.

In short, it seems much of our society and many common beliefs are based on bullshit.

Goldacre did a roundup of the bullshit he detected in 2010 titled 'The year in nonsense' and it's frightening.

What the bullshitters seems to know is the exact point beyond which the average person will cease enquiring into the truth of a matter, so we see untrammelled nonsense being spread by credulous, lazy media while the swift rebuttals, often on blogs, go almost unnoticed except by enthusiasts.

It's all helped along by the deep irrationality of the human mind. It seems that if we learn something that refutes a prejudice it only deepens the prejudice; that if a crime has multiple victims we think it's less serious; and that what women musicians wear affects listeners' assessments of their skill.

One scam I knew about but never quantified is the tabloid journalist's technique of correcting a rubbish story with some essential information in the 19th paragraph. Most readers, it seems, lose interest at about para 8 or 9 so the outright lie in the headline is accepted.

BTW for designers and layout freaks, there is some good info in that last link about how people read a page, including the fascinating info that when perusing a full length photo of a male, men's eyes will go to the penis area more often than women's. I wonder if they controlled for gayness in their sample? But I'm too time-poor to track down the original paper, so I'll just believe it!

This is paragraph 8 already, so I'll stop.

Sending the wrong message

2011-03-01T12:37:00.002+11:00

I've blogged about this before in, but NCPIC's new four-year funding and their continuing record of very questionable research projects prompts me to reproduce the text of a letter of mine published in The Age.

State governments are leaping onto the bandwagon to drug-test drivers and penalise them at least as heavily as drink-drivers, eagerly supported by National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC).

Here is my letter:

Sending the wrong message
BETH Wilson muddies the waters when she writes: ''These substances are highly likely to cause accidents and deaths. The likelihood of impairment because of drugs may be three times that of alcohol.''

A recent evidence review into cannabis and driving by the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre concluded in part: ''There are numerous methodological limitations in the studies reviewed that may account for the great variations and inconsistencies in their findings, which detracts from the likelihood of a clear synthesis of results.''

Population studies consistently show a much smaller rate of cannabis-related accidents than for alcohol. Nevertheless, the centre and, it seems, state governments are forging ahead as if the risk for cannabis is the same as for alcohol. This risks both the misallocation of resources and miscarriage of justice if the penalties and enforcement are made equivalent.

Pleas of ''sending the right message'' are hollow when the message is inaccurate.

MICHAEL GORMLY, Woolloomooloo

My phrase 'misallocation of resources' means this: The more time police spend on the drug aspect of driving, the less time they have to fight drink-driving which is a significantly greater threat to you and me. So NCPIC's inaccurate slogan "Smoke and drive and you're as good as drunk" may actually promote greater harm.

The letter following mine in The Age casts more doubt on the drug driving panic:

Test for driving skills not drugs
IT IS annoying to see such broad statements from a health professional as: ''These substances are highly likely to cause accidents and deaths.'' What substances is she talking about? Are all illegal drugs bad for driving and all legal drugs OK? It is such a simplistic approach to ban all illegal drugs, but amphetamines can cause people to be more alert; they can be performance enhancing.

Studies of marijuana show drivers are more cautious after smoking and take fewer risks. What is needed is some fresh thinking away from the paranoia towards drugs. Forget about the drugs and test drivers for co-ordination and driving skill.

TIM ANDERSON, Sunshine

Having said all that, I am not recommending that people should drive under the influence of drugs, especially people who are inexperienced at either activity. I remember in the days when Mandrax was legal one acquaintance who frequently drove while under the influence and regularly pranged her car, a beautiful vintage Valiant. However she always travelled so slowly that no serious damage was done and no-one injured!

Alcohol is probably the most dangerous drug as it releases inhibitions so people take more risks on the road, and the law should therefore be tougher on drink driving than drug driving.

But that would 'send the wrong message', no?

States in bed with criminals who profit from prohibition

2011-03-01T12:07:00.000+11:00

While it is well known that prohibition creates the turf on which organised crime operates, globalisation and new technology are enabling a frightening illegal network in which some governments ARE the criminals as detailed in a new paper by the Global Commission on Drug Policies.

Senior government officials in countries such as Russia, Albania, South Africa and Venezuela, often favourites of the President or occupying senior policing roles, have been outed as kingpins in international crime, controlling international networks smuggling drugs, weapons, dirty money and people. Drugs are probably the most lucrative of these markets.

The rule of law, human rights and democracy itself are under serious threat while relatively honest governments fight a losing battle against these global crime organisations. Such governments are hamstrung because they operate mostly within national boundaries while their opponents operate across borders.

Effective international co-operation is not possible when dealing with other governments who ARE the criminals. Meanwhile, prohibitionist policing within borders creates the very potential for the international criminals to profit.

The paper argues that most drug control policies are out of date and focused on the wrong people - still targeting individual users and dealers while an international cartel of criminals and politicians burgeons across the planet.

This is a must-read paper, and any prohibitionists need to have a good hard think about how much harm their beliefs are causing. It makes the harms of drugs pale into insignificance.

"I drank the bong water"

2011-02-25T08:49:00.001+11:00

George Clooney, "World's sexiest man" (?) focuses
on Barak Obama

You've gotta laugh. Actor George Clooney's advice to aspiring political candidates is a sign of the times.
Far from Bill Clinton's coy "I didn't inhale", left-leaning George explains in the SMH why he wouldn't run for office himself:

"I f**ked too many chicks and did too many drugs, and that's the truth," said Clooney, who has twice been declared People magazine's sexiest man alive.
Clooney, 49, said a smart political campaigner would "start from the beginning by saying, 'I did it all. I drank the bong water. Now let's talk about issues' That's gonna be my campaign slogan: 'I drank the bong water.'?"

It's a far cry from the po-faced admonitions of prohibitionists who beat up the dangers of cannabis to foment moral panic. Clooney is the polar opposite of the deadhead psychotic cannabis addict usually portrayed by these temperance campaigners.

Research we can believe in?

2011-02-21T12:35:00.000+11:00

Prohibitionists governments like those of Australia and the USA pour a lot of money into research on cannabis, but only if the research is trying to establish harms.

Despite this, the relatively harmless nature of the drug means there are few if any damning results. Even the current focus on trying to prove cannabis causes psychosis is producing only tenuous links, even as the media seem to accept any old research as gospel.

An article by cannabis law reformer Paul Armentano outlines the Obama Government's betrayal of its own commitment to evidence-based policy - "Change we can believe in". The American Medical Association also called for more research into medical cannabis, raising hopes among reformers.

Armentano writes:

Those hopes were snuffed, however, when a representative from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the agency that oversees 85 percent of the world's research on controlled substances, reaffirmed its longstanding "no medi-pot" policy to The New York Times. "As the National Institute on Drug Abuse, our focus is primarily on the negative consequences of marijuana use," a spokesperson told the paper in 2010. " We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana."

In other words, they only look for harms. Anything researched in this way would create a bad picture, so it is hardly scientifically balanced. Other agencies such as Australia's National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC) follow a similar policy, spending large amounts of scarce national health funding on their unbalanced research and subsequent anti-cannabis propaganda. NCPIC last year was funded for a further four years.

Meanwhile many people wait years for elective surgery and the shortage of nurses means more are working long or double shifts, while post-operative patients who in former times would have been cared for in hospital for a few days are filled with painkillers and immediately sent home. And try seeing a doctor on a Sunday in Sydney city. My advice is, stay healthy!

Prohibition surely screws up our national priorities.

No wonder the police love prohibition - they share the assets with criminals

2011-02-16T11:19:00.001+11:00

A story in today's Sydney Morning Herald entitled 'The untouchables: crime fighters let gangsters take the money and run' exposes the dirty underside of prohibition.

In countries which encourage confiscation of assets suspected of having been illegally earned, the thirst for the assets tends to overshadow justice. It seems The NSW Crime Commission is no exception.

The story begins:

THE state's most secretive law enforcement agency has been sharing the proceeds of crime with organised crime figures, cutting deals that allow them to walk away with millions of dollars.

As one of the main earners for organised crime is prohibited drugs, this pattern is closely linked to prohibition. Another salient quote:

But critics say such deals do not make a dent in the amount of drugs sold in Sydney and, as they are struck in private, do little to deter crime.

Increasingly, prohibition is being exposed as an ineffective racket feeding bloated law enforcement interests.

When the Coalition wins power in March, beware their privatisation creed: their ultra-conservative christian prohibitionist faction, led by MLC David Clarke, will no doubt push for tougher prohibition while their money men are likely to support privatised prisons, no doubt with contracts that guarantee profits profits -- read 'guaranteed human input' -- for the lucky financiers.

It's an ugly scenario.

Ludicrous priorities: As the law collapses, the War on Drugs continues

2011-02-14T12:20:00.000+11:00

A nice article in The Guardian illustrates in a nutshell the stupidity of the War on Drugs and the unthinking mindset of those who believe in it.

Camden, New Jersey has a failing administration. It's a deprived, crime-ridden neighbourhood that is so broke is has just laid off nearly half its police force and raised taxes by 23%, according to The Guardian.

While readers of this blog will understand how drug prohibition both creates crime and doesn't work, the local police don't understand this and they name fighting drugs as one of the top priorities for the remains of their police force.

We are coming up to the 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs. While the US has spent over a trillion dollars on this war, drugs are just as plentiful, much more varied and relatively cheaper than they were back in the 1970s. over half the arrests over that time have been for cannabis, a drug that has never caused a single death.

While an obscenely rich country might be able to gloss over this colossal waste of money, times are tougher now and enclaves like Camden show just how wasteful, profligate and ineffective prohibition is. It's time for a new way of thinking, but that seems to be one of the most difficult challenges for the human mind.

Greens warn of new era of terror for NSW

2011-02-10T14:11:00.001+11:00

According to the NSW Greens, "There’s a real chance that after the March election, a conservative coalition of the Liberals, the Nationals, the Shooters and Fishers Party, Family First and Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats could control the NSW parliament."

Apart from anything else, this would give far-right Christian extremists like Liberal powerbroker David Clarke a big say in the NSW drug laws. Picture an intolerant police-like state with people in many minority cultures being persecuted and jailed under the banner of 'drug prevention'. They are all 'sinners', after all.

The Greens have produced a pretty good 1m:33sec zombie-flick about the prospects, obviously targeting the youth audience and hoping it will go viral. Check it out!

Such a conservative coalition would want to cut back or kill harm minimisation programs that are proved to work. They would like to close down the Kings Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre and they hate Methadone replacement programs for addicts. Already-scarce Rehab places would likely dry up and be replaced by compulsory and coercive cold-turkey style abstinence programs (which DON'T work) and ever-expanding jails (privately run for profit, of course).

Around the world now there is a trend for conservative governments to gain power on such issues as immigration and when they get power they crack down on 'illicit' drugs. That's why the Dutch coffee shops are being closed or regulated into insolvency. It would be a real backward step if it happened here.

New 'potaganda' ignites the naysayers

2011-02-10T09:25:00.005+11:00

Among my circles it's said that if Miranda Devine opposes you, you must be on a good track. Trouble is, she writes superficially plausible 'sound-bites' very well, so her latest attack on drug law reform will convince some people who don't really know the facts.

Again Ms Devine is fuelled by a report from the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC), a body generously funded by our cash-strapped health department to demonise cannabis under the guise of science.

Their work to date has been, on the whole, almost laughable, one study attempting to link cannabis and violence through a dodgy analysis of patients at St Vincents Hospital Emergency. Never mind that one doctor who worked there said he had never once seen a patient present because of cannabis problems.

Another recent NCPIC report attempted to show that pot causes respiratory problems. As with most of their reports, they don't present new findings, just analyse old findings in a different way and package them up as fodder for the likes of Miranda Devine and to please their funding body.

In this case they referenced two studies by UCLA Medical professor Donald Tashkin which analysed the components of cannabis smoke and found it had lots of nasties in it, then extrapolated that cannabis might be more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke. The media of course jumped on these with glee and ran shock-horror headlines world-wide.

Tashkin's findings so suited the US government that they funded a much larger population study which unfortunately for them showed that long-term pot smokers had LESS cancer than the control group. OOPs.

But NCPIC appear to have ignored this study in their review, listing only the two earlier Tashkin studies.

Similarly, it would not be difficult to collect a bunch of studies that link pot and schizophrenia, especially if you ignore the really big problem for prohibitionists as explained in a much more balanced report of the NCPIC study in Time magazine:

Still, none of the data linking marijuana use and psychosis can prove causality or sufficiently explain why rates of schizophrenia have remained stable or even declined since the 1950s, while marijuana use has increased exponentially. Unlike rates of cigarette smoking and lung cancer, which rise in tandem, marijuana smoking rates in the population do not correlate with higher rates of schizophrenia.

But the real fallacy in Miranda Devine's argument is that, even if pot does cause mental illness, prohibition only worsens the problem.

This is because under prohibition, pot is easier to get than alcohol for under-age kids (those most at-risk) as a small-time peer-to-peer dealer network exists in every town and high school, so distribution becomes self-funding or even profitable. The bad elements combine it with gang culture to really set up potential criminal lifestyles.

Legalised regulation would starve these networks of reliable supply and many kids would have to either get older people to buy for them (and this could be the target of severe penalties and credible education campaigns) or grow their own (at least gardening would be healthier than bashing the private school kids and pinching their mobiles to fund a purchase, as happens now).

I wonder how Ms Devine would react if they brought back prohibition of alcohol along with all the crime, corruption and death that caused. Prohibition doesn't work, no matter how much quasi-scientific spin you produce to support it.

And it's interesting that the most enthusiastic media backers of NCPIC's work also support the Iraq war and deny climate change. Nice company you keep, NCPIC. The director, Professor Jan Copeland, must be proud of herself.

PS: This study of 600,000 patients in the UK showed that psychosis rates were not increasing, whereas if the cannabis/psychosis link was as real as some claim, a 29 percent increase would have been expected. Note, this again is a population study, dealing with real people.

PPS: Informed commentary on Crickey supports the line I take above, pointing out that the NCPIC study excluded 80% of available data for various technical reasons. One Michael R James writes:

But even if we give the benefit of the doubt to such studies or the hypothesis, I doubt anyone seriously believes the "solution" is more draconian prohibition. And good luck on counseling kids on preventive measures for a disease which less than 1% of them will suffer. If anything these studies suggest that decriminalization and regulation of the product (THC levels etc) would be the way to go. But then commonsense never applies.

Full text of his comment below:

"Cannabis and schizophrenia:

"Michael R. James writes: Re. "Why pot really is making kids sick: the new scientific line" (yesterday, item 9). The article by Sophie Cousins was too emphatic in accepting the conclusion from the newly published study. Schizophrenia (SZ) is a terrible disease particularly as it afflicts adolescents and young adults but these strenuous attempts to place blame on a single environmental factor seems misguided.

"Readers should understand that this paper has not generated new primary data but is instead a meta-study of previously published data. A meta-study attempts to extract analyses of greater statistical significance from as many published studies as can be found to meet specified eligibility criteria. Meta-studies are used when there is confusion or conflicting conclusions from individual studies, usually over a long period of time. They are often employed, or resorted to, when statistical power of individual studies is inadequate. Thus, by definition the hypotheses being tested are not easy to prove and the phenomena being examined are complex and poorly understood. Disease of mental health fit this bill to an extreme.

"Clearly any attempt to increase power by pooling data from different studies is itself susceptible to problems, perhaps none more so than in mental health research. The meta-study must attempt to establish rules that pool appropriate data and exclude incompatible data. In this case, of 443 relevant published papers examined 354 of them were excluded from the meta-study. So 80% of papers were excluded for the various reasons given by Large et al. For example only those were retained that reported time of onset of psychosis rather than time of first treatment. These exclusions were an attempt to remove potential confounding issues that may have previously hidden significant associations. But excluding 80% of data raises the risk of ascertainment bias or publication bias, notwithstanding the authors’ statement “There was no statistical evidence of publication bias.” Statisticians try to take care of such nuisances but this scientist hardly ever believes their claims.

"Personally I am not going to be persuaded by studies like this. There are too many other possibilities, for example an ascertainment bias caused by susceptible teens being over-represented in the drug user group (or starting earlier, or smoking more). There are contrary studies suggesting that cannabis use may actually ameliorate psychosocial effects in SZ. I also find the effect described (cannabis use advances disease onset by 2.7 y) suspiciously high especially since it comes from all users, not, say, high users. The authors reported that heavy use caused a greater effect but was not statistically significantly separable from light users; there is almost the hint in the paper that single use may be enough!

"More worrying is how enthusiastically politicians and some in the medical profession will grasp onto conclusions like this. Indeed, there is the money to perform these kinds of studies because cannabis is the third most commonly used addictive drug, not because it is the third most harm inducing drug. (That honour will lie with drugs like Prozac or Stilnox and other prescribed behaviour-modifying drugs our society is overdosing itself on.) Like the hysteria over ecstasy (on average one death per year compared to 12,000 alcohol-related deaths (2006 data, all ages) or log orders lower than youth alcohol consumption or dozens of other things kids use or do) the harm from cannabis is self-evidently not easy to find or we wouldn’t need to spend so much research money searching for it.

"And as a Crikey commenter noted "about 20 people under 25 experience early onset of schizophrenia and have smoked marijuana at least once" are not compelling numbers. Total abstinence is not going to make much difference to SZ prevalence—maybe none if, as is likely, all such people will still suffer SZ a few years later -- or have much public health impact at all really.

"But even if we give the benefit of the doubt to such studies or the hypothesis, I doubt anyone seriously believes the "solution" is more draconian prohibition. And good luck on counseling kids on preventive measures for a disease which less than 1% of them will suffer. If anything these studies suggest that decriminalization and regulation of the product (THC levels etc) would be the way to go. But then commonsense never applies."

Matthew Chesher ecstasy bust spreads enlightenment

2011-02-03T13:55:00.001+11:00

Happy new year, dear reader. I'm back from a research trip/holiday into the wilds of regional Australia. What can I say about it? For one thing it's not so damn humid as Sydney, he said, dripping with sweat even with the fan on full.

While I was away education minister Verity Firth's husband, Matthew Chesher, was arrested for allegedly buying one tablet of 'ecstasy'. What he actually bought we may never know because prohibition means drug supply is unregulated and provided, by definition, by criminals.

The stupidity of this arrest and the predictable outcry of horror from hypocritical politicians and journalists made me roll my eyes. Don't forget that true ecstasy (MDMA) carries less risk than peanuts according to New Scientist.

At least this farce, and waste of public money, has spawned a number of enlightened articles, notably this one by Alex Wodak, in which he describes how this incident would have been a complete non-event in countries like Portugal where drug use is treated as a personal health matter and remedial intervention occurs only when the user is dysfunctional.

But one popular blogger, Jack Marx, really nailed it with an acerbic piece that neatly compares the damage and mayhem caused by this arrest with the alternative had it not occurred -- that a bloke probably would have had a great evening.

Jury stages revolt in marihuana case

2010-12-22T15:37:00.000+11:00

So many potential jurors in a cannabis case in Missoula County Idaho refused to serve that the trial failed, according to reports.

A man was charged with possessing about 2 grams after neighbours dobbed him in for 'dealing'.

"District Judge Dusty Deschamps took a quick poll as to who might agree. Of the 27 potential jurors before him, maybe five raised their hands. A couple of others had already been excused because of their philosophical objections," says The Missoulian newspaper.

"Is it fair, Deschamps wondered, in such cases to insist upon impaneling a jury of “hardliners” who object to all drug use, including marijuana?

“I think that poses a real challenge in proceeding,” he said. “Are we really seating a jury of their peers if we just leave people on who are militant on the subject?”

Interesting times indeed. Just how long can democracies continue to prosecute something that so much of the population does not agree is a crime?

It would be wonderful to see such healthy scofflaw attitudes burgeoning in Australia. Don't hold your breath.

The charged man was separately convicted on a stealing-related charge. I'm not saying he was a saint. The point is, prohibition is absurd and more people are realising it.

Letter of the week: Clover Moore = Alan Jones?

2010-12-15T10:28:00.001+11:00

The widening cultural gap between regulators and the rest of us was beautifully expressed in a Sydney Morning Herald letter today. The sad thing is, the Law and Order class will never understand.

The zombie-like security process at the Jack Johnson concert occurs often enough, but rarely on this delicious scale. That is, the middle-aged leisure classes who bray for ''law and order'' and curbs on those outside their own lifestyle are finally subjected to their own rules. To sinfully paraphrase William Makepeace Thackeray: it is one thing to hoot in agreement with Alan Jones and Clover Moore from a snug armchair at home. It is another to experience the reality first-hand.

William Cattell Sydney

What's most interesting is the comparison of Clover Moore and Alan Jones, who are usually cast as mortal enemies. But they share this in common: Raising a moral panic and then demanding heavy-handed regulation to solve the 'problem'.

Yesterday the state government revoked Clover's Late Night Trading Development Control Plan, a surprise move that has Clover spitting chips, accusing the government of caving in to the AHA and the alcohol industry. While this may be true, I'm cheering because it's a great outcome for youth culture, youth employment and my right to live in a global city with a 24-hour entertainment precinct.

And after Clover used her casting vote "with great pleasure" to order the demolition of the caretaker's cottage and ending Rory Miles' hopes of continuing to run the adjacent Rushcutters Bay Tennis courts, I am truly over Clover. Rarely have I seen such a ruthless trampling of clear community desires.

The action casts Clover as an old, out-of-touch dictator rather than the resident-friendly progressive pollie she likes to portray. She has destroyed a community for the sake of her old-maidish Tidy Towns obsession. As one older man said from the gallery at the Council meeting after her vote: "Shame, Clover - you're a disgrace to Australia".

Defining addiction

2010-12-09T14:23:00.001+11:00

The term 'cannabis addiction' is now bandied about as if it is an established fact. It seems that the addiction industry has redefined the term to suit, as discussed in a Time article.

Having known people who used many types of drugs, I always agreed that cannabis could be psychologically addictive -- but then, so can golf, good chardonnay or even blogging.

Compared to the "shaking, puking heroin junkie who can't quit because the withdrawal sickness is impossible to bear", giving up cannabis is a breeze as far as I have observed -- people just do it naturally when their life changes or they reach a certain age (As I have previously described in 'Confessions of a cannabis addict').

But the addiction industry argues that mental addiction is harder to break than the physical, and it is well known that junkies or tobacco smokers who give up find it difficult to fill the social vacuum left in their lives.

So if both kinds of addiction are simply addiction, and therefore treated similarly under the law or in medicine, isn't someone having a lend of themselves? Is weaning a serious injecting drug user off their habit the same as advising a newly pregnant woman to stop smoking pot while they are pregnant, or a final year student to give up while studying for their final exam?

As the Time article says, you can die from alcohol withdrawal but not from cannabis withdrawal. The seriousness of an addiction must be considered in relation to the harm caused. One woman became addicted to carrots, for instance.

And given that cannabis is the least harmful of drugs, legal or not, (notwithstanding the moral panic generated by the anti-cannabis industry), all this po-faced concern about cannabis addiction needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

But the biggest injustice is that nicotine addicts are treated as having a health problem and help is provided to wean them, which along with other measures results in steadily declining rates of use. But cannabis 'addicts' are punished by law. Why? Who would tolerate a government that punished smokers, drinkers (or golfers) with fines and jail? Interesting.

Top cop living in the dark ages

2010-12-02T12:06:00.001+11:00

It seems Victorian Deputy Police Commissioner Sir Ken Jones was misquoted in the press and did NOT advocate drug law reform as per a previous post.

It seems, rather, that this university-educated cop is a died-in-the-wool prohibitionist willing to make entirely unsupported statements about law and drugs that do not stand up to even the most cursory analysis.

Blogger Terry Wright nailed it in his Heroin Diaries, quoting Sir Ken who said:

I think you have to look at it (drug courts), case by case because people who are absolutely addicted beyond help, they should and will be punished but they also need treatment and help as well.
-- Deputy Police Commissioner Sir Ken Jones

Terry comments:

This is breathtaking. “… people who are absolutely addicted beyond help, they should and will be punished …”. Is Sir Ken really suggesting that addiction itself is a crime and should be punished? It’s this mindset, where addiction is not considered a medical condition but a law & order issue, that is so repugnant. I can’t help but feel repulsed at this attitude. Can anyone imagine someone in his position calling for alcoholics or cigarette smokers to be “punished” because they are addicted?

This type of obdurate behaviour as seen in many anti-drug zealots, will often involve mass exaggeration and a reliance on popular myths. Assumptions like all drug use will lead to addiction or the debunked ‘Gateway Theory’ should have ceased years ago but reliable research seems to have no place in the drug debate when Sir Ken and co. have their say.

It's worth having a read of Terry's detailed post in which he critiques this top cop's beliefs. The sad thing is, the new Liberal government in Victoria ran the usual law-and-order campaign and Commissioner Jones' erroneous views will probably be inflicted more harshly on the people of Victoria.

Strategies to end the War on Drugs

2010-12-02T11:01:00.001+11:00

An interesting post on the ACDA's Drugtalk email list broached questions about the best strategy to change public perceptions about drugs, and eventually to move beyond prohibition:

I think it’s time we admitted that using reasoning from facts is not a very good advocacy tool. So how should we advocate for better drug policy?

I put the question to a panel at a public screening of films organised by Harm Reduction Victoria. The best answer… said we need to focus on people’s compassion – illustrate the harm of current policies with stories to highlight the personal side.

That sounds like a good overarching strategy – what do people think?

I agree that the compassion approach has its place, but it will fall on many deaf ears while a number of false beliefs spread by prohibitionists remain current.

Uninformed people continue to believe that:

drug dealing = murder
there is no safe level of use of illicit drugs
today's cannabis is a different and more dangerous substance than the low potency weed baby boomers smoked in the 1970s
regulated legal supply would lead to an explosion of drug use
prohibition reduces drug use and reduces harms
drug users commit serious crime to a greater degree than straight people.

It's all very well inviting compassion but that is easily trumped by thoughts such as "but it's for their own good" or “they should have thought of that before they committed the crime".

I like the LEAP billboard that said something like "Drugs are harmful but the War on Drugs is worse"

While I disagree with the unqualified "drugs are harmful" statement on its own -- clearly many accepted legal activities are more risky -- it harnesses a popular mindset so the main message can penetrate.

As for getting a more truthful multipronged message out (including a realistic assessment of the harms of drugs, as per David Nutt's recent work), I know how to do it but it would be a fulltime job. Budget: around $150,000 a year, maybe $200,000, with the possibility of becoming self-funding over time.

"Using reasoning from facts" is the best policy, but the message has to be polished, sloganised and constantly promoted both directly and through the press -- a 'War on Spin".

I'm looking for another job at the moment. Any rich benefactors out there?

Nick Cowdery repeats call to end War on Drugs

2010-11-11T09:54:00.002+11:00

On the same day that Tony Abbott is in the news suggesting that judges be elected (rather than appointed) to enable ever-tougher sentencing, Director of Public prosecutions Nick Cowdery has criticised existing 'get tough on law and order' policies as being too responsive to the 'ranting' of the tabloid media," as reported in The Australian.

This divide of conservative and progressive thought occurs against an underlying trend of overall crime actually reducing according to crime statisticians.

Mr Cowdery said the current approach to illicit drugs was "ineffective, wasteful and inconsiderate of the human rights of those concerned".

"I would decriminalise drug possession and use and small-scale trafficking," he said.

Mr Cowdery believes the only area of drug use that should remain a crime should be large-scale commercial enterprises.

Do I look good in the battle at El Alamein?

2010-11-05T05:26:00.000+11:00

Mr Gormly ... "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Photo: Helen Nezdropa

Photographers generally hate being photographed -- you know how the picture never matches your self-image.

So it's weird seeing my picture in today's Sydney Morning Herald, in a story about our local campaign against the demolition and redevelopment of Fitzroy Gardens .

Forget the issues -- I look like a sad, sagging old bloke instead of the fit, statuesque Adonis I feel myself to be.

But the story's not bad for a brief summary. Council justifies their intention to remove over 5,000 convict bricks by saying they "appear to have been imported from elsewhere" -- like, perhaps Japan?

No, wherever they came from, they "appear" to have been in situ for 40 years now and, unlike a museum piece or a brass plaque are still functioning as they were intended to - forming useful walls, and totally in the public domain where people can appreciate them and touch part of the earliest white history in Australia.

The story mentions key points like the rally to be held tomorrow and the unsuitability of opening up the entertainment precinct to the residential precinct behind via a new visual boulevarde running past the police station.

Clover Moore's latest pro-redevelopment letter is quoted, saying the ''renewal will respect the park's extensive heritage since 1939."

How does demolishing something respect its heritage? Mind you, the sentence is a finely crafted piece of spin, using their current buzzword "renewal" when the Local Action Plan says "refresh"; and it refers to lost 1939 heritage and ignores the heritage-listed 1971 layer of significance, as per the whole Council justification for their radical plans.

[at 5.16am there were three people reading the SMH story. Hello to those anonymous kindred spirits - or are they Council spin-doctors girding themselves for another day battling the residents they are supposed to represent? Hullo! at 5.18 there were six people reading it! It's the new craze!]

But that story is only a tame introduction to local writer Delia Falconer's opinion piece in the same edition, headlined: "Council's plan to rip out heart of the Cross". [Mind you, only two people were reading it at 5.22am! -- but the day is still young).

More on that on the Save Fitzroy Gardens website!

Wave of support to save Fitzroy Gardens

2010-10-27T21:56:00.000+11:00

Beautiful Fitzroy Gardens - if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

The City's plan to demolish and redesign Fitzroy Gardens in Kings Cross, site of the El Alamein Fountain, is stirring a growing wave of opposition as locals realise the treasure in their midst. Meetings among all the local business and resident groups, a fast-growing petition and a rally to be held at the Gardens on Saturday 6 November are just some of the roadblocks being erected in front of Council's bulldozers.

Yours truly volunteered to make the website in co-operation with a network of locals and, even if I say so myself, when you see the facts and photos laid out you have to wonder what ignorance prompted Council to launch this project -- which has been on their books at least since 2003, although they are spinning that the community requested it in 2007.

The site is at http://www.savefitzroygardens.com/index.html (not all the pages are finished at the time of writing, but you'll get the idea.

Top cop advocates debate on drug law

2010-10-21T13:30:00.004+11:00

Deputy Commissioner Ken Jones
(pic: Herald-Sun)

Another senior police officer has 'broken ranks' with the normal police support of the War on Drugs with a call to educate the public about the on-costs and ineffectiveness of prohibition, and to have an informed debate.

Victoria's Deputy Commissioner Sir Ken Jones is one of the few to name the costs we bear in less obvious areas because of prohibition:

He said the public should be educated about the flow-on costs, from higher insurance premiums to delays in elective surgery as hospitals treated the fallout from drugs and crime...

It's refreshing to see such a thoughtful approach relieving the usual War on Drugs rhetoric.

His statement comes as NSW is shaping up to a probable Coalition government in March.

Leader Barry O'Farrell has today voted against the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, although he allowed a conscience vote and the Centre was endorsed by the Lower House.

But, interviewed about his party's pro-gambling deal with clubs on ABC 702 radio this week, he told Adam Spencer that "prohibition doesn't work".

I took heart from this, thinking "that will come back to bite you about drug prohibition".

But Mr Spencer then asked him the very question -- if prohibition doesn't work for gambling, what about legalising cannabis?

But Barry wasn't about to be caught out so easily and was ready with a stock answer -- that cannabis wasn't the same drug mums and dads might have known in the 1970s, and today's cannabis was far stronger and more dangerous.

Dedicated followers of this blog will know why this is a nonsense so I won't reiterate the argument. Suffice it to say that today's cannabis is still far safer than alcohol by any objective measure, so Barry should therefore prohibit alcohol... hang on, his policies are the opposite of that! I'm confused, but not as confused as Barry.

Who benefits from prohibition?

2010-10-12T10:29:00.001+11:00

It's only a month till California votes on Proposition 19, a Bill to legalize and tax cannabis. As the battle lines form, it's interesting to see who opposes the Bill and why. Many are scratching their heads at opposition from drug police, jail supervisors and... the alcohol industry who are, ironically, contributing to an anti-cannabis campaign called Public Safety First. As reported on Alternet, the financial self-interest of these bodies is obvious

Lining up in support of Prop 19 are dozens of (mostly) retired law enforcement figures, including former San Jose Police Chief Joe McNamara and former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, as well as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and the National Black Police Association; four California US congressmen; dozens of state and local elected officials; local ACLU chapters; the California NAACP; the California Libertarian Party, the California Green Party; the California Young Democrats and many local Democratic groups; the Republican Liberty Caucus; organized labor groups, including the SEIU of California, the Western States UFCW, the longshoremen, and various union locals; clergy, including the California Council of Churches IMPACT and the Interfaith Drug Policy Initiative; economist Dr. Jeffrey Miron; and a number of physicians, including former US Surgeon General Joyce Elders. California's burgeoning professional cannabis community has moved Prop 19 forward, with supporters including the Harborside Health Center, the Berkeley Patients Group, and the initiative's primary sponsor, Oaksterdam's Richard Lee.

On the other side are the usual suspects: The California Narcotics Officers' Association, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, the California Police Chiefs Association, the California Correctional Supervisors Organization, the California Peace Officers Association, the California District Attorney Association, and local police associations. They are joined by all federal drug czars past and present, past and present DEA administrators, both California US senators and most of the congressional delegation, most newspaper editorial boards, the California Chamber of Commerce, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the California Beer and Beverage Distributors (who chipped in $10,000 to Public Safety First, a political action committee created to oppose Prop 19), Californians for a Drug-Free Youth, DARE America, and other anti-drug organizations.

See Alternet for more

PS (14 Oct 2010) The Wall Street Journal chimes in on this point. A piece about 'The economics of drug violence' sums up the opposition to Proposition 19:

Some progress may be in the making on marijuana, and Mexicans will be watching the California ballot initiative that asks the electorate to approve the legalization of the ubiquitous weed. It is far from clear that Proposition 19, as it is known, will pass. The combination of conservatives who fear that legalization would transform us into a hash-happy heap of hippies, drug warriors who make a living off of the criminalization of pot smoking, and gangsters whose profits are tied up in prohibition could be enough to defeat it by a narrow margin.

Apart from painting this picture of prohibitionists as self-interested uglies with irrational fears, the article suggests that the War on Drugs 'creates' large, monopolistic and violent drug cartels because that's what it takes to get around military barriers to drug distribution.

'Shocking numbers' show success of Kings Cross

2010-10-05T17:10:00.000+11:00

6,000 people per hour in the Cross -
"Shocking evidence," says Clover

Did you know the WHOLE CAPACITY of Town Hall (2,000 people) goes through the Bayswater Rd intersection in Kings Cross EVERY 20 MINUTES on a big night? That’s 6,000 people between 1am and 2am, while there are 5,500 footfalls on Darlinghurst Road. It’s a “major event”, says Clover Moore.

She’s right. These thronging young crowds comprise the most educated, healthy, well dressed and gorgeous generation in human history. Most people see their weekly gathering as a great party, a movement, a celebration of the very wealth and freedom we fight wars for. Certainly the tens of thousands in the fun-filled crowds see it that way.

But our ageing Councillors see it as a “shocking problem” that has to be eliminated. Here we see two opposing mindsets across a generational divide, and mindsets are dangerous because they cause people to ignore facts or at least interpret them selectively.

The footfall figures probably come from Council’s new research which is intended to “progress the cumulative impact argument” in the words of Council’s CEO Monica Barone.

But facts can be a double-edged blade. The huge numbers are also proof that any violence is only a very small part of a very big scene. And given those numbers, Clover Moore’s alarmist figure of $3.2 million a year being spent by St Vincent’s Hospital dealing with alcohol related injuries doesn’t look so alarming. In times where billion is the new million, maybe that’s just the price society must pay to deal with its own damaged underbelly.

The knee-jerk response by Council and police to shut the scene down punishes the benign majority to target the thuggish few, ‘throwing the baby out with the Bayswater’.

[snip]

[rest at http://www.altmedia.net.au/my-generation%E2%80%99s-war-on-nightlife-puts-down-a-new-generation/25092]

Herald journalist gets all mixed up

2010-10-05T17:03:00.002+11:00

Vanda Carson has been writing in The Sydney Morning Herald about Kings Cross lately. Her story in Saturday's edition though, shows either terrible confusion or really bad sub-editing. It was a long weekend, after all.

In a story about Council’s War on Kings Cross, Vanda writes:

Residents are also mostly supportive of the plan, with the majority of Kings Cross and Oxford Street residents wanting fewer pubs or a cap on the number of liquor licences, according to a council survey.
The survey also showed 20 per cent of Oxford Street residents and 16 per cent of Kings Cross residents believed either the opening hours or the number of alcohol outlets should be restricted to curtail violence, noise, vomiting and public nuisance issues.

Excuse me, Vanda, how do figures of 16% and 20% justify the phrase "the majority of Kings Cross and Oxford Street residents wanting fewer pubs". They sound like a rather small minority to me, as I have been banging on about.

The only survey Vanda Carson could have been referring to* showed only 16 percent of residents wanted to "Restrict opening hours/alcohol outlets". That's far from a majority. Perhaps Vanda is a bit mathematically challenged and reads what she expects to believe.

Vanda also qualifies Council's recent series of losses in court by describing the victors with terms like "powerful hoteliers", as if Council's bottomless budget and corporate size does not match or exceed that of their opponents. The fact is, Council's evidence simply does not stack up, as I reported on at length in the current City News.

In a series of reports, I show from Hansard records (2 June 2010) how Clover Moore wants to shut everything down at midnight (Off to bed early, Sydney, says Clover);

And how Police and Council are ignoring other measures to improve amenity in Kings Cross (DIY Policing offer ignored).

All the above were tied up in a comment piece (My generation’s War on Nightlife puts down a new generation).

*P 32 (print) or P 38 (pdf pagination) of Late night trading - Community perceptions (June 2008, Urbis)

More on the Don Weathurburn and Wayne Hall opinion piece

2010-09-23T11:24:00.004+10:00

A friend defended by email one part of the piece by Don Weatherburn and Wayne Hall (first see post below), writing the following:

Friend: This, for example, I agree with although I question the way drug law enforcement is enforced and whether certain aspects of the law is workable:

Weathurburn & Hall: "It's a sad fact that many dependent drug users only seek treatment when the personal and financial cost of continued drug use gets too high. The financial cost is attributable in large part to prohibition.

"The personal cost includes trouble with police and the courts, which is one of the most commonly cited reasons for entering treatment.

"Coercing drug-dependent offenders into treatment is known to be effective in reducing drug use and drug-related crime.

"We don't have to choose between treatment and drug law enforcement. We can and should support both."

This is nothing more than Drug War rhetoric. The first sentence would more accurately read "It's a sad fact that VERY FEW dependent drug users seek treatment only when the personal and financial cost of continued drug use gets too high."

The statement projects the Drug War myth that illicit drugs users are typically dysfunctional addicts and that drug use is a scourge on society. The facts, however, do not support this characterisation.

1. They are talking about maybe 1.5% of drug users. Why should the other 98.5% be persecuted, searched and jailed?

2. Even granting what they say is true for the 1.5%, only a tiny fraction of those actually succeed in getting clean after rehab. They nearly all relapse many times before they stop, regardless of police persecution. "Seeking treatment" is only a beginning.

3. Interdiction does nothing about the social and personal problems most addicts have that drive them into addiction. Until these are solved, the problem is unlikely to go away.

4. If you subtract the harms of prohibition, addiction (while I wouldn't choose it) is not actually much of a problem, certainly not enough to justify jailing the number of people we do.

5. Jail is not much of a deterrent to these people. They can still get drugs in jail, they get a bed and three meals a day. They get to see their long-lost mates, and don't stay in for that long anyway.

6. There are not nearly enough rehab places for those who do want them. The MSIC has a contingency fund to pay some upfront costs for people who want to have a go, because there are rarely any free spots available.

7. Police action has little effect on hardcore users. That's why we consistently see around 200 injections per day in the MSIC in the midst of perhaps the highest concentration of sniffer dog activity in the state. The dogs mainly get recreational users carrying pot or pills.

I could go on.

More experts talk nonsense in the media

2010-09-22T15:59:00.003+10:00

Researchers Don Weatherburn and Wayne Hall have seriously damaged their professional credibility in an opinion piece in today's SMH.

They attempt to rebut several arguments for drug law reform but contradict themselves and rely on obvious fallacies.

The pair write:

Argument number one is that the war on drugs has failed because it's still easy to obtain illegal drugs. This is like arguing that the laws against drink driving have failed because thousands of people each year continue to drink and drive.

What rot. Since the War on Drugs was declared in 1971, illicit drug use has exploded in western countries. By contrast, the drink driving laws have greatly reduced that crime. The analogy also fails because drink driving is a danger to others but 99 percent of drug use, a victimless crime, is not.

Then Messrs Weatherburn and Hall say the real purpose of prohibition is not to make drugs unavailable but to “keeps prices high”. Considering the UNODC's intention in 1998 was to create a "Drug-free world" by 2008, this statement is nothing more than a spin on that failure. The main supporters of prohibition are the right-wing Christians behind Drug Free America and Drug Free Australia, who received a $600,000 grant from Tony Abbot during the Howard government. So Weatherburn and Hall's assertion might be a surprise to them.

Meanwhile higher prices in fact create the massive profit that keeps criminals in the game, often better resourced than the police. An obvious comparison is Al Capone’s bootleg empire during alcohol prohibition in the US. So prohibition in fact creates the illicit drug trade.

This high price strategy is central to America's Drug Enforcement Administration. Yet they have been powerless to stop 28,000 people being killed in Mexico as cartels supply the US market, chasing the super profits the DEA makes possible.

Weatherburn and Hall argue that legitimsed legal supply would drop prices, thus encouraging more people into the market. Huh? Repeal of prohibition virtually stopped the dangerous and violent bootlegging of Capone et al. Why would more people enter a market in which the profits had been wiped out? Or did they mean that dropping prices would encourage more use? This sounds intuitive but there is no convincing evidence of this. Since drug use exploded even as prohibition increased prices, it is evident that normal price elasticity does not apply to drugs the same way it might to flat-screen TVs.

Then they argue it would be immoral for the state to supply toxic drugs like methamphetamines.

First, the state would not have to provide supply – under a regulated system private enterprise could do it, as it does for pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol and tobacco.

Second, the piece also admits that “decriminalisation… has little effect on the prevalence of illicit drug use”. This is an admission that problem users will get their fix whether or not the state supplies them, so it’s a zero sum argument and a self-contradiction by the authors if they were arguing that lower prices would significantly increase use.

However under regulated supply, quality and potency would be ensured and documented, and the rest of us wouldn’t have to suffer the crimes committed by addicts to meet black market prices.

Please Mr Weatherburn and Mr Hall, stick to research, not fallacious assertions.

Charges dropped over Elizabeth Bay drug death

2010-09-15T12:03:00.001+10:00

On the same day news broke that the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings cross will be legitimised (see post below), the SMH also reports that Manslaughter charges have been dropped over the overdose death of a former Socceroo player in Elizabeth Bay last year:

Prosecutors have withdrawn a manslaughter charge against a woman linked to the drug-related death of former Socceroo Ian Gray.

Mr Gray, 46, was found dead in the lounge room of his apartment in Elizabeth Bay in Sydney's east on February 15.

A court has heard previously that he was found to have a "plethora" of drugs in his system, including heroin.

Sherryn Marie Davis, 22, pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing equipment for the administration of a prohibited drug.

It's just more tragic 'collateral damage' from the failed War on Drugs.

Mexico's drug war comes to Sydney as Injecting Centre legitimised

2010-09-15T11:39:00.001+10:00

It's official - the cocaine boom in Australia is being supplied by Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, says a report in today's SMH.

Well it had to be coming from somewhere, and the quality has been much better than in recent years, I am told, so this news is no real surprise.

Reports of rich punters paying up to $500 a gram for the best product explain how there is a profit to be made out of what must be a torturously difficult business -- getting tonnes of an illegal substance right across the planet, evading armies of police and customs to supply an illegal distribution network here.

This price, and the profits, are of course possible because prohibition makes it so. Despite this, there is again no mention of prohibition in the lengthy SMH report.

It even takes a swipe at users because they indirectly support this violent, murderous cartel, ignoring the fact that it's the government's prohibition regime that makes it so.

The ABC's AM program, however, ran the legalisation story front and centre, piggybacking it on the news that the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross was to be legitimised, quoting drug law reformers Tony Trimingham, Dr Alex Wodak and Wayside Chapel Pastor Graham Long.

Premier Kristina Keneally announced the MSIC move yesterday, ending a pattern in which legislation had to be passed regularly to maintain funding for the Centre. An incoming Coalition government could have finished the Centre by simply doing nothing, a possibility given fierce opposition from far right Christians in the Liberals led by MLC David Clarke. This faction advocates a moralistic zero tolerance enforcement approach, arguing that the Centre legitimises and perpetuates drug use.

But founding Director of the Centre Dr Ingrid van Beek commented on 702 radio that such moral objectors “would rather see people dead than addicted – really I’ve never gotten that.”

Wayside Chapel Pastor Graham Long then joined other drug law reformers on the national AM program calling for an end the the War on Drugs, which he said had failed.

“There is no shortage of drugs,” he said. “You can buy anything you want at any time. Give me a minute and I’ll be back with anything you like.”

Dr Alex Wodak from St Vincent’s hospital said the global drug trade was worth $320bn a year which gave drug dealers more access to resources than law enforcement.

Tony Trimingham made similar comments. Mr Trimingham is a founder of Family Drug Support, a group based on the families of people who, like Mr Trimingham’s son, died or suffered from drug addiction but realise that prohibition is a problem, not a solution

Even Kings Cross Police Superintendent Tony Crandell commented on radio that "Prohibition isn't working", in the context of a supportive message about the MSIC having improved amenity for local residents. It underlines the difficulty police face. Tasked with prosecution the War on Drugs, they must either put their heads in the sand and believe the prohibition myths or carry out their duties knowing they are nearly futile.

Incredible discovery: Australians like to drink!

2010-09-14T10:00:00.007+10:00

Salvation Army musos spread the message on
Kings Cross station, London - where the tubas were
shiny, the playing excellent and the
fractional platform numbers bemusing

The nanny state kicked into overdrive yesterday with blanket media coverage of a survey by those teetotalling prohibitionists, the Salvation Army.

Despite going into pubs across the country for decades collecting money in buckets, the Army needed to conduct a survey to establish that:

• 4 million Australians drink out of habit (hmmn, that would include me)

• 1.4 million of "them" drink to feel "normal". This seems a bit shocking until it's explained that "normal" can mean simply that people think it's normal to drink when they socialise, celebrate or commiserate. (Hmmn, that would again include me).

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Salvation Army state drug and alcohol services co-ordinator, Kathryn Wright, said the findings were alarming and showed a culture saturated by alcohol.

It seems that when a few drinks in a pub relaxes people enough to throw money into buckets, that isn't so alarming to the Sallies.

But worst of all, did you know that some people "drink to get drunk"! Get out of here, who would have thought? Next they'll tell me people eat to prevent hunger, or smoke pot to get stoned!

This sanctimonious and mindless non-news nevertheless got blanket coverage from the media who are not generally known for their temperance, happily feeding a general moral panic which is stridently calling for the night economy of cities to be shut down.

Now THAT's alarming!

It would be interested to know where the funding came from for the survey and PR campaign. The cash certainly didn't go to the poor and needy. Perhaps the Sallies should go back to charity and tuba-playing. Leave the propaganda out, please! Meanwhile I'm happy with my habits, I don't cause problems for others or myself with my drinking, and resent being preached to.

Detective murdured in War on Drugs

2010-09-09T10:37:00.006+10:00

Some of the armed and armoured police who swarmed
into Bankstown after the shooting
(photo Kate Gehragty, SMH)

As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

William Crews, a 26-year-old detective-in-training, was taken to Liverpool Hospital after he was shot in the head with a .22 calibre rifle. He was pronounced dead at 12.30am today.

Mr Crews, a detective senior constable originally from rural Australia, was involved in a raid on an apartment building on Cairds Avenue, Bankstown, about 9pm. Officers were executing a search warrant for drugs when a number of shots were fired.

A group of people inside the building opened fire and the officer was shot, sources said.

Five people were initially arrested, while police had to negotiate the surrender of another three suspects.

Detective Crews was a member of the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad. The incident sparked an inrush of police, from the Riot Squad to counter-terrorism specialists and helicopters. The whole street was cordoned off and residents were cowering in fear, several saying they did not feel safe in their own suburb.

The media is following a well-worn route here, reporting the tragedy in terms of heroic police, bad guys, guns and of course DRUGS.

But I will be very surprised if public figure mentions prohibition and the War on Drugs - the fundamental cause of all this pain, mayhem and massive spending of public money.

The sad fact is that this death, and others, are unnecessary. The victims are casualties in and martyrs to a War which causes far more harm than the drugs it fails to control.

No drugs were found in the raid. [On day two of this story no-one has been charged with murder and there is speculation the policeman was shot by one of his own colleagues in "friendly fire", making this a double tragedy. Two men named Nguyen and Geehad were charged with shooting offences.]

Saddest of all is that people who believe in prohibition, including most police, will come away from this with hardened attitudes towards drug criminals and will intuitively lean towards yet more prohibition.

But they should spend some time reading about an alternative police view, from US justice professionals who have formed LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. They are mostly police who have seen through the War on Drugs rhetoric, people whose frontline experience has taught them that prohibition causes more harm than the drugs they cannot control.

Meanwhile the next-to-top headline in the same newspaper talks about a cocaine epidemic in Sydney. But who will join the dots and conclude that this rise is evidence that prohibition is ineffective and shows the futility of yet another Drug War casualty?

Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione is claiming a 76% increase in cocaine arrests is because police are doing a 'good' job but Don Weatherburn from BOCSAR says hospital admissions for cocaine overdoses are also rising.

"It's simply disingenuous to say this is nothing more than an increase in police activity,'' he said.

By the end of the night, interestingly, no-one had been charged with murder.

And Opposition leader Farry O'Barrell had come out with a call for mandatory life sentences for people who murder police - a fantastically original political ploy that does zero to address the cause of the problem.

Cocaine: the new ecstasy

2010-09-05T14:27:00.000+10:00

Cocaine use in Sydney is booming, say some analysts in this weekend's SMH.

Punters are paying up to $500 a gram to be assured of a quality product. Some say the boom is caused by a shortage of ecstasy after disruptions to the international supply of precursor materials. This is a perfect example of the 'balloon effect' -- squeeze the balloon in one place and it swells in another, making prohibition a rather pointless exercise. This is especially so as restricting a relatively safe, non-addictive drug like ecstasy-MDMA pushes people to more dangerous drugs including cocaine which is addictive.

My contacts in clubland tell me the only pills they have been able to get are blue ones that keep people up all night and leave them with shaking hands the next day. They say these are definitely not MDMA although they are often sold as ecstasy, illustrating how prohibition itself makes drugs more dangerous.

But Police say the arrest boom is because they are searching lots of citizens

A NSW Police spokesman said increased cocaine and ecstasy arrests were a result of a higher number of general arrests.

"In the 12 months to June this year, police conducted 187,000 searches of individuals … which yielded 15,000 items, including illicit drugs,'' he said.

Assuming many people were caught with more than one 'item', that means well over 90% of searches produced nothing. This police pogrom is shameful evidence that we no longer live in the proverbial "free country", one in which you would have the right to walk down the street unmolested if you were not causing any problems. Ah, it's lovely living in a police state.

Ben Cousins prompts a good debate on prohibition

2010-09-01T14:20:00.003+10:00

A recent series of letters in The Sydney Morning Herald contains succinct rebuttals of prohibition. SMH readers tend to think a bit more deeply than the average Joe, so these letters offer little hope that the public in general is waking up. Still, I am sure the following conversation would not have appeared a few years ago. Things are moving on.

30 August 2010

Devine misses the point on Cousins drug story
I was appalled by Miranda Devine's article on the Ben Cousins' documentary and her opinion on drug addiction and those afflicted by the disease (''Seven's weak tackle on Cousins'', August 28-29).

However, the tragedy is that the most Australians would agree with her. Whatever your opinion of Ben Cousins, he has done a great thing in getting people talking about addiction.

Drugs are a serious problem in society. If people are genuinely concerned and fear for their children becoming another statistic, they should not listen to opinions of journalists but to those who have lived through the experience. None of the addiction specialists who shared their views on the documentary condemned Cousins, and these are the people we should be listening to.

I was in active addiction for nearly 25 years and was deeply offended by Devine's comments. Over the years I've had to deal with the death of many of my friends at the hands of drugs. I'm sure their parents would be comforted by Devine's wisdom that ''they were not afflicted by a disease. They were simply narcissists who took drugs because it makes them feel good.'' Until people understand that addiction is a mental health issue and drug abuse is symptomatic of underlying mental disorders we will continue to watch our children die. The children being sexually abused and neglected today are tomorrow's drug addicts.

Alison Fitzgibbon Broadmeadow

The replies start, 31 August 2010:

A choice disease
Alison Fitzgibbon (Letters, August 30) says ''addiction is a mental health issue and drug abuse is symptomatic of underlying mental disorders''. Really?

Then how does she explain that very first time? Is it mental health disorders that prompt a young trendy to pop a pill in a nightclub? I don't think so. As for drug addiction being a disease, with the possible exception of sexually transmitted diseases, I can't think of a single disease that gives a person complete choice over whether to be exposed to it.

Daniel Lewis Rushcutters Bay

Record hauls, spectacular busts, a multi-year and multi-agency investigation costing millions, and yet the estimate is that the supply of illegal drugs has dropped by merely 10-15 per cent (''Guns and poses: inside the drug lords' deadly world'', August 30). Yet more evidence, as if more were needed, that prohibition only enriches dealers, spawns violence and crime, and corrupts police.

The solution? Legalise it. All of it. Regulate it tightly and tax it heavily (like tobacco and alcohol). We have given prohibition a good long go. No one can say we haven't tried. It has totally, utterly, absolutely failed. Time to try something else.

Shannon Roy Cherrybrook

• Replies to replies, 1 September 2010:

Drugs include Christian crack

On ''recreational'' drugs, I take an either/or position: either prohibit all drugs, including alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, or legalise and control all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and cannabis. Nothing gives me the pip more than people pontificating about the evils of ''drug use'' while downing a schooner, smoking a ciggie or when hyped-up after their morning espresso.

My brother, a fundamentalist Christian, would no sooner drink, smoke, snort or shoot up than jump off a cliff. But at least he has the good grace, and sense of humour, to refer to coffee as ''Christian crack''. By his own admission, he can't get by without it. A drug is a drug is a drug.

Peter Cain Kingswood

Daniel Lewis (Letters, August 31) has no idea what he is talking about and should be thankful for it. Yes, that very first time can be the result of a mental health disorder. Not for everyone, but not everyone becomes addicted. If someone is clinically depressed and his friend says, ''These pills will make you feel amazing'', he has the choice to say no, but would he? I don't think so.

Anyone who is sure they would has never been depressed, or has received the proper treatment for it. Do not think that just because someone is a ''young trendy'' they do not have problems.

Those who support failed zero-tolerance policing, scrapping heroin injecting rooms, blocking harm minimisation legislation and sending the mentally ill to rot in jail cause far more damage than a pill at a festival.

Sam Fields Seven Hills

Daniel Lewis misses the point. The mental health issues lie not in the impulse to start, but the ability to stop.

Tim Austin Epping

Undercover cops betrayed by War on Drugs

2010-08-30T18:22:00.000+10:00

'Joe' before his undercover steroids, and after, pictured
with his former undercover colleague 'Jessie', now his wife

More lives destroyed by the War on Drugs – this time an undercover cop who worked Kings Cross in the 1990s. Relatively unsupervised by his employers, 'Joe' took on the persona of a Lebanese kingpin, tasked to expose corrupt police who were in on the drug profits.

Joe pumped himself up on illegal steroids increasing his weight from 75 to 145 kilos. Now he has been abandoned by the Police Force, his kidneys have failed, and his body is starting to reject a transplanted kidney.

His younger brother, unaware that Joe was in fact a cop, emulated his big-time-in-the-Cross- image and ended up in jail for armed robbery.

It's all explained in a book by Clive Small and Tom Gilling, Betrayed, and in a piece by Michael Duffy in today's SMH.

Michael Duffy is one of the more enlightened writers on drugs, because he usually highlights the futility of prohibition, writing:

Does [Joe] think locking up some drug dealers made a difference? "No. They say there's a war on drugs but there's no such thing. The police take 200 kilos off the street and say they've made a big dent, but the next day you can buy drugs for the same price. It makes no difference. For every importation they catch, five more get in."

There you have it from the mouth of one who knows.

Tighten up on alcohol, lighten up on other drugs - Guardian

2010-08-30T10:25:00.001+10:00

When heroin, the best painkiller, was legal
and abuse almost non-existent compared to today

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has run another penetrating analysis spotlighting the unbalanced and unworkable approach to alcohol and other, banned drugs. It's titled 'Drink, drugs and uneasy hypocrisy' and points out that the alcohol industry in the UK spends £800m per year on advertising while users of alternative drugs are arrested and jailed.

Writer James Meek observes that he can get a lethal dose of vodka at his local off-license for £30, no questions asked.

On the other hand in the USA, the country that experienced the disaster of alcohol prohibition, one in 100 of its citizens are now in jail, predominately on drug charges. This is five times the incarceration rate in the UK. The social damage from this pointless inquisition is immeasurable. Meek adds to this the carnage in Mexico, where another 72 people have been found executed, probably by a drug cartel which thrives on the supersized profits made possible by prohibition.

In 18185 when cocaine was legal, we did not have
a child addiction epidemic. Hmmmmn.

Meek wonders what advertising for drugs would look like, but he's off the mark there. Drugs are now one of the most popular and profitable commodities in the world - with no advertising. In a legalised, regulated and balanced environment, the advertising of alcohol, cigarettes and recreational drugs would all be banned. They could also tighten up on the advertising of medical drugs, too. In this light, the free market days of the late 1800s (above) are a universe away!

One commenter on the Guardian piece eloquently listed the stupidity of prohibition:

If you support prohibition then you've helped trigger the worst crime wave in history.

If you support prohibition you've a helped create a black market with massive incentives to hook both adults and children alike.

If you support prohibition you've helped to make these dangerous substances available in schools and prisons.

If you support prohibition you've helped raise gang warfare to a level not seen since the days of alcohol bootlegging.

If you support prohibition you've helped create the prison-for-profit synergy with drug lords.

If you support prohibition you've helped remove many important civil liberties from those citizens you falsely claim to represent.

If you support prohibition you've helped put previously unknown and contaminated drugs on the streets.

If you support prohibition you've helped to escalate Theft, Muggings and Burglaries.

If you support prohibition you've helped to divert scarce law-enforcement resources away from protecting your fellow citizens from the ever escalating violence against their person or property.

If you support prohibition you've helped overcrowd the courts and prisons, thus making it increasingly impossible to curtail the people who are hurting and terrorizing others.

If you support prohibition you've helped evolve local gangs into transnational enterprises with intricate power structures that reach into every corner of society, controlling vast swaths of territory with significant social and military resources at their disposal.

A little perspective on the booze blight

2010-08-27T13:51:00.003+10:00

It's interesting to watch the ever rising moral panic about booze that drives our politicians into a neo-prohibitionist frenzy. I rarely agree with conservative think tank the Centre for Independent Studies but their libertarian aspect leads them to support informed debate about the repeal of drugs prohibition and the perils of over-regulation, so they deserve points for consistency.

Below, they analyse the latest shock-horror report from the anti-alcohol industry, a report that the police are using to back their calls to shut down Sydney's night-time economy:

$36 billion ways to make a media splash
The first lesson for anyone wanting to make a big splash in the media is to have a big, scary, shocking number. It’s practically fool proof. Just put out your press release and wait for the phone to ring.

This tactic was put to good use this week by the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, which released its finding that alcohol abuse costs the Australians $36 billion a year.

Newspapers and television stations around the country were quick to interrupt blanket coverage of the election to report on the newly quantified evils of booze.

The fact that the story could be accompanied by sensational footage of drunken louts punching on in Kings Cross didn’t hurt either.

But in the fast-paced world of news, not many journalists have the time to read a report that’s more than 200 pages long. And here’s the rub.

Many of the assumptions used to deduce the big scary figures are laughable.

The report says 70% of the population have been negatively affected by someone else’s drinking. This figure is clearly meant to shock. But a closer look reveals that it’s not so shocking after all. In this study, ‘negatively affected’ means anything from being in a relationship with a violently abusive alcoholic right down to being kept awake by a neighbour’s boozy barbeque. With such rubbery assumptions, it’s a wonder that it is only 70%.

Of those survey respondents who say they have been negatively affected by someone else’s drinking, 16.5% say they have suffered between ‘$5 and $25,000 per year’ of property loss or damage.

But the report doesn’t say where on this scale most respondents lay, so we can’t differentiate between people who have had their car written off by a drunk driver and those who have ended up with a broken wine glass at a dinner party.

Alcohol causes serious problems in our society. But not all drinking is the same. Wildly inflating the costs of drinking, while taking none of the benefits into account, trivialises the very real costs of drinking – and grossly damages the report’s credibility.

Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies.

Proof that prohibition has failed

2010-08-26T17:51:00.004+10:00

While many people think this story from the Murdoch stable is a fit-up, I am not surprised that some parents might be so stupid as to let this happen. (See full text below. Note the April 1 dateline, and that NT welfare authorities do no corroborate it.)

If the story is true, it's proof that prohibition has failed. Unfortunately the prohibitionist frame of reference that most Australian media inhabit means this story will be generally interpreted the opposite way -- that we need an even tougher 'War on Drugs'.

I suspect that even under strictly regulated legalisation, you couldn't stop this degree of parental failure. It's child abuse.

The nonsense in the story about 'addiction' to this non-addictive drug absolutely condemns it to beat-up status. The child is said to throw a tantrum if she is denied cannabis, tobacco (which is of course addictive) or alcohol. But kids throw a tantrum if they are denied a piece of chocolate cake, too. It just means they are spoiled.

The real danger to the child is that drug use at such an early age might rewire the way her immature brain develops. But keep it in perspective -- few parents blink an eye when kids are prescribed Ritalin etc, a huge and controversial trend.

And ninety-something percent of cannabis users never have any serious problems with it, yet the War on Drugs is a war on all users.

More perspective, from online discussion about this story:

Ok, now,

5% of all deaths from diseases of the circulatory system are attributed to alcohol.

15% of all deaths from diseases of the respiratory system are attributed to alcohol.

30% of all deaths from accidents caused by fire and flames are attributed to alcohol.

30% of all accidental drownings are attributed to alcohol.

30% of all suicides are attributed to alcohol.

40% of all deaths due to accidental falls are attributed to alcohol.

45% of all deaths in automobile accidents are attributed to alcohol.

60% of all homicides are attributed to alcohol.

(Sources: NIDA Report, the Scientific American and Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario.) Also see Alcohol Consumption and Mortality, Alcohol poisoning deaths, CDC report,

That's well over 100,000's of alcohol related deaths each year.

Total Recorded Deaths Caused By The Use Of Cannabis: 0.

Full text of article:

Five-year-old 'smoked dope'
By Edith Bevin
April 1, 2004

A FIVE-year-old Northern Territory girl has been smoking cannabis, it was learned last night.

A nine-year-old and a 13-year-old also smoke drugs and drink alcohol.

The case is being investigated by Family and Children's Services.

The department last night refused to confirm an inquiry was under way.

But a former FACS officer said: "The child's case has been referred to an assessment team to follow up.

"There have been no reports of physical violence towards the child - just drug abuse."

The Northern Territory News has obtained photographs that show the five-year-old girl preparing to light a bong in a house in Palmerston.

A 13-year-old is pictured lighting a bong while her 13-year-old friend pours herself a glass of sherry.

The neighbour, who admits to being a drug user, said the five-year-old girl helped herself to the bong.

"She lit it and correctly breathed the smoke in without any adult help," the woman said.

The girl also smokes cigarettes.

"This is serious stuff - she acts like an addict," the neighbour said. "If she doesn't get that ganja or tobacco then she chucks a tantrum - she throws herself on the ground and screams until she can get her hit.

"I've worked with addicts my whole life but I've never seen a five-year-old addict.

"I've seen teenagers and adult addicts and their stages of aggression - the behaviour that this child is displaying is exactly like that.

"We're not talking about a one-off, it's not an accident.

"If FACS tested that child tomorrow she'd have THC in her blood."

Health Department spokeswoman Bernadette Keefe said last night: "If there is evidence of a five-year-old involved in drug use we would be immediately concerned and take action.

"But that is not the information we have received." But when asked what information the department had received, Ms Keefe said: "I can't comment on that."

- Northern Territory News

Amarni bikies make billions from drugs

2010-08-24T11:08:00.005+10:00

The beautifully stylised Nomads bike pack,
parked in Kings Cross in July 2004

Suit-wearing bikies working within the corporate system are committing major international fraud to establish money-laundering networks to process billions of dollar profit made mainly from methamphetamines.

And while the police know about it, they are too wary of the bikies to do anything about it, because the gangs use better counter-surveillance techniques than the police to identify undercover officers and target their families with threats.

This is the alarming scenario presented in a new book, Above the law by Ross Coulthard (also spelt 'Coulthart' on the bookselling websites) and Duncan McNab.

One of the scams involved the identity theft of all the customers of an Australian mortgage broker. These identities were then used to buy and sell properties, resulting in drug profits being cleansed into legitimate money.

Nothing has been done about this operation.

The new book, sequel to Dead man running by the same authors, describes how the bikies have become a major international franchise underpinned by massive drug profits and the ability to intimidate rivals and police with extreme violence.

But, as usual, the elephant in the room, prohibition, is not mentioned in any of the online blurbs or in an interview with the author broadcast today by Deborah Cameron on the 702 Morning Show.

The bikies are clearly the Al Capones of modern times but the media remain unable to make that link explicit, throwing their hands up in helplessness against a threat that incidentally makes them millions in book deals and dramatic headlines.

The idea that repealing prohibition would stop the income-generating engine of the world's biggest criminal threat just does not make an appearance. The availability of cheaper, cleaner, regulated and controlled drugs, would put the bikies out of business and probably not increase use of the drugs.

The bikies had teamed up with Lebanese criminal gangs who, according to Mr Coulthard, style themselves as bikies because they know the police leave those groups alone. This would explain why the Parramatta Nomads lost their bikes and became Notorious, a gang closely associated with Kings Cross and the Ibrahim brothers – these Nike bikies were not hardcore devotees, but were more into style than bike culture.

Blurbs on the bookseller sites describe the sheer scale of the illegal enterprises:

Far surpassing the threats posed by the Mafia, Russian syndicates, Chinese Triads and Japanese Yakuza, outlaw motorcycle gangs are now being acknowledged as the greatest current organised crime threat. Their international empire is both sophisticated and bloody and brutal. It is also both strategic and opportunistic - where they cannot dominate, they broker alliances.

While such books are valuable sources of well researched information, they are part of the problem so long as they present it as an eternal cops vs robbers battle without pointing to the real foundation of the problem -- prohibition.

Such analysis would make it crystal clear to uninformed politicians and people that the harms of prohibition are indeed worse than the harms of drugs.

Five models for regulating illicit drugs

2010-08-19T10:07:00.005+10:00

An article in the British Medical Journal neatly describes the circular logic of prohibition and then proposes models for regulation within legalisation or decriminalisation.

Writer Stephen Rolles first challenges several prohibition axioms including the belief that ending prohibition would increase drug use. He argues that the harms of prohibition are not only greater than the harms of drugs, but increase those harms.

He then describes the circular logic of the War on Drugs thus:

The criminalisation of drugs has, historically, been presented as an emergency response to an imminent threat rather than an evidence based health or social policy intervention.11 Prohibitionist rhetoric frames drugs as menacing not just to health but also to our children, national security, and the moral fabric of society itself. The prohibition model is positioned as a response to such threats,12 13 and is often misappropriated into populist political narratives such as "crackdowns" on crime, immigration, and, more recently, the war on terror.

This conceptualisation has resulted in the punitive enforcement of drug policy becoming largely immune from meaningful scrutiny.14 A curiously self justifying logic now prevails in which the harms of prohibition—such as drug related organised crime and deaths from contaminated heroin—are conflated with the harms of drug use. These policy related harms then bolster the apparent menace of drugs and justify the continuation, or intensification, of prohibition.

Later in the article, Rolles presents the five basic models for regulating drug availability proposed by the long-established UK lobby group Transform:

Medical prescription model or supervised venues—For highest risk drugs (injected drugs including heroin and more potent stimulants such as methamphetamine) and problematic users

Specialist pharmacist retail model—combined with named/licensed user access and rationing of volume of sales for moderate risk drugs such as amphetamine, powder cocaine, and methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy)

Licensed retailing—including tiers of regulation appropriate to product risk and local needs. Used for lower risk drugs and preparations such as lower strength stimulant based drinks

Licensed premises for sale and consumption—similar to licensed alcohol venues and Dutch cannabis "coffee shops," potentially also for smoking opium or poppy tea

Unlicensed sales—minimal regulation for the least risky products, such as caffeine drinks and coca tea.

The article has been endorsed by the outgoing President of the Royal College of Physicians, Professor Sir Ian Gilmore and has sparked another anti-prohibition editorial in The Guardian which also cites leading Barrister Nicholas Green who says prisons are overcrowded with criminalised drug users who should not be there. Green, writing for the Bar Council, laments cuts to legal aid in the UK and offers decriminalisation as a more rational way to cut costs in the jail system.

People who unthinkingly repeat prohibitionist mantras -- especially authoritative academics talking to the media -- need to get with what's happening overseas, especially when it comes from such illustrious sources within their own profession. If they continue with their views, they need to rebut the arguments thus presented or be exposed as mere ideological charlatans,

[Numbered references are footnoted in the BMJ article]

Prohibitionist axioms don't hold water

2010-08-18T10:11:00.003+10:00

Associate Professor Stephen Jurd has kindly responded to the post below -- via comment under the post and by email. [It turns out he and I went to the same school in another life].

But Dr Jurd's response does not address the points made in that post.

He writes via email (my responses interweaved):

Even the prohibitionists may have some evidence.

Of course, but how sound is it? Given that nearly all the research is funded by governments on condition that it looks for harms, and further funding for such research depends on getting the 'right' result, it's not surprising that a lot of research demonstrates the harms of drugs. But this is not the point. If you researched anything on that basis you would show harms (research the harms of cars for instance, or rock fishing, or Rugby League). And law reformers do not dispute that drugs have side-effects. What they question is prohibition, and there is no convincing evidence that it works. Indeed, 28,000 deaths in one country alone is a stark argument against.

A soundbite is not the place to present evidence.

All drugs have side effects. More drugs more side effects. Legalising drugs may eradicate some, but certainly not all of the side effects - see cirrhosis, lung cancer and sedative overdose deaths.

There is little evidence that drug law reform would increase use -- as my post below explains: "Portugal's 2001 decriminalisation of all drugs was followed by an overall decrease in use and a huge reduction in the transmission of the HIV virus. Dr Jurd also ignores that the highest drug usage rates globally tend to be in the countries with the strictest prohibition."

Re side-effects, we know about the harms of alcohol. But the harms caused by its prohibition in the 1920s were worse, including people dying from bad quality illegal hooch and open gang warfare on the streets. The murder rate in the US skyrocketed during prohibition.

My views are not monochromatic. I am not immune to the tragedy of 28,000 deaths. But are they killing over cannabis? And are they killing over the Mexican market? More likely they are killing over white powders and US dollars.

Yes they are killing over cannabis as well as cocaine. US dollars are indeed the main driver of this carnage, but those dollars are made available by prohibition. So it's inconsistent to support prohibition in one country when it's prohibition in the next country that fuels the problem.

Cannabis law reformers in California argue that regulated supply would put the cartels in their state out of business. Some prohibitionists reply that the cartels would simply move on to other forms of crime but this again is an assertion that ignores certain facts: that other forms of crime are far less reliable and more risky than drug dealing. Under prohibition, kids deal drugs in every high school every day. That's a far cry from robbing a bank.

As a psychiatrist I felt it was necessary to say that cannabis causes a variety of psychiatric side effects, some of them very serious indeed

That message is amply broadcast by governments and media. But a causal link between cannabis and schizophrenia is not absolutely established despite the overwhelming bias of the research.

And this ignores another point I made: "the awkward fact that Schizophrenia has not increased per capita during the decades that cannabis use indeed did explode (under prohibition!) since the 1960s."

Even assuming a causal link, there is no evidence that punishing the 99% or so of users who are not badly harmed is an effective way of preventing harm to the unfortunate 1%. Indeed, proof-of-age and rationing under controlled supply may reduce use by teenagers, who are most vulnerable to harmful side-effects.

As I wrote to Associate Professor Jurd, this is not personal, just a plea for sound public debate. Dr Jurd's work on addiction seems to be very creditable. But his qualifications do not include work on the effectiveness of prohibition, so I ask him to really examine his belief that: "It is a well recognised public health axiom that the higher the availability of any drug, the more the drug will be used."

It's not an axiom, Dr Jurd, it's an ideological belief. As Arthur Miller wrote: "Ideology: a principled denial of the facts".

For more on the price and demand elasticity of drugs, see the lower part of this recent post.

And an analysis of cannabis use in The Netherlands, where cannabis is legally sold in shops, challenges US Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske who is spreading another prohibitionist assertion, claiming that an explosion of cannabis use in that country is leading to the closure of many of the coffee shops. Kerlikowske also denies that crime increased during alcohol prohibition in the US. He has no evidence for this, and I wonder how he explains the Boston University graphs posted here? Maybe, like most prohibitionists, he simply ignores facts that challenge his ideology.

Why do so many experts talk nonsense?

2010-08-16T15:08:00.004+10:00

The former president of Mexico has declared that 'legalisation' of drugs is the best way to stop that country's ongoing Drug War massacre which has seen 28,000 people killed in recent years.

Mexico is seen by reformers as the clearest case showing that the harms of prohibition are worse than the harms of the drugs it fails to control.

It was covered on Saturday night by SBS News in a story that distinguished itself by even talking about 'legalisation' -- although it still never mentioned the flip side, prohibition.

Current President Calderon opposed the idea, falling back on an assertion that 'legalisation' would cause an explosion in use of the drug. Perhaps this unsupported claim is understandable as he receives swags of money from the US government so the damage ultimately caused by US demand for drugs is kept across the border for the Mexicans to deal with. He's a politician.

But what is the excuse for Associate Professor Stephen Jurd, an Australian addiction specialist who seems to have become one of the media's 'go-to' guys on drugs.

He mirrored President Caldéron, opposing 'legalisation' on the grounds that cannabis use would dramatically increase because it would be more easily available and that would lead to an increase in psychoses.

But he tellingly offered no evidence for these assertions, which are straight from the prohibitionist hymn-book.

For a start he seems to assume that legalisation equals an unregulated free-for-all. But all drug law reformers I know of support a highly regulated regime designed to moderate drug use, particularly among young people.

Secondly his assertion that 'legalisation' would lead to a significant increase in use is problematic. As more enlightened commentators have pointed out ad nauseam, Portugal's 2001 decriminalisation of all drugs was followed by an overall decrease in use and a huge reduction in the transmission of the HIV virus. Dr Jurd also ignores that the highest drug usage rates globally tend to be in the countries with the strictest prohibition.

Thirdly his belief in the solid link between cannabis use and psychosis ignores the awkward fact that Schizophrenia has not increased per capita during the decades that cannabis use indeed did explode (under prohibition!) since the 1960s.

What's Dr Jurd's excuse for this sloppy commentary? Has he simply adopted a mindset that agrees with our prohibitionist government, that fount of research funding and career advancement?

Even if Dr Jurd was right, what value does he put on 28,000 lives snuffed out so-far in Mexico alone, relative to the treatable harms of drugs?

And would he likewise assert, for the same reasons he gave above, that the prohibition of alcohol in the US should not have been repealed?

Or was the professor simply the victim of terrible editing?

An intelligent comment would have queried how 'legalisation' in Mexico would stop anything while prohibition remains in force in the USA, ensuring that stupendous profits can be made by criminals and the illicit trade would continue. Hmmmn.

Anyhow, I'll email Dr Jurd and give him an opportunity to respond. Watch this space.

Inquiry links prohibition with Police corruption

2010-08-11T14:26:00.002+10:00

NSW Police are in trouble for having "improper associations" with the wrong sort of people, reports today's SMH:

Over the past year, the Ombudsman has been made aware of cases involving friendships between policemen and members of bikie gangs, the leaking of confidential information about police investigations, and friendships with known users of or dealers in drugs, he said in his submission.

Other cases involved attempts to influence criminal investigations, and claims of police seizing a large amount of drugs without charging the person in possession of the drugs.

Of course if these drugs were legal, taxed and regulated, a major opportunity for police corruption would vanish. And it's pretty difficult for some Police not to know "users of drugs" as that might be 20-30% of the adult population, or more in some areas.

It's also difficult for those police who know prohibition and its myths lack credibility, when they have to bust people they know have done no-one any harm.

Then there are those police who use drugs themselves. That would make it really difficult to respect the laws they enforce, even as drug users who know the truth about their tipple of choice must find it hard to respect the police.

Gee, prohibition causes a lot of damage to the fabric of society. Trouble is, most people just take it for granted because 'that's how things are'. But they needn't be...

Glimmer of hope in media drugs discourse

2010-08-05T19:08:00.003+10:00

Yesterday a psychiatrist moderated his claims that cannabis causes schizophrenia with an encouraging side-comment that the War on Drugs was ineffective. But he got quite a few other things wrong.

Dr Neil Phillips, who is a practising psychiatrist but not a drug specialist or researcher, appeared on Richard Glover's ABC 702 radio show rounding up the research linking cannabis and mental illness as discussed in the previous post.

Richard Glover had been lobbied earlier in the day by an interested colleague who referred him to the Time article discussed in the post below, pointing out that schizophrenia has not increased over the decades during which cannabis use expanded many many times over since the 1960s. This is a real thorn in the side for those who claim cannabis causes schizophrenia.

Richard Glover did ask that question but the Doctor dodged it, simply referring back to the research he was quoting. Hmmn.

While the Doctor's message was reasonable and thought-out, he still maintained that cannabis was addictive. I believe this is a misuse of the word as commonly applied to substances which are unquestionably addictive such as heroin or tobacco. But if someone can smoke cannabis regularly for 40 years and give up without a single problem, the substance is clearly different from those two drugs. While some abusers do become psychologically addicted, a better word might be 'preoccupation' or 'obsession'. It's still a problem, but use of the term 'addiction' does little except abuse the English language and alarm people.

Dr Phillips also ran the popular line that cannabis isn't what it used to be, saying that back in the 1970s the active ingredient THC ran at about 4%, while today's highly bred hothouse pot reaches 14%.

I have data from 1972 showing cannabis from the Hunter Valley clocked in at 11%, so Dr Phillips' claim is tenuous.

But he did point out that in those days hashish and hash oil were commonly available [as well as potent Thai buddha sticks - ed] all of which are highly concentrated and potent.

So why would today's cannabis be so mentally toxic?

He surmised that modern hothouse pot had been so manipulated by breeders that perhaps the balance of THC (associated with schizophrenia) and cannabidiol (CBD -- which seemingly protects the brain) had been altered in favour of the former -- hence the recent links to mental illness.

IF this was so (and the doctor quoted no evidence), legal, regulated, taxed production could mandate breeds that restore this balance and reduce the problem that now exists under prohibition.

The usual shower of listeners phoned in, convinced that cannabis had sent their child insane. One listener, Adam, said he smoked pot regularly, and although he had a good job and was functional, could not give up the drug which sometimes made him lethargic and caused temporary memory problems.

But he, too, said that the War on Drugs was a mistake. If it worked, he wouldn't have a habit, would he?

Cannabis and Schizophrenia - link or cause?

2010-08-04T11:13:00.003+10:00

The prohibition establishment keeps promoting studies which claim cannabis causes psychosis in a small minority of people, and credulous media faithfully regurgitate them, usually with sensational headlines.

Given the dominant media mindset on drugs, which almost never questions prohibition, such reports automatically skew opinion in favour of prohibition.

But the link between cannabis and psychosis or schizophrenia is not simple.

The knotty question is thoroughly explored in Time magazine, a journal that, unlike many media outlets, fact-checks its content.

The piece by Maia Szalavitz brings up the biggest confounder for the alarmists: that schizophrenia has not increased over the decades during which cannabis use expanded many many times over since the 1960s.
But the piece also shows how studies with apparently clear results are not necessarily so clear. Many control factors have to be brought to bear. For instance, more males smoke cannabis than females, and more males, whether or not they smoke it, get the disease and get it earlier than women.

So whether or not there is a causal link, cannabis smokers are more likely to suffer the disease for demographic reasons.

Other studies show that those who smoke cannabis and also have schizophrenia and several times more likely to have a family history of the disease.

But these tricky nuances are usually ignored by journalists and presenters who seem to think they have a moral duty to demonise drugs.

Nor do they usually question whether prohibition prevents any of the problem cases. Indeed, regulated supply could make it more difficult for young people to obtain drugs.

So when you next hear an alarmist story about drugs and psychosis, email or phone the presenter and link them to this.

You might also link them to this professional article about alcohol psychosis, which has case studies of people hallucinating an attack by ants and rabbits running across their hospital room. Ask the journalist why the media never runs stories about alcohol-induced psychosis? Bias perhaps?

More local blogs

2010-07-29T15:17:00.001+10:00

I found a new and different local blog, Vampires of Potts Point.

It presents "creative Goth" fiction using local settings. It's giving me ideas to extend my Gothic Sydney photoart series. I'd like to meet the mysterious author!

And yet another, Tracey Grace's blog, which features longish well-written pieces and local pics focusing on street people. Tracey is fairly new to the area and records her journey as she grapples with being confronted by the street people society has discarded.

Her latest piece asks how to respond to begging. It's good.

Drugs enter the Federal election; Clichés fuel Lingo Bingo

2010-07-29T14:56:00.001+10:00

Oh oh! Today both major parties announced they would "Get tough on crime", singling out gangs and knife crime. There was talk of police using metal detectors to find knives. Fair enough I guess. Knife crime gives me the shudders, but banning the import of knives won't stop people using kitchen knives.

Of course the Liberals tied the crime to illicit drugs. True, but only because of prohibition and "getting tough on drugs" creates the huge profits that attract the criminals. The same old dog is chasing its tail.

Regulated legalisation would knock the stuffing out of the whole illicit industry and make the streets a lot safer for the rest of us. And it would make money through taxes instead of costing billions.

Meanwhile I've had a bit of fun publishing the ultimate political speech, in The City News, based on the political clichés submitted by listeners to the Lingo Bingo competition Richard Glover is running on ABC 702 -- plus a few the listeners missed.

I've offered the speech to aspiring candidates because if they delivered this speech somewhere verifiable, they might resolve the Lingo Bingo game in one swoop and get a free kick on air.

Enjoy!

How the War on Drugs victimises minorities

2010-07-29T10:15:00.003+10:00

A major study conducted by the UK Drug Policy Commission has found that gay men may be three or four times as likely than straight men to use drugs.

This will come as no surprise to people who know inner city life and culture, and backs up data in Australia's Household Drug Surveys which show young men use recreational drugs more than other demographics.

But what it quantifies for the first time is that the War on Drugs is inflicted more heavily on minority groups than the general population.

Prohibitionists might respond that this is unavoidable simply because certain groups use more drugs than others, and this is by definition bad and therefore interdiction is for their own good.

The argument fails, though, when the objective facts about different drugs are taken into account. Alcohol, the drug accepted by majority culture, is in fact far more harmful than cannabis or MDMA ecstasy, so targeting users of those drugs while tolerating alcohol is not for their own good.

This amounts to discrimination, and its effects can be seen starkly in Sydney where police with sniffer dogs disproportionately target gay venues, precincts and parties. The cultural decline and 'alcoholisation' of Oxford Street must be at least in part caused by this relentless selective policing.

It only adds to the cultural discrimination that breath-testing for alcohol is random but detection of other drugs is not.

Different cultures -- both within Australia and internationally -- use different mind-altering substances. For example look at the dominance of Khat in north African countries, another drug now banned here for no good reason.

So if cultural minorities are being targeted more often by police because they use or prefer drugs that are less harmful than alcohol, it throws up an ugly fact about the War on Drugs -- that it has always had a back-story of targeting minorities.

That's why the NAACP in California supports proposals to legalise, regulate and tax cannabis. Research clearly shows that Blacks and Hispanics in the US are arrested for cannabis in far greater proportion that whites, even though a higher proportion of whites use cannabis.

Similarly in Australia, a huge percentage of our Indigenous imprisonment rate can be linked to prohibition, which partly explains our failure to reduce the imprisonment rate.

It may be co-incidental that the strongest proponents of prohibition are conservative white Christians, but it should give pause to people who casually support prohibition. Ironically, the conservatives are also the strongest proponents of "Choice" in matters like public vs private education and health. Their "Choice" mantra, however, fails when it comes to the choices of cultural minorities.

I doubt many would be surprised at this hypocrisy.

The full study, which also looks at drug use patterns of ethnic and disabled minority groups, can be found here, just a click away.

Magistrate invokes fairy tale in cannabis custody case

2010-07-26T10:59:00.002+10:00

The prohibition of cannabis has been used by an "obsessive" father as a lever in a court battle over custody of his child, as reported in The Sydney Morning Herald.

The 5-year-old lives with his mother, and the father's case rested significantly on her occasional cannabis use. Without her knowledge he had the child drug-tested and also complained that she gave the boy food containing artificial colouring.

Magistrate Warwick Neville awarded custody to the mother on condition that she submit to urine and hair follicle drug tests for the next 18 months. However he accepted that the mother was committed to her role and there was no evidence the child had come to any harm in her care.

Mr Neville's approach -- in which he somehow likened the vicious little drama to the Harry Potter stories -- swallows whole the prohibitionist myth that a parent's moderate use of cannabis is equivalent to child abuse, while on the other hand alcohol use by parents is acceptable.

There is absolutely no evidence for this. Rather the opposite, as alcohol is more dangerous than cannabis by any objective measure.

So here we have the alcoholic down the road allowed to keep the kids while the moderate, caring toker up the road has to go on the wagon and have her time taken and bodily privacy invaded for 18 months. If the poor woman switches to drink, everything will be fine in this fantasy land the Magistrate appears to inhabit.

In his Harry Potter analogy, he likened the mother's sometime cannabis use to being under an evil spell, "caught in a twisting vine called the Devil's Snare".

This colourful but ludicrous analogy betrays the magistrate's misconceived view of cannabis that harks back to the fictions of the Reefer Madness era.

Once more prohibition has led to a gross waste of time and our taxes in the law courts as it seems there was no problem here except for an obsessive parent using misconceived views to fight a damaging custody battle.

Media still spreading drug war myths

2010-07-25T10:33:00.004+10:00

An otherwise creditable report by Asher Moses in The Sydney Morning Herald spreads one of the most blatant Reefer Madness style lies of recent times.

In a story detailing how the 'legal high' industry is using the internet and innovation to get around prohibitionist intervention, Moses wrote:

The Wall Street Journal reported that the so-called "legal highs" had been blamed for the deaths of two young people in Britain and Sweden and British authorities said they may have contributed to as many as 30 deaths.

This referred to Mephedrone, (Cat or Miaow), a derivative of the mild social stimulant Khat that is taken daily in North African countries but banned in the west.

However a Sky News report by China Correspondent Holly Williams said this:

Mephedrone hit the headlines in March after the drug was linked to the deaths of two teenagers in Scunthorpe. However, post mortems revealed no trace of the chemical in the blood of Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19.

The original reports were part of the prohibitionist spin accompanying the UK's recent mephedrone ban and follows precisely the same pattern as the famous Reefer Madness propaganda film that demonised marihuana back in the 1930s in support of its prohibition. The movie is so inaccurate and over the top that it is now viewed as comedy.

Asher Moses' story is otherwise balanced and accurate. At least he bothered to get a comment from outside the prohibitionist enclave, quoting Dr Alex Wodak thus:

For me this is just another illustration of the futility of drug prohibition ... and if criminalising drugs hasn't worked, what you need to do is treat drugs as a health and social phenomenon," he said.

Prohibitionists still rely on gross dishonesty to maintain the credibility of their ideology. But, hopefully, one day 'truth will out', and more journalists will learn to recognise their spin.

Drug warriors chasing their own tails

2010-07-25T09:12:00.004+10:00

Police comments about a recent massive cocaine bust unintentionally underline the futility of prohibition.

As reported in The Australian:

WHEN NSW Police this week announced they had seized a 240kg shipment of cocaine from Mexico, officers were full of praise and caution.

"Until the head's taken off, it's never over," Detective Chief Superintendent Ken McKay told the ABC. "These people will come back at us. The profit margins are too great not to."

My bolding of the last sentence betrays the essential unworkability of prohibition, which is the very thing that jacks up the prices and creates the irresistible profits. Yet still the DEA in the US boasts about the success of their War on Drugs by citing price increases resulting from their efforts.

The quote above continues a current theme of police commentary which demonises a drug because of problems actually created by prohibition, a circular argument. The other big theme in the same vein is that people should avoid ecstasy pills because they don't know what's in them.

What the drug warlords seem not to understand is that the normal rules of price elasticity or risk are not the same for drugs as for, say, apples. If apples are in short supply and double in price, buyers simply switch to bananas for example.

This 'balloon effect' is shown clearly in the drug use graphs with the Australian story (above). The incorrectly headlined graphs clearly show that as the use of one drug declined between 2001-2007, another rose.

But even if the price of all the drugs rose at once there would be little effect on demand because the human appetite to alter consciousness seems to be insatiable -- just listen to the difficulty many people have giving up drink during the 'Dry July' campaign as promoted by ABC Radio 702 this month, in which people give up alcohol for a month for charity. One caller this week lamented how "flat and boring" her life as a teetotaller had become.

Our strong demand for mind-altering pleasure is why, even as the price of cannabis rocketed from $30 per ounce to $500 per ounce between the mid-1970s and '90s -- due to US satellites becoming able to photograph the big crops from space -- the use of cannabis still rose sharply, crossing to a new generation.

It seems the War on Drugs has currently succeeded in choking the global supply of MDMA ecstasy. But international reports show manufacturers are simply switching to less effective, more dangerous substances to fill the demand for party pills. (See links here and here)

So while the drug warriors crow about their successes they are in fact increasing the net risk to users.

The story ends with another quote that supports the above interpretation:

Don Weatherburn, from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, said police were doing a good job of trying to strangle supply; but the real problem was the "hugely growing demand".

It seems the authorities unconsciously admit they are chasing their own tails. It's a funny old world.

Dodgy sparkies and appeals to dob in neighbours mark War on Growers

2010-07-23T12:13:00.000+10:00

I always feel sad when I hear police on morning radio congratulating their peers on another bust of an indoor cannabis grower.

This week it was a 74-year-old man caught growing 162 cannabis plants in a house in Minto. He was remanded in custody, set to face a major charge and probably a long jail term.

I was sad because he had done nothing worse than a brewery worker, because cannabis is safer than alcohol by any objective measure, and fuels far less social damage than its violence-inducing cousin.

His worst crime may have been simple greed. Or 'ambition' as it's called in the big end of town.

But according to a report in today's SMH, the panic about indoor growing has moved to the sparkies who rig up the grow-rooms, often stealing power from the grid (which presumably the rest of us pay for -- another cost of prohibition).

Police say many of the power systems were built by the same sparky, and a complex plug system and spaghetti loom is pictured (above).

Police reports of the value and amount of the cannabis they confiscate illustrate the stupendous profits made possible by prohibition.

The annual number value of busted plants in NSW is reported as:

21,000 plants with a street value of about $64 million
53,500 cannabis plants - worth an estimated $160 million growing in drug houses and open-air operations
and in the average crop-house, 1600 plants a year, with a potential street value of $8 million a year

Bear in mind that this represents only the plants they found -- while cannabis remains available in every town and high school. Presumably this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Eight million dollars from one year's cropping? Sheesh, no wonder new growers pop up faster than old ones are caught.

The story then lists ways people can spot a crop-house next door, encouraging the ignorant to dob in their ambitious but harmless neighbours.

Mind you, if cannabis was legal, regulated and taxed, this illicit market would wither and the stuff could be grown outdoors, chemical-free and without the power theft. Or in commercial indoor operations -- like the four factories now approved for medical marihuana in Oakland California. These are set to earn local authorities $211,000 each in permits, plus a permanent tax stream, and employ hundreds of people, according to an LA Times report.

That system would also keep 74-year-old victims of a stupid War on Drugs out of jail.