How much we pay to pollute

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.]

Climate change deniers disappear up their own propaganda

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.

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

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.)

Debating with climate change sceptics

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.

Do not be alarmed (or even alert)

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!

Documenting more official bullshit about drugs

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.

Junk Science rules the world

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

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.

Incredible discovery: Australians like to drink!

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.

A little perspective on the booze blight

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.

Cannabis and Schizophrenia - link or cause?

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.

Big oil money behind the climate change deniers exposed

A clever global campaign to create and promote questionable science undermining support for green energy has been funded in large part by American oil giant Koch Industries.

Greenpeace has done the research tracing nearly $50 million of Koch money over nine years going to climate denial organisations, some of which was used to create non-reviewed junk science including the one that denies global warming is harming polar bears. You've probably heard of that one.

Other 'research' projects purported to show that converting to clean energy reduced employment, but were equally flawed. However the most common use of the money is to disseminate these factoids throughout the media and to lobby governments and politicians to keep burning fossil fuels, protecting Koch’s profits.

Why they don't just use the money to diversify into green energy and make money that way, I don't know. Perhaps it's simply the conservative mindset.

Science was reason's triumph… the defeat of the Beast. But what happened when the Beast learned science?  – Arthur Miller

Copenhagen brings climate debate to a thunderhead

I am amazed at the effectiveness of the climate change sceptic movement in dominating public debate around the Copenhagen conference. Time and again, climate sceptics' pseudo-science is exposed but they just churn away regardless.

They even claim that climate change science is a global conspiracy by (a) the British Monarchy or (b) the communists whereas I think they are the ones in the pay of the fossil fuel industries. Here's a site with a neat list of climate sceptic organisations and where they get their money from. Surprise surprise, it's the oil and coal industries! Who would have thought!

And this article in today's SMH rounds up some science showing alarming global warming and extreme weather patterns -- as I wrote to the Herald in August when we had bushfires simultaneously in both hemispheres. It rings true to this lay person.

Photo: A storm out to sea pictured from the roof of the Blanco Restaurant building in Roslyn St, Kings Cross on 19 November. No, I'm not saying this is a result of global warming, it just seemed a graphic illustration. A few minutes later the storm produced a classic anvil thunderhead, below, as the sunset peeked through to highlight buildings in the eastern suburbs:

PS: 702 Radio is reporting the last six months were Australia's hottest on record with an average temperature of 20.1 degrees since June, according to the National Climate Centre. I know weather is not climate but... what's the downside of building renewable power stations and a decent rail network, just in case?

NCPIC hard-wired for bias

The National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre is not funded to provide balanced information according to its director, Professor Jan Copeland.

Prof Copeland revealed this to a reporter from The City News who asked her why the Centre failed to provide information about the medical uses of cannabis.

“The free national cannabis information and helpline is not targeted at those who seek information on possible medicinal uses of cannabis and is not funded for this purpose,” Prof Copeland is reported as saying.

In other words, the Centre is tasked to provide only one side of the story. This of course makes a mockery of its claim to be 'evidence-based' as it relies only on negative evidence and must ignore positive evidence – evidence which is sufficient to have persuaded 14 states in the US to legalise medicinal cannabis, because it has been found to help people suffering a number of serious diseases including multiple sclerosis, post-traumatic stress syndrome and cancer.

A tagline on NCPIC's homepage coyly acknowledges this: "evidence-based information and related harms", it says (my bolding).

This makes a mockery of the term 'evidence-based' because if you acknowledge only the negative evidence about ANYTHING you create an unbalanced picture of it. Imagine researching cars, looking only for harms. Or football, or mountain-climbing. Focusing on only the negative aspects of any of these things (which are far more 'harmful' than cannabis) makes it easy to produce a horrifying picture of death, disease, violence and incapacitation. In other words, demonisation.

So it's fair to say NCPIC, a leftover from the John Howard years, has no more credibility than any political propaganda machine and people should balance its offerings with less one-sided sources of information, such as the myriad links via this site.

We acknowledge that there are harms to cannabis, so in that crucial sense The Kings Cross Times is more balanced and credible than NCPIC.

Just to prove it, we link to NCPIC above. For a really good look at some full-on prohibitionists check Drug Free Australia's site -- then compare their information to some of the other sites linked in the right-hand column. Then there's the Scientology anti-drug site Drug free Ambassadors, members of whom I encountered dressed in identical clothing running around Kings Cross distributing an anti-ecstasy booklet that was almost laughable in its panic-mongering. Ironically the warcry of this bunch of clones was "think for yourself, don't follow the crowd".

Below is a very scientific Scientology graphic illustrating the evils of ecstasy. It's rather good, don't you think?

Jan Copeland spins the evidence

If the worldwide consequences were not so disastrous, it would be almost funny to watch prohibitionists spinning their self-contradictory message. This week Professor Jan Copeland, Director of the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC) made a startling statement reported in The City News -- nothing to do with me although I write for that journal -- in a story covering NCPIC's recent Cannabis Conference:

The Hemp Embassy also believes that the NCPIC, as an information service, should be providing information to the public about studies that suggest cannabis is not a gateway drug, cannabis does not have a causal link with schizophrenia and that cannabis does not cause lung cancer.

Professor Copeland said: “Each of these studies is of interest, although up to five years old, but none are without significant methodological flaws.”

Methodological flaws? ALL of them? Up to five years old? It's funny how all those studies are common traffic among AOD professionals and I have seen no credible claims that these studies are flawed, whereas many of the studies claiming cannabis is more and more dangerous are quickly exposed as junk science, especially NCPIC's offerings. Further, the studies suggesting cannabis is not so harmful tend to be large population studies, reflecting actual reality, while the studies portraying cannabis as the 'new satan' tend to be very small reductive exercises which are designed to show harm, and usually get all the headlines.

I think this is a case of the kettle calling the 'pot' black.

A great example of junk science is NCPIC's own study which attempted to label cannabis as a cause of (sorry, 'linked with') violence. It did a quick statistical crunch of people presenting at St Vincent's Casualty and found that a lot of the people involved in violence had used cannabis. Never mind that they may have also taken ice, or alcohol, or been beaten up because they owed their dealer $400 (a symptom of prohibition, not the substance). Never mind that St Vincents Casualty is constantly besieged by marginalised, dysfunctional junkies trying to wangle opiate medicine, which would skew your sample somewhat and is another consequence of prohibition. Never mind the St Vincent's Casualty doctor who wrote to the SMH observing that he had never seen an emergency caused by cannabis. Never mind the swathe of studies showing that cannabis does not cause violence.

And these studies are not tinpot little junk studies such as NCPIC's, either. Major, credible evidence reviews consistently find that cannabis is not a cause of violence -- carried out by such bodies as the Canadian Special Senate review (2002), the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, SUNY Buffalo's Department of Family Medicine (2005), the US National Drug Intelligence Center, and Oxford University. Are these organisations all producing flawed science, Professor Copeland? Or are you little more than a propagandist on a payroll?

I got all the above references from a new book, Marijuana is safer, So why are we driving people to drink? Funnily enough, another of the 45 footnoted references in the same chapter is a 2007 study by none other than Jan Copeland herself. It showed that 70% of Americans who seek treatment for cannabis are coerced into it by the courts (rather than presenting because they thought they had a problem), which pricks another of the current prohibitionist myths -- that an increase in cannabis-related presentations to doctors shows that today's 'skunk' is super-potent and causing problems which send the 'victims' to the doctor.

Ironically, NCPIC itself seems to be propagating this myth, despite Professor Copeland's own study. A story yesterday in the Townsville Bulletin about eight-year-old indigenous kids smoking pot quoted a NCPIC report:

The centre reported last year 19,000 general practice consultations across Australia in 2008 involved the management of cannabis-related problems.

We have 'drug courts' here in Australia which also give people busted for cannabis the choice of conviction or 'treatment'. This one is a furphy, Professor Copeland, as you well know by your own research. Or are you going to claim your own research is 'methodologically flawed'?

While it is obvious that eight-year-old kids should not be smoking pot, I would suggest that the problem is not the pot -- it's the kid's social environment. If you prevented them smoking pot without addressing the larger social problems, the balloon effect would probably just push them onto sniffing petrol or glue, far more harmful. Would heavier pot prohibition really solve the plight of disadvantaged Aboriginals? Or is it a simplistic red-herring?

But such logic is too deep for the moral panic merchants. The story goes on to parrot all the current myths:

...teachers needed to be more skilled in educating students about the serious mental health issues, including addiction and dependency, depression and schizophrenia, associated with regular use of cannabis.

Oh well, so much for accurate public information.

More Junk Science exposed

In grappling with the disconnect between what prohibitionists tell us and the reality I see on the streets, I have found over and over that they quote junk science, 'studies' which often have such gaping holes in their assumptions and method that even a layperson can see through them.

The malaise extends beyond illicit drugs. My recent criticism in The City News of the City of Sydney's alcohol research shows that the data do not even vaguely support the spin Clover Moore puts on it (a spin that I note is now rapidly changing its focus, but that's another story).

It appears we the public can put little or no faith in the Science we pay for. Mostly, it seems to be engineered to support preordained agendas. There should be a law against it.

An insightful article in Today's SMH by Jessica Irvine looks at the 'modelling' that creates a lot of headlines which turn out to be simply wrong. Ms Irvine also takes a good swipe at credulous journalists who parrot this rubbish.

Take the following quote, talking about the mining sector's campaign against emissions trading:

In June the Minerals Council of Australia published a report saying ''23,510 direct jobs will be lost across Australia's minerals industry by 2020''. Wrong.

The modelling, produced for the council by another consultancy, Concept Economics, found jobs in the mining industry would grow over that time, just not by as much when compared against a certain ''reference case'', which, as it turns out, involved assuming a much higher level of ''no-change'' emissions than anyone is predicting.

A lot of the headlines claiming that [X] costs the economy $16 billion a year (or whatever) are similarly suspect. I reckon if you added up all those claims they would exceed GDP by a fair bit. Can journalists at least please lift their game? Jessica Irvine excepted! She's on the money.

PS 27 August: The prostitution of Science was again highlighted this morning in a 720 ABC radio interview with Dr Tim Hawkes, headmaster of The King’s School. He was part of a panel at Macquarie University's Annual Oration by its Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz about returning morality to education, which had become corrupted by post-modern relativism and reduced to the pragmatic function of wealth creation.

Dr Hawkes in the radio interview criticised the practice of drug companies writing a paper about their own products and then paying an academic to put their name to it.

Ironically Miranda Devine, whose prohibitionist columns generously regurgitate junk science about illicit drugs, was also on the panel.

PPS 30 August: Oh, and here's a story about how George W Bush's Chief Scientist in the Office of National Drug Control Policy was a political appointee with no direct experience in the field -- and he is still there, trying to undermine current policies.

NCPIC Director described as 'prohibitionist'

Professor Jan Copeland, highly paid Director of The National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC), has been described as "a very enthusiastic supporter of prohibition" on the UKCIA blog.

The writer, who says he has heard Professor Copeland speak three times at forums in the UK, claims her input into NCPIC publicity is slanted and easy to spot. This opinion resonates with this blog's sharp criticism of NCPIC's output since its inception.

Questions must be asked about a supposedly evidence-based public organisation which is seen to be driven by the personal ideology of its director. Our tax dollars should be spent on establishing the truth, not selectively interpreting evidence to support a preordained ideology.

The public has a right to assume that information presented as scientific is unbiased and reliable, especially when it comes from a Professor and they are paying for it.

And credulous media accepting NCPIC's media releases as authoritative need to look a little further into the facts, or at least seek opposing comment, before amplifying such propaganda. I name The Sydney Morning Herald and 702 Radio's Deborah Cameron as guilty in this regard. At least Professor Copeland's inaugural essay on the ABC blog was open to comments and was factually flamed.

To see previous posts on this subject, with links to the abovementioned material, just type NCPIC into the blog search field above.

Prohibitionists still peddling their nonsense

This almost laughable story from the UK Telegraph about a study into cannabis use was actually posted on an email list for Alcohol and other Drug professionals by Herschel Baker of Drug Free Australia. "Cannabis 'can cause psychosis in healthy people'" screams the headline, and it's all about the terrors of the new skunk-style cannabis -- complete with this picture of a skunk joint being rolled.

But the subjects of the study were not even given skunk, and the psychosis was transient, induced by an apparent overdose of pure THC injected into 22 very brave -- or stupid -- men, half of whom got a placebo. Unsurprisingly, those who received the placebo didn't overdose.

An analogy might be injecting people with pure vitamin A -- which is toxic in large doses -- and concluding from the resulting deaths that carrots can kill you (carrots being a good source of vitamin A).

THC overdose is an extremely unpleasant thing, but inducing it via injections proves nothing except that the loony right can still get funding from somewhere and the tabloid press still publish their 'findings'.

The article also repeats the myth that the THC content of street cannabis has risen from 6% in 1995 to 14% now. I have results from a Sydney university study showing potencies of seized NSW-grown marihuana from 1971. They range from 3% to 11.5%, the latter from wild plants picked in the Hunter Valley, decades before 'skunk' was thought of. Meanwhile some of the more looney prohibitionists still claim that potency has increased anywhere between 10 and 25 times. 25 multiplied by a potency of, say, 10% would give us weed which consists of 250% THC, a remarkable exercise in metaphysics.

Note that the study suffers from the usual traits of junk science -- small samples and a reductive method. Surely even the mentally challenged can see the difference between smoking something with an alleged 14% potency and being injected with something that's 100% pure?

It would be almost funny except that these myths still grip the public imagination, which is of course the purpose of such propaganda and of the dishonest charlatans who promulgate it. Never mind the ethics of injecting humans with an overdose.

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

By contrast, BBC UK published this thought-provoking piece about harm reduction and the concept of 'specific deterrence'. Note the comments below it. Then compare and contrast with the Telegraph piece.

Media Watch roasts Herald's pot rot

I had been looking for the time and energy to roast the Sydney Morning Herald's so-called medical reporter Kate Benson for uncritically publishing nonsense about drugs, but Media Watch has done it for me.

Benson on June 17 wrote about Cannabis addiction, a problematic concept that at worst refers to psychological addiction rather than the far more severe physical addiction suffered by frequent cigarette smokers or heroin users. The two conditions bear little similarity so using the same word for them is misleading.

I have seen many regular pot smokers simply give it up, with no side effects.

But the fiction of 'cannabis addiction' has unfortunately taken hold of the AOD sector since prohibitionist governments started throwing money at cannabis addiction programs, providing many in the sector a whole new career path. These people are not going to question the concept as their careers depend on it. Jan Copeland and NCPIC are prime examples, although they have retreated from their early alarmist nonsense since professional communicator Paul Dillon joined them.

But back to Kate Benson, not only does she mindlessly propagate a misconception of cannabis addiction but she totally screws up the statistics, claiming that one in six Australians were addicted when the Household Survey she quoted actually says that one in thirty smoke it daily.

Cool, Kate. Several of the comments on the Media Watch site ask what Kate was smoking when she wrote the story?

International experts talk sense on cannabis

A panel of international experts has concluded that the prohibition of cannabis causes more harm than the drug itself. The UK's Beckley Foundation commissioned the panel in the lead-up to next year's UN review of global drug policy.

The panel's conclusions have received wide news coverage (even in the SMH!), a rare but welcome balance to the hysterical and inaccurate stories we are usually bombarded with.

Typically, the anti-drug zealots will ignore this new report and continue spinning their increasingly transparent propaganda.

I challenge Jan Copeland, director of the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre, to discredit the findings of the Beckley Cannabis Commission, as her supposedly "evidence-based" message is diametrically opposed. As she is privileged to possess the resources to do this, and either she is wrong or the Commission is wrong, avoiding the issue will destroy any credibility NCPIC may have.

If she cannot or will not discredit the Commission, it must be concluded that NCPIC is immorally wasting millions of taxpayer's dollars in its partisan mission of disinformation.

I challenge Jan Copeland to explain the contradiction between her portrayal of cannabis as a seriously dangerous drug rivalling Ice and the Beckley Commission's conclusion that:

The probability and scale of harm among heavy cannabis users is modest compared with that caused by many other psychoactive substances, both legal and illegal, in common use, namely, alcohol, tobacco, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin.

PS: 7/10/08 The actual Beckley Commission report is now online. The conclusions and recommendations are on Page 169. Please note the 49 pages of references. An appendix outlines desirable directions for research into cannabis, offering a wider agenda than the present politically directed search for harms. Of note among these are two areas that have been crying out for attention: Proper epidemiological research into the effect of cannabis on car accident rates; and research into the precursors, genetic or otherwise, indicating why cannabis is enjoyed by some but causes anxiety in others. Knowing the warning signs of psychosis could be a useful tool in preventing harm.