KX shooting vid goes viral

Apparently this news clip from Channel Nine has gone viral and is so popular it's being remixed on Youtube. (233,420 views by 26 May).

Check Clare Werbeloff talking about the "wogs", one fat and one thin, who argued about sleeping with one's cousin before one shot the other last Saturday night. 

Check the police numbers! While the local NIMBYS are using this as 'proof' that venues need to be shut down, we don't know that alcohol was involved. But we do know that the perp brought a gun with him on his night out. I'd say that's the fundamental problem, and punishing whatever venue these guys were at will do nothing to solve it. 

PS 25 May: The SMH reports this morning that Clare Werbeloff's eyewitness account, described above, was a fake.

"We have interviewed her and she has not witnessed the shooting," said acting Kings Cross Police crime manager, Detective Inspector Matt McQueen. " She has admitted to making it all up and has not witnessed the shooting."

IMO that makes the whole saga even better! It's live theatre of the highest order, impro from the party precinct. Alcohol-fuelled creativity! "You slept with my cousin" is the new millennium equivalent of Didn't you kill my bruvver? (by Ian Drury & the Blockheads?). Fully sick.

Council destroys more public art

The Kings Cross community was horrified last week when Council contractors removed four life-sized photographic portraits installed by Channel Ten’s Guerrilla Gardens team seven weeks earlier on the corner of Ward Avenue and Roslyn Street.

The work was on a private wall with full co-operation of the owners, the 'Sisters on the corner,' Catholic nuns who have worked in the area for over 20 years.

I've written a full report in The City News.

Truly, the City of Villages would better be known as The City of Pillages. 

By contrast, when Guerrilla Gardens created an installation near the Balmain Tigers Club, Greens Mayor of Leichhardt Jamie Parker wrote to them advising that some of the plants would not survive the sunlight they were exposed to. The team responded and replaced the plants with more suitable varieties.  Result: Balmain richer, Kings Cross poorer. Thanks Clover.

Above: KX busker Cathie O’Brien posing in front of her portrait, part of the original installation. Below, today's blank walls courtesy of Clover Moore, with the disappointed 'Sisters on the corner' who had been thrilled to have the work on their wall.

PS 30 May: Council has apologised for the removal of the art and has issued the following statement:

“Unfortunately the mural was removed after a complaint was received from a member of the public about offensive graffiti on the mural. Rather than remove the graffiti only, City graffiti removal contractors took down the mural. The City supports the work of the Guerrilla Gardeners, providing there are no safety issues and we apologise for this error. The City is now investigating what options there are for reinstating the mural on the site.”

Prohibition debate shifting ground

The prohibition debate in Sydney seems to be shifting ground, with The SMH today kindly publishing another of my letters, this one called Prohibition doesn't work. I was responding to an Elizabeth Farrelly piece lamenting the burglary of her house by junkies and pinning the syndrome on the true cause: prohibition and junkies.

Another letter from a Redfern resident concurs. It seems living in the epicentre of street drug fallout and having to deal with it daily clarifies the mind (conservatives excepted of course -- they just carry on with their fallacious dogma).

In the past I have had little success getting letters on this topic published. Let's hope it signals a new framework for sensible public debate.

PS Dr Andrew Byrne from the Redfern Clinic has written in more detail how Portugal's systems work.

PPS 25 May: One reply to the letters above from  prohibitionist Matt Kwan was published on Saturday. My letter is described as "illogical" but see if you can pick the multiple fallacies in the following:

"Money will still matter

Michael Gormly and Thea Gumbert (Letters, May 22) believe legalisation of drugs such as heroin will result in less crime, as addicts will no longer have to steal to support their habits. This is illogical. Many illicit drugs are highly addictive. Sooner or later, dependence will outstrip addicts' capacity to pay, regardless of where they buy drugs. Stealing will continue under prohibition or legalisation, as both require money to be exchanged for drugs.

Matt Kwan Sydney"

I replied (see below) and wasn't published. But Stuart Cranston from Coogee nailed it better than I did with this letter published today:

Cigarette ban is no answer

Matt Kwan (Letters, May 23-24), when have you ever heard of a cigarette smoker, someone who is hooked on the most addictive drug in the world, committing a crime to pay for a packet? I guarantee that your answer would be never and the reason is that tobacco is legal and as a result the prices are kept low and within reason.

If, however, tobacco was criminalised, the price would skyrocket and the supply and distribution would be controlled and managed by organised criminal gangs. That is why the argument for prohibition fails dismally in this context.

Stuart Cranston Coogee

An elegant reply, Stuart! Two letters preceding his also rebut prohibitionist dogma as preached by Miranda Devine.

My unpublished reply to Matt Kwan follows:

It is Matt Kwan who is illogical about drug addiction (Letters 23 May). He thinks addiction has no upper limit to its consumption and therefore addicts would return to crime even if drugs were legal and regulated.

It ain’t necessarily so. Supply by prescription would imply not only built-in health management but also the ability of doctors to prescribe to the needs of the addict. Meanwhile the wheels would fall off the illegal supply chain, both from plummeting demand and ‘unfair’ price pressure from the regulated product. Yes, some addicts would try to operate outside the system but, faced with a choice of a long and possibly fruitless search on the streets or the certainty of a quality product at a much lower price, the desperate addict would overwhelmingly favour the latter, leaving us with far safer homes and more pleasant public spaces. 

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo

Seriously, would you buy dodgy illegal product at $50 a hit when you could get a quality legal product around ten times cheaper? If addiction did drive users to more and more product, wouldn't their $5 hit still be better value than the $50 option? And if they did steal to get their $5, wouldn't that still imply a ten-times reduction in crime by addicts?

International drug cartels reportedly factor in a 50% loss of their product in transit, and still make exorbitant profits because there is no legal alternative to their product. Legal supply of drugs would send such a highly leveraged business to the wall quick smart. Imagine a legitimate business like GMH losing half the vehicles they export and having to double their RRP to compensate. Not viable.

Another thing Matt Kwan doesn't get is that most addicts keep their tolerance at a fairly steady level, many holding down jobs. It seems Matt believes the myths peddled by prohibitionists, which is understandable if he has little first-hand knowledge of the street drug scene.

Balancing the risks and benefits of cannabis

While the prohibitionists and most media keep demonising recreational drugs, amplifying every possible negative finding about them, a more balanced and factual body of data is slowly accumulating.

Much is made of the link between cannabis and schizophrenia, and piles of research is being funded to prove the link. However a Melbourne AOD researcher recently posted the following on the ANCD's Drugtalk email discussion group: 

Using the Lancet meta-analysis we can see that of 6.2 million cannabis smokers in the UK, 800 experienced schizophrenia. Thus 0.00125% of cannabis smokers experience schizophrenia. Or, 99.99875% of cannabis smokers do not.

So prohibitionists who use the mental illness argument to support their position are happy to persecute the 99.99875% who are not affected in a vain attempt to save the remainder, who it seems have contracted the disease anyway, despite prohibition. The stupidity is remarkable. The dishonesty of beating up this problem while obscuring the context of these tiny numbers is unforgivable.

Also The Beckley Foundation is about to research the link between cannabis and creativity. One day adults might be able to balance risk against benefit using credible information, like we can for most activities.

Meanwhile The Wall Street Journal has run a long piece interviewing Barak Obama’s new ‘Drugs Czar’ and it seems change is at least in the air. The report begins:

The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.

In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues.

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

Climate sceptic’s new book refuted

I don’t quite understand why certain people seem hard-wired to believe that human activity has no effect on climate, and will believe any old crock that supports their view even after the claims have been disproved ad nauseam. Adelaide’s Professor Ian Plimer has published just such a book, his academic rank giving superficial credibility to his claims. However he is  a geologist with no previous work on climate science published, let alone peer-reviewed.

To its credit The Australian, which frequently publishes material from climate sceptics, has run a review shredding Plimer’s book, showing that it re-runs a litany of discredited furphies. Some of these beggar belief -- for instance according to Scienceblog, Plimer blindly accepts Khilyuk and Chilingar, the guys who compared human CO2 emissions with natural CO2 emissions over the entire history of the planet and concluded that human emissions were insignificant. These guys sound scientific, but they were comparing billions of years with hundreds. Be careful what you believe (including anything on this blog!). Always question authority.

Shock, horror! Old people outraged at young partygoers

The local NIMBYs have taken councillors on a night tour of Kings Cross to demonstrate the horror of lots of young people partying, reports The Herald. Despite the fact that real estate prices have held up well in the area, these ageing serial local whingers are apparently unable to sell up and move out. No, Kings Cross has to be suppressed back to some arbitrary level -- decided by Councillors no doubt -- where the fallout from partygoers is "acceptable".

It's almost funny that the very Council which has used regulation to concentrate Kings Cross into The Strip is now concerned about over-concentration. The solution? More regulation.

The old whingers trotted out their usual litany that the Cross was "much worse than it used to be". Yet Frank Black's book Kings Cross Double Cross is filled with incidents from the past that make even my hair stand on end... like a trucker who drove his prime mover down the stairs into a strip club because the receptionist had ripped him off in change, and a detective raping a rape victim with a bottle.

It's true that Sydney has far too many nasty, violent idiots who seem to have swallowed rap gangsta style and ethics whole , as I witnessed last week when I stopped two of them who were savagely beating a transvestite sex worker -- not drunk, just full of hate. But putting the screws on Kings Cross cannot make this go away, only shift the violence somewhere else. Your suburb perhaps? The NIMBYs need to think long and hard about their own ethics.

More high-visibility policing would do the most to mitigate problems, and my senior police sources say there is no lack of police because they just bring them in from other areas. Of course, sniffer dog squads at 4pm and troops of invisible undercover cops looking for drug action do nothing to help the main problem...

Half the problems the councillors were so horrified about were the result of existing regulation, like smokers on footpaths. All the unique but slightly dodgy small bars that used to dot the back streets have been forcibly closed by Council so now all the action is concentrated into the strip with a less-and-less diverse suburban crowd. But of course straight bourgeois people like our Councillors and NIMBYs can only see one way forward... more regulation. 

Psst... it won't work! 

Interestingly, all the 'problems' the councillors saw were on the uncontrolled streets but they are going to target the venues which are a controlled environment, even as the Herald story described revellers drinking from winecask bladders in the street (there's an empty one outside my front door right now!)

Picture: KX at 4am on Friday night. I dragged myself out of bed to get a shot of stranded revellers to illustrate the lack of public transport at that time -- only to find the place literally crawling with vacant cabs! Oh well.

Council manufactures ammunition for its War on Kings Cross

Crime in Kings Cross in nearly all categories has steadily fallen over the past year, even as more big new licensed venues than ever have opened. Any evidence-based approach would have to consider the strong possibility that Council's mantra of "More licensed premises = more crime so let's restrict the premises" is flawed.

But no, Council has gone ahead and manufactured a junk study using data from 2001–2006 that 'proves' their hypothesis, even though only 14% of 190 local respondents to a face-to-face survey agreed with it.

The Sydney Morning Herald has swallowed the spin whole, not only taking the study seriously (a serious failure of critical thinking by Urban Affairs reporter Paul Bibby) but quoting police out of context (according to police I have spoken to since).

If the hypothesis had any legs, why is it that crime has fallen significantly over the past year even as huge venues have opened including The Trademark, Piano Bar, Kings Cross Hotel, Madame deBiers, the Sugarmill and Elk. A number of licensed restaurant/bars have also opened. 

And why, when Councillors were apprised of those facts last night by Kings Cross Partnership chairman Adrian Bartels, was he aggressively questioned by Councillor Harris (Greens) as if he was some sort of idiot for not understanding the clear data in the Council study.  Cr Harris then turned to Police for clarification only to have Mr Bartels’ statements verified. 

Cr Mallard (Liberal) asked Cr Harris if he was going to apologise but it was not to be, and nor did any of the other Councillors let the facts get in the way of a good bit of temperance union dogma as they voted in support of the study, which will soon go on exhibition on Council’s website for public comment. 

Just one example of the nonsense in the research is the way it handled the fact that Manly and Coogee have fewer licensed premises than Kings Cross yet more crime -- it waffled on about the size of venues and said this reflected "evidence that a small number of hotels are often associated with a large proportion of crime." Huh? Doesn't that contradict their whole approach? And could the higher crime rate simply reflect the higher proportion of moronic thugs that inhabit those places? (Ask any late-night taxi driver about the demographics of Coogee and Manly). But such subtle possibilities were not examined in the research.

This is my take on the problem - that we have a suburban yob problem, not a venue problem. If anything the pubs are over-managed as they scramble to comply with the existing plethora of regulations that just put up the price of a drink for the rest of us.

Punishing the venues won't make the yobs disappear. At best they will go somewhere else to make their mischief. And that's the real agenda -- good old-fashioned NIMBYism. 

Council’s report and junk studies are already available below.

The agenda item summary is here:

 

The "Late Night Trading: Community Perceptions" report by Urbis, dated 30 June 2008, is here. 

And finally, the "cumulative impact study", a report from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre for the City of Sydney entitled "Alcohol-related crime in city of sydney LGA", is here:

PS: I have previously taken apart the police data linking venues to violence, and it's all over the place like a mad person's breakfast -- no credibility whatsoever. I analysed it in a City News editorial.  Anyone using it as a basis for further research also seriously compromises their work. Interestingly, no response to my piece was forthcoming.

Prisoners wanted

The Sydney Morning Herald kindly printed one of my letters last week, calling it…

"Wanted: prisoners"

The threatened NSW "jail sale" has implicit dangers seemingly not yet aired ("Union leaders threaten to thwart Labor's prison privatisation plot", April 28). Just as the Government guaranteed private road tunnel operators a certain amount of traffic to guarantee their revenue, it is likely to promise private incarcerators a certain number of prisoners.

This would create a chilling conflict of interest, with the Government facing compensation payouts to jail operators if it reduced crime or liberalised laws.

The justice system should be driven by justice, not by fear of fiscal pain, and it should remain in public hands.

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo

A lesson in spin

A press release about how cannabis-based ointments MAY help control those horrible staph-type infections people get in hospitals was qualified by the following cautionary statement about the language in the media release. Prohibitionists, researchers and journalists seeking dramatic headlines with shock-horror stories about drugs would do well to be so honest.

Forward-Looking Statements 
This Press Release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934. A statement containing works such as “anticipate,” “seek,” intend,” “believe,” “plan,” “estimate,” “expect,” "project," "plan," or similar phrases may be deemed "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Some or all of the events or results anticipated by these forward-looking statements may not occur. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include the future U.S. and global economies, the impact of competition, and the Company’s reliance on existing regulations regarding the use and development of cannabis-based drugs. Cannabis Science, Inc. does not undertake any duty nor does it intend to update the results of these forward-looking statements. 

Living without gravity

I thought I had seen everything young heroes could do on a bike, but this guy takes the cake:

Portugal teaches the world a lesson about decriminalisation

The prohibition debate really is over. A comprehensive report from the Cato Institute examines the results of Portugal’s 2001 decriminalisation of all drugs (including all the ‘hard’ ones).

None of the dire warnings of right-wing panic merchants have eventuated. To the contrary, drug use has remained stable or even reduced, particularly among school-aged people. The adverse health consequences of drug abuse including overdoses and sexually transmitted diseases have also reduced significantly. HIV/AIDS rates among drug users have been slashed. Deaths from opiates have dropped by more than half.

Resources have been shifted from policing drugs to education and prevention programs. That's ironic as ‘prevention’ is the current buzzword of the prohibitionists.

PS 29/April/09: Well, the debate is never really over because some people simply believe in prohibition regardless of the facts.  The Wall Street Journal has run a debate, To Legalize or not. The pro-legalisation piece (rather, pro-decriminalisation as it turns out), runs what to me looks like a solid, logical line, briefly noting Portugal’s experience after decriminalisation. 

For balance, the WSJ also ran an anti-legalisation essay but it collapses in the second paragraph with the statement “What would America look like with twice or three times as many drug users and addicts?”. It argues that law enforcement had reduced crack and meth use by 60%, ignoring swathes of statistics that show drug use and the number of addicts has not changed much in decades. It also ignores worldwide comparisons that generally show drug use to be on the high end in the prohibitionist countries. It's clever but it’s still tripe.

Even if the number of addicts did increase under decriminalisation, it wouldn't look so bad as the criminal element would have been eliminated from the equation. Prohibitionists however, with their black-and-white viewpoint, can't imagine such a complex scenario.

How big money is sending us down the gurgler

Rolling Stone magazine has run the best story I've seen on the WFC (that's World Financial Crisis, nothing to do with fried chicken). It clarifies the confusion between two points of view – one, that it's all a conspiracy or two, that politicians are sort of OK people who are doing their best on behalf of their constituents.

Writer Matt Taibbi begins:

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

It's eight pages well worth a read.

At last! The Herald gets real about drugs

Today's editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald marks a sea-change in granny herald's attitudes. Finally Sydney's bikie wars and gang violence are put into their correct context as ‘unintended consequences’ of the failed 100-year War on Drugs.

The piece refers to The Economist's call for decriminalised, regulated availability of recreational drugs because it is the ‘least bad policy’. 

That magazine “noted that in 1998 the United Nations general assembly called for a drug-free world by 2008. In the intervening decade, despite a massive death toll and the expenditure by the United States alone of $US40 billion ($57 billion) a year on the war, the extent of drug use in First World countries has hardly changed at all.”

What a contrast to the spin coming from the UN's chief prohibitionist, Antonio Maria Costa, who interprets this failure as a “stabilisation” of illicit drug use. It is he who uses the coy phrase “unintended consequences” to describe the worldwide violence, corruption and injustice stemming from this stupid war against an industry which makes up about eight per cent of world GDP, bigger than the economies of most countries.

But it's still baby steps from The SMH. The next step is to acknowledge that illicit drugs are not 'the scourge of society’ as the dogma goes, but a pleasurable privilege that is not a significant problem for 98 per cent of users. After all, that's why the “persistent demand” that The Herald refers to just won't go away.

Bikies and prohibition make NSW a police state

Kings Cross is likely to see more violence as the NSW government declares yet another war – this time on bikies.

But this War, which will give police unprecedented secret powers, is just an extension of the War on Drugs, as explained below.

“Follow the money” says Duncan McNab in the SMH today, referring to the profits to be made from illegal drugs. He writes:

“The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that in 2004, 9 per cent of Australians had tried amphetamines. One in five aged from 20 to 29 had dabbled, much of it supplied by outlaw motorcycle gangs. In August 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy with a value of $440 million was seized and linked to a bike gang… But the seizure did not stop the party.

“So it is no wonder that gangs will fight hard to protect their turf and the dollars generated. Critical parts of that turf are the nightclubs of Darlinghurst and Kings Cross.”

[Pictured are the bikes of a Nomads chapter parked in Kings Cross in July 2004.]

The new laws are based on South Australian laws which allow police to search your home if you live next door to a suspect – without your knowledge. You can also be jailed for meeting a “proscribed person” more than six times in a year.

Police never have to reveal the evidence they cite in deciding whose home to search or whom to proscribe. It gives them powers that rival police states such as Burma or the fascist regimes of last century. These powers WILL be misused.

You can also be jailed for failing to provide identification to police, says the SMH. Police Minister Tony Kelly today reassured 'working families' that the new laws applied only to people suspected of “serious” offences such as drug trafficking, murder, kidnap, pedophilia etc.

Of course if you repeatedly say drug trafficking is a serious offence and mention it alongside murder and pedophilia then it must be a serious offence. However this does not apply to pubs because the drug they sell – alcohol – is legal. And if you are one of the 20% of young people who have used amphetamines or one of the 50% who have tried cannabis, you will be surprised to know you are the victim of a crime as serious as murder or pedophilia. But, sadly, that's the fiction on which our laws are based.

The new laws will also give police the power to declare protesters or strikers Proscibed Groups – on the spot with no warrant or reference to the courts.

True to form, prohibition is not directly mentioned in The SMH. Only Crikey seems to see that ‘elephant in the room’, with Greg Barns today writing:

“As I noted in Crikey on 1 April last year, these laws are largely unenforceable, cement in law the concept of guilt by association and would do nothing to lessen the problem of bikie gangs’ violence because they completely miss the point – which is that bikie gangs thrive on our refusal to decriminalise drugs.

“The Serious and Organised Crime (Control) Act passed through the South Australian Parliament in May last year make the anti-terrorism laws look like a freedom charter.”

Victorian anti-ice campaign 'bullshit' says professor

A nice story from The Age exposes the reality vs the spin of the War Against Drugs.

Premier Steve Bracks in 2007 trumpeted a new $14 million campaign against Ice, 'the new scourge of society' at the time. Not only has the campaign disappeared down the gurgler but the Ice epidemic fizzled out, too.

"I have never been subject to a bigger load of bullshit," said Professor Nick Crofts, an expert in harm reduction programs.

Experts were worried that the focus on ice simply took the focus off heroin and that the campaign was basically a political stunt.

Note the comment from the Opposition at the end of the Age story -- they just don't get it either.

Media addicted to drugs panic stories

The media are addicted to scare stories about drugs. In 1934 it was a 'Snowstorm' as Melbourne newspapers beat up a circulation-boosting panic about a cocaine epidemic – despite their inability to find anyone who had actually abused the drug. However it was enough justification to form the first Australian Drug Squad.

This morning ABC radio, in between all the alcopops stories, reported a new  threat from heroin. It reported political instability in South-west Asia has allowed the supply of heroin to double. Apparently overdose rates in Victoria are rising and Australia is an attractive market because users are willing to pay high prices. It's panic stations in case we return to the bad old days of the 1990s with three people dying each day from overdoses.

This could be portrayed as further evidence that prohibition has failed, even as Antonio Maria Costa extolls its successes at the UN. But, as usual, this 'woolly mammoth in the room' was not mentioned, the stories fizzling out with insipid calls for the government to do some unspecified thing  about it. 

Apparently the government is "focusing too much on alcohol". But, hang on, the same people have been lobbying hard in support of the alcopops tax which looks like failing in the Senate anyway. Sheesh, what's a poor government to do?

Hint: we know that medically supervised injecting centres prevent deaths from overdoses, so if those deaths are really the concern, why not build a few more centres, as recommended by the 1999 NSW Drugs Summit? Injecting centres work, prohibition doesn't. It's unarguable.

Terrifying footage of US War on Drugs

The little kiddies living on this street in suburban USA will be staying inside for a while after this wild shootout in which a SWAT team "Takes out" a "dangerous dealer".

Even with this level of expenditure and force, illicit drugs remain easily available in every town in the US -- and in Australia. This video is a glimpse of what a "drug-free world" would really look like. Truly, the solution is worse than the problem. 

Ecstasy 'riddled with rat poison'

Thus claims The Daily Telegraph today in a scare story about impurities in ecstasy-type pills.

"During recent drug hauls, the AFP's illicit drug intelligence program has analysed tablets that have shown traces of various "adulterants" including heroin, LSD, rat poison, methamphetamine, veterinary anaesthetics and crushed glass", it says.

"Among 14- to 19-year-old users 17.3 per cent used ecstasy - which experts say is growing in popularity compared with other illicit drugs - at least once a week.

"Recent government statistics also show that over 1.5 million had used ecstasy in their life and males were more likely than females to have used ecstasy."

The irony is, the story constitutes an excellent case against prohibition – firstly, any such impurities would not exist in a regulated market, thus removing the danger, and secondly, that's an awful lot of teenagers taking pills! Clearly prohibition isn't working. Of course that view is not mentioned by The Tele. 

Professional fence-sitter Paul Dillon timidly asserts that we need "ways of dealing with it more effectively."

That's for sure.

It's another beat-up from the Daily Terror!

An AOD (Alcohol and other drugs) professional provided this commentary on the story:

If the AFP has found active doses of Heroin in ersatz “e” pills, it would be a world first. No sample tested anywhere on the planet has been confirmed to contain active doses of Heroin.

This should not be surprising, as Heroin is worth hundreds of dollars per gram when sold as Heroin.

As far as I am aware, the only previous case in the literature is a pill tested by Interpol which tested positive, but to inactively small traces of Heroin. The amount found was so tiny that most commentators believe it had simply been stored in a zip lock bag that had previously contained powder heroin.

The Veterinary Anaesthetics mentioned are of course the dissociative Ketamine, a very common adulterant in dodgy “e”. Ketamine combined in the right dose-ratio with Methamphetamine or Dexamphetamine produces a synergistic effect that mimics true MDMA. In the wrong relative doses, this combination is either very “speedy” or very sedating.

When users describe a pill as “smacky” it almost always contains too much Ketamine. (Better informed users may call this “going in the K-hole.”)
When users describe a pill as “coke-based” it typically contains methamphetamine or other ATS, or caffeine. No pill has been found to contain active doses of cocaine, (for the same reasons that none have been found to contain active doses of heroin).

Very rarely pills are found that contain pesticides or other toxins.

UN drugs czar spins us into a new, futile war

The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs is meeting as I write to decide global drug policy for the next ten years. While drug authorities are deeply divided  about the current prohibitionist approach, Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has no doubt that prohibition is the answer.

But he defends his view with a string of fallacies, and this surely undermines his position. 

In a BBC interview today (Wed 11 March, 0832 UK time) , Costa claimed success for prohibition because 100 years ago, a lot more opium was being produced than there is now. However it is not valid to compare Shanghai in 1900 to models of legalised regulation being proposed nowadays by reformers. 

Then, opium was treated just like any commodity and international trade was fostered by Britain. Shiploads of it were produced in India and sold in China where it was consumed at will, largely through smoking in opium dens.

Nobody is proposing a return to any such model. For a start, today's addict injects heroin rather than smoking opium. This change was accelerated if not caused by the US-driven introduction of prohibition – heroin is more easily transported, concealed and consumed than opium, and produces higher profits. Heroin was originally smoked but, as prohibition tightened, the best bang for buck came, literally, from injecting.

That introduces more serious risks such as HIV AIDS. Russia is one of the strictest prohibitionist countries, where addicts are routinely jailed and methadone programs are banned. Needle exchanges are controversial and risky to use. An estimated two million addicts in the country – one addict for every 50 people of working age – is around eight times the rate for other European countries. There are around one million Russians with HIV which used to be spread mainly among drug users but is now spreading to the wider population. 

Russian prohibitionists blame their problem on the occupation of Afghanistan, the source of most of their heroin,  and urge the mass aerial spray-poisoning of opium crops.

But even if this horrendous solution choked the supply of heroin, trends in other countries show that addicts simply turn to other drugs such as pharmaceutical opioids or, worse, amphetamines which can be locally produced in secret labs.

To compare this situation to Shangai in 1900 is ludicrous. In doing so Costa also ignores the fact that the 1998 UN policy called for  a world free of drugs by 2008. It hasn't happened. Drug use is down in some places, up in others. Prohibitionist Sweden, showcase of the conservatives, has the same addiction rate as liberal Norway. Some drugs are declining worldwide but others are rising in popularity.

Costa glosses over this failure by claiming that the War on Drugs has “stabilised” drug consumption. He claims that "legalisation" would cause an explosion in drug use with “major health consequences.” Tell that to a Russian addict with HIV.

Because only 0.5% of people are addicts, he says, prohibition has worked. What nonsense! By the same token, only 1.5% or so of illicit drug users are addicts. The low addiction rates are not a result of prohibition. Simply, most people are too smart to get addicted in the first place, law or no law. 

Prohibitionists like Costa always say “legalisation” because it evokes the spectre of an out-of-control free-for-all with half the population wrecked on drugs. Costa argues that, because far fewer people use illegal drugs than alcohol and tobacco, prohibition has worked. It's more nonsense – our society has always used tobacco and alcohol more than other drugs, legal or not, because they are very different from other drugs. Think of it this way: if cannabis, heroin or ecstasy were legal, would you start using them? Nearly all non-users answer "no". Or, if you drink and we lived under alcohol prohibition, would you accept a glass of fine wine offered by a trusted friend at a private dinner? Probably. The law has little to do with people's choices in this regard.

The illicit drugs simply do not suit most people. A single dose is far more powerful than moderate amounts of alcohol. People take mdma or smoke marihuana to have a strong experience, to greatly alter their mental state in a pleasurable way. Most people are not interested in this and many have unpleasant experiences on these drugs. 

Alcohol is different – people have a few drinks for social reasons, and you can have a few over dinner without great effect.  Many people who enjoy a few drinks  simply dislike the effects of cannabis, hallucinogens or amphetamines. They don't have a good time on them and would not start using them if they were available legally. Just like people in The Netherlands.

A more accurate term than "legalisation" is “controlled availability”, a term which recognises that a legal, regulated framework could actually control many aspects of drug production, distribution and use, earning tax dollars along the way and saving a fortune in the cost of incarcerating millions of people, the great majority of whom have not in fact done anyone else any great harm.

Costa also ignores that the use of cannabis and ecstasy, for instance, exploded under prohibition in the 1960s and 1990s, and that they are easily available in every town in western countries. Is this what he calls success?

However, at least he now recognises the vast global drugs industry, calling it "an unintended consequence of prohibition". This illegal, unregulated and untaxed industry constitutes around 8% of global GDP. It's bigger than the oil and fuel industry! Costa blithely asserts that we simply need to get tougher and police this industry out of existence. 

From what area would he have us take the massive military budget required? Health, education, disaster aid, pensions, infrastructure, anti-terrorism?

What sort of a world would it be? A very ugly one I think, full of soldiers, guns, prisons and poison on a massive scale.

And all to 'prevent' something which for the vast, vast majority of drug users is not even a significant problem.

I note Costa has not answered the question posed to him by the dare to act email campaign: If "legalisation" will lead more people to take drugs, why does prohibitionist San Francisco have three times the cannabis usage rate of liberal Amsterdam? Costa has repeatedly, publicly evaded that one. See the footage of it via the link!

Costa's whole position is based on fallacy. But he doesn't care, because he and his prohibitionist friends control UNODC and all they need is enough spin to convince uncritical media and ill-informed people that their mindset is justified.

The Guardian neatly summarises the alternative approaches to drug regulation here.

PS 13/03/09  Antonio Maria Costa continues with more nonsense soundbites. Get this one: "Drugs are not harmful because they are controlled, they are controlled because they are harmful," he said. 

First, drugs are far more harmful because of prohibition -- see the 'ground glass and rat poison' post above this one on the main blog page. Second, drugs are hardly controlled when they are being pushed by an illegal international industry bigger than the fuel oil industry. It's a clever bit of spin from Costa, appropriating the word 'control' which is used by his opponents as in 'controlled availability', often interchanged with 'regulated supply'.

It's not a recession but “the great disruption”

This New York Times opinion piece rings true. 

We are not experiencing ‘The Great Recession’ as the IMF dubbed it today. 

Rather, it’s the collapsing of an unsustainable bubble blown up by  a model of wealth creation built on debt, planned obsolescence and exploitation of natural resources far beyond a level which can be passed on to future generations.

Equally interesting is a comment on the piece by Don Duncan which concludes:

“We've killed the goose; demand was unsustainable, propped up by enormous debt, and it's not coming back.

“So where are the jobs going to come from for a sustainable economy? The less energy we use, the more the energy companies will have to charge (and the government - see today's articles about new taxes to make up the decline in gas tax income, as people drive less and cars become more efficient). Any attempt to return to buying rubbish just to keep the economy turning over is doomed. Where's the tax base going to be?

“What will a sustainable economy look like?”

Indeed. It’s highly recommended reading.

Drug search goes badly wrong for Police

The courts have thrown out a police case against Kristian Bolwell, a Newtown solicitor, who was assaulted and arrested by police when he offered his card to a person they were searching for drugs. Mr Bolwell had two ribs broken by police during the arrest.

Costs of approximately $6,000 have also been awarded against the police after CCTV footage showed their case against Mr Bolwell to be based on lies. 

No drugs were found on the person being searched even though he had been indicated by a sniffer dog after a squad of police had entered the Coopers Arms Hotel in Newtown and blocked off all the exits before trawling patrons with the dog.

Mr Bolwell may sue for compensation. All costs of this case will be met by you and I, the taxpayers.

ABC radio transcript here. Previous blog entry here.

More great stencils get zapped

Local artist Mini-Graf kindly installed this work: Danger: A repressive society is coming in Brougham Lane for a prospective docco some friends of mine are piloting.

It was taken down within two hours. Can't have good art on the walls now, can we?

The Carriageworks people asked for the pic to run in their next art magazine.

Today I found a kindred blog, Nosey in Newtown, which pictured the German version of the stencil (below), also since removed.

Nosey documents the history of that wall as more artists keep putting new work there.

What officialdom will never realise is that some people need the freedom to act outside its claustrophobic middleclass oppression, and such people will gravitate to the inner city because suburbia is suffocating. 

But control is getting more and more effective in the name of nothing more than a middle-class obsession with order and sterility.

As one caller on radio 702 commented to graffiti-hater Deborah Cameron, "At the end of the day it's only paint on the wall". 'Get some perspective' was her message to those whose brains explode every time they see wall art.

Funnily enough calls ran mostly in favour of wall art and even lenience to taggers -- "make them clean it up" was the commonly suggested punishment, and I have no problem with that if the wall owner doesn't want it on their wall.

But the haters of public art believe themselves to be the sole arbiters of public amenity.

PS Deborah Cameron yesterday spoke a nice faux-pas when she described herself as "a scrubber", referring to her neurotic habit of scrubbing out graffiti.

A heavy hitter against prohibition

Respected magazine The Economist, hardly your typical lefty rantsheet, has published one of the most succinct rebuttals of drug prohibition. 

A short quote:

"Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before."  

Obama policies expose Drug War hypocrisy

The Wall Street Journal yesterday analysed the effects of President Barak Obama's new policy of halting Federal busts for medical marihuana use in states where it is legal.

Like all policies that decriminalise use but keep trafficking illegal, the policy means the high-risk and high-profit incentive for illegal drug cartels continues.

The Journal relates this to the carnage in Mexico. There, major drug cartels making around $10bn a year out of gringo demand for pot and coke also fight a bloody armed war against their own government, which is in turn financed by the Americans. So US money is fighting US money on foreign ground.

Mexico is paying a high price for this contradiction between US demand and US policy, and many there believe the fallout from the drug war is far worse than problems around the drugs. Pictured (top) are Mexican soldiers deploying and (right), some of the decapitations performed by the Cartels (pic by Glenn Beck).

On top of that, US gun dealers are making a fortune selling weapons to the Mexican cartels, also reported in the WSJ. Truly, the beneficiaries of prohibition are a scary bunch. 

Attempts by the Mexicans to decriminalise personal drug use have been blocked by massive pressure from the Bush administration. 

More and more commentators are calling for an end to the War on Drugs, a move which would very quickly starve the cartels of their income. 

Then the problems of drugs could be addressed through regulatory controls along with health and education measures all paid for by taxing the drugs. Californian Senator Tom Ammanio has introduced a Bill along these lines arguing that the money earned and saved by the government would go a long way to address the government's soaring financial  deficit.

Change is indeed in the air. Obama's move on medical marihuana is a small, safe step in the right direction. But meanwhile Mexico is soaked in blood and our own SBS News has started reporting the Mexican carnage but, typical of the Australian media, mentions nothing about the role of prohibition in the problem.

Ice not a drug of violence

It seems that amphetamines don't make people any more violent than normal. It seems, rather, that criminals tend to be violent according to a study of nearly 100,000 people by the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

Yet it's true that people who seriously abuse ice -- or cocaine for that matter -- can and do have violent psychotic episodes. Any cases that I know of have been preceded by long intense injecting binges of perhaps two weeks with lack of sleep and proper food contributing. I surmise that people who do this must be so few they are not significant statistically.

Email campaign targets UN drugs boss

One way powerful prohibitionists shore up their position is by appointing reactionaries to key positions -- for example Mr Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Mr Costa has several times publicly evaded a simple question about the effectiveness of prohibition, finally resorting to an outright lie. An international email campaign has been organised to persuade him to answer the question properly.

Read the facts, watch the videos, email Mr Costa at http://daretoact.net/

Then pass it on to your friends! It's important to act now as on March 11-12 a High Level Segment of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs will review the implementation of targets adopted by the UNGASS in 1998 when they decided the War on Drugs would result in a 'Drug-free world' by now. I don't think it worked. 

(UNGASS = United Nations General Assembly Special Session.)

Drug War 'logic' beggars belief

The website stopthedrugwar.com highlights some of the stupid arguments put forward by prohibitionists. Are these people idiots, brainwashed or just calculatingly dishonest?

The recent incident involving Michael Phelps getting caught smoking pot has caused the age long debate to rear its head again on whether or not we should legalize or at least decriminalize our drug laws. The idea in attacking the drug laws is that people should be free to make their own decisions. The problem with that line of reasoning is that you would never be able to draw the line on establishing any law. Everything would have to be legal, including armed robbery, murder, assault, etc. In essence, it would be anarchy. [Shreveport Times]

Stopthedrugwar replies succinctly:

We want to legalize marijuana, but not murder. Does that make sense? Armed robbery, etc. would still be illegal. No one will ever try to legalize violent crime, so shut up and stop worrying about that.

Then the same idiot claims that the rise of pot cafés in Amsterdam proves that legalisation increases use, ignoring the fact that, per capita, 3-4 times FEWER Dutch smoke cannabis than people in the US. Perhaps the rise in pot cafés is due to refugee tokers from prohibitionist countries enjoying a relaxing holiday, classic "balloon effect".

And from the Wall Street Journal:

If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence," a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence "because these guys are flailing. We're taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.

He's talking about the mass murder in Mexico as drug cartels fight for massive profits from the illicit US market (see post below).

If success = mass murder does it not occur to these people that the cure is worse than the problem?

These prohibitionists also say higher prices (and therefore profits) generated by the War are a sign of success. What would failure look like again?

Drug War failed, say three ex-presidents

Three ex-presidents from South America have slammed the US-driven War on Drugs, claiming it was pushing their fragile democracies to breaking point, reports The Australian. They cited the ongoing massacres happening in their countries, endemic police corruption and continuing use of illicit drugs.

The US claimed the violence was evidence their strategy was working as it showed the drug cartels were under pressure.

Over 6,000 people were killed in Mexico last year with decapitation becoming fashionable. It's a small price to pay for keeping a few conservatives happy and our jails full, I suppose.

Meanwhile nearly seven tonnes of cocaine was found on a ship in international waters off Mexico in a joint operation between the US Coast Guard and the Mexicans, who took the loot and the crew back to the undoubted security of Oaxaca.  What could possibly go wrong, Señor?

PS (17 02 09) An erudite article in The Independent (UK) puts a passionate case for regulated legalisation of recreational drugs. Some snippets...

"Drugs syndicates control 8 per cent of global GDP – which means they have greater resources than many national armies. They own helicopters and submarines and they can afford to spread the woodworm of corruption through poor countries right to the top."The cartels offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: plato o plomo. Silver or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet."

"When alcohol was legalised [after prohibition], the murder-rate fell off a cliff – and continued to drop for the next 10 years. (Rates of alcoholism, revealingly, remained the same.)"

Ecstasy use up, sniffer dogs on the nose, pub lockouts dumped

While ecstasy use is "shooting up" according to the SMH, sniffer dogs finally got the bad report they deserve. Says the Herald: 

"In one case considered by the ombudsman, an operation costing about $41,000 resulted in a $1000 fine.

"A 2007 National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre report found that most people who knew dogs would be at an event beforehand simply made a better effort to conceal their drugs."

Bureau of Crime Statistics figures showed the number of "ecstasy incidents" in inner Sydney rose from 211 to 540 over the 24 months to September last year. 

And in another wild stab at a figure by the 2007 National Household Survey, the number of users in Australia had risen to 600,000. (Recent estimates in Britain have ranged from 500,000 every weekend to 400,000 users nationally. Someone is talking nonsense but the trend is clear).

As usual the plod cited the terrible chemicals used to make pills as a reason not to take them, blissfully unaware that this was also a rationale for legalising them and regulating manufacture and distribution. He was silent on the dangers of peanuts (see post below!).

This week I wrote a major editorial on the subject for The City News, suggesting that the constant blitzing by sniffer dogs on streets and in clubs was simply turning more people to alcohol which in turn created worse problems. The above picture, taken in Kings Cross, was captioned: "Police humiliating the counter-culture and imposing the alcohol monoculture".

Pub lockouts dumped

While the mainstream press hasn't picked up this idea yet, events again reflect the themes of this blog as, after only four months, the lockout policy applied to 48 pubs is to be dumped in favour of a "star rating" supposedly indicating the danger level of a pub. It's just as stupid but at least it's less draconian and this time the pubs will be consulted.

Ecstasy safer than peanuts: New Scientist

Can't help laughing at the analogy in this New Scientist editorial:

"Say you have to decide whether to give a stranger a peanut or ecstasy. Which is safest? Ecstasy, of course.

"A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA."

The piece goes on to lament the absurd nature of drug laws and policies that kowtow to the tabloid press instead of to rational evidence.

Cabramatta ran on bent cops

The SMH today tells of the resurrection of Sydney's Cabramatta from junkie hellhole to normal suburb. Prohibitionists often use it to illustrate the success of a Get Tough on Drugs policy. But those in the know say the crackdown just displaced the problems to other suburbs. Now it appears the bad old days spawned police corruption, that inevitable twin of prohibition. From the Herald story: 

"Now, the suburb is like any other, Mr Lalic says. The drug problem has instead spread up and down the railway line to nearby suburbs he says.

"The former assistant police commissioner Clive Small - who in his new book Smack Express writes that police corruption contributed to the drug problem in Cabramatta - says that determined police action and the heroin drought contributed to cleaning it up.

"Cocaine and methamphetamines are the drugs of choice now, he says, but they are sold away from the public eye. Even though they are a bigger problem than heroin ever was there is insufficient public awareness, Mr Small says."

PS (21/02/09)  The Australian has published a lengthy report on Smack Express by its co-author, Tom Gilling. While revealing the pervasive power of organised crime in Australia, and recognising the sheer scale of the money and corruption involved, it ends with a whimper: 

If we as a country don’t stand up now against organised crime, the battle will be lost, and it will be our own fault.

Not a word about how prohibition provides the fertile fields for our modern-day Al Capones and their $multi-billion business. The article remains safely within a trite 'cops vs robbers' framework. I'll be reading the book in the hope it goes further.

Gang violence in Vancouver linked to prohibition

Three Canadian newspapers this week, reacting to an epidemic of public gangland shooting murders, have blamed it on drug prohibition and called for an examination of controlled, taxed supply policies.

The price of cocaine in particular has soared because of the War on Drugs, ironically one of the aims of the War. But high prices mean high profits and the gangs become all the more vicious in pursuit of the loot. It's Al Capone all over again and it's clear the harms of prohibition are worse than the harms of drugs, which are occurring in any case.

See an editorial from The Province journal in Vancouver here. 

When will the Australian media begin catching up?

Prohibitionists persecute quadriplegic

Already living a life-sentence trapped in a body that does not function because of a car accident, quadriplegic Paul Baker faces another as the NSW legal system works out what to do with him after convicting him of manufacturing ecstasy.

The cost of care to keep this unfortunate man in jail is reported to exceed the $300k per year we shell out to keep a prisoner in maximum security.

The drug itself is dangerous in certain circumstances – about as dangerous as international air travel if you compare the number of people who use it to the casualties. 

But, since the 1930s, prohibitionists have carefully constructed a moral panic about first cannabis and then every other recreational drug besides alcohol. No-one has done the same about air travel. So most of us sit, contentedly cocooned in our misinformed mindset and happily let  the forces of prohibition destroy people's lives in the name of a social illusion.

As long as it happens to someone else, we can ignore it, right? Even when a quadriplegic is to be jailed for committing a crime that's no more harmful than a Qantas pilot doing his job. What a travesty of justice.

According to our own crime researcher Don Weatherburn, you have to inflict harm to prevent harm, a puzzling proposition bordering on the Kafka-esque. But no-one weighs up and compares the harms. Likely no significant harm would have come to anyone if Mr Baker had actually produced good quality MDMA ecstasy (and a lot of people would have had a brilliantly good time). But locking him up for the rest of his life -- at our expense -- is a definite harm. And it won't even teach him a lesson because the lesson is nonsense.

From Wikipedia:

The chief executive of the UK Medical Research Council stated that MDMA is "on the bottom of the scale of harm," and was rated to be of lesser concern than alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, as well as several classes of prescription medications, when examining the harmfulness of twenty popular recreational drugs. The UK study placed great weight on the risk for acute physical harm, the propensity for physical and psychological dependency on the drug, and the negative familial and societal impacts of the drug. Based on these factors, the study placed MDMA at number 18 in the list.[78]

It's worth checking the link on the above quote. Apparently 500,000 people take ecstasy every weekend in the UK. When this is taken into account, the moral panic that prohibitionists create about the drug falls into an evidence-based perspective. Let's get real, please, and leave Paul Baker to his own devices.

Another population study negates moral panic about drugs

A large study of over 4,000 "crack babies" in the US has found very little evidence of any effect, reports the New York Times. Yes, effects are there but they are smaller than the effects of other things like alcohol, tobacco or poverty.

I am finding a strong pattern in the "science" around drugs, which is as politically loaded towards prohibition as it could be. While different critics are claiming that 50% to an astonishing 90% of "studies" end up being wrong, the more credible ones are population-based with large samples like the one quoted above.

Meanwhile two NSW children taken away from their parents by DOCS for 13 weeks because the parents occasionally smoked pot have been returned by the courts, reports The Australian today:

"Judge George Palmer said the children had been removed for "no reason whatsoever". Their parents were recreational smokers of cannabis but there was no evidence they had abused or neglected their children."

In another area, at least three population studies I have read about found no evidence that cannabis consumption increases car accidents. Yet small reductive studies of the kind that get people stoned, put them in front of a computer and measure reaction times show slower reactions and this is used as evidence that cannabis causes car accidents. Then there are studies of the kind that inject rats with pure THC to overdose levels and conclude that cannabis is toxic.

Prohibitionists quote these latter kinds of studies endlessly, creating a moral panic about drugs. Yet when I point out to them that all this terrible damage is happening under prohibition, so it is obviously no solution to such problems that do exist, they go silent...

The very conservative Beckley Commission concluded that cannabis did produce a slightly greater risk of car accidents -- about 15x less than alcohol, I recall.

So, are the fines for drug driving about 15 times less than for drunk driving -- just as the fine for exceeding a speed limit by 10k is a lot less than for 80k over the limit? No. 

Bollards used for slander

Someone's been putting up posters on our wonderful new poster bollards claiming Kings Cross Police are again corrupt in a reprise of the "Police State" 1980s. It says $200 a week will buy heroin dealers immunity, while a little more will "stitch up yuppies" who complain about drug dealers with the "swear/resist arrest/assault-a-cop trifecta" or take out an Apprehended Violence Order. 

It also claims the courts play along, always believing Police evidence. It provides not a shred of evidence and names several police names, but gets the identity of the Kings Cross Crime Manager wrong, citing a long-gone holder of that position. The insertion of the word "(giggle)" between several of the paragraphs lends it a surreal air but no credibility. Very strange.

"Tell 'em Wayne M sent ya," it teases.

I got a photo of the poster but it is so defamatory I can't show it. Is this our first case of bollocks on bollards?

Someone seems really angry though, and has gone to a lot of trouble to produce the piece.

King of the Cross?

The SMH today ran a long colour piece about John Housain Ibrahim, apparently known as 'King of the Cross' and reportedly a powerhouse behind the district's popular nightclub industry. He seems to be a lot richer than me!

What I'd give for a long chat with him, to learn about the place from the top down instead of seeing it from street level. But it wouldn't be over a beer, first because I don't like it much and second because he claims to be a teetotaller. The Law seems to think he is a drugs and crime boss but they've never been able to pin a single thing on him in 21 years of trying.

Sugar as addictive as cocaine - let's get tough on sugar

"CORNFLAKES, biscuits and soft drinks may be as addictive as cigarettes," reports the Sydney Morning Herald this morning...

"Dr Thornley said evidence showed people who binged on high-carb foods experienced symptoms of addiction - loss of control, a compulsion to keep taking higher amounts to get the same buzz - and suffered withdrawal if they went cold turkey.

"And like those addicted to cocaine and alcohol, people with a higher body mass index had fewer brain pleasure receptors..."

Our hearts must go out to those poor people suffering the degradation of a life controlled by high GI foods. They face a future of obesity, diabetes, rotten teeth and constant ridicule because of their weight.

Obviously the government must immediately move to get tough on high GI foods, begin burning and poisoning sugar-cane crops, and jailing growers and dealers. We need mandatory biscuit searches at schools, airports and fast food restaurants using sniffer dogs and blood testing. Shut down any business selling these evil substances.

I look forward to a worldwide "War against Heavily Processed Carbohydrates". Obviously the lives of addicts would be further degraded by the prohibition, but you know you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Then we might see fat people dealing in Pepsi and mugging others for the cash to pay for black market corn flakes, biscuits and soft drinks.

But no worries, we can mount propaganda campaigns that associate this behaviour with the substance and so cement public opinion behind a prohibition approach.

We could come up with studies that show sugar leads to illicit drug use - 100% of people studied would have consumed sugar before trying harder drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy. In fact those drugs would probably be sold by illegal ANZAC cookie dealers who might also lace their cookies with other drugs as there would be no regulatory control.

"Soft on sugar" advocates might promote rehabilitation facilities with a saccharine substitute program and optional liposuction. On the other hand we might see radical abstentionists forming groups such as "Heavily Processed Carbohydrates Free Australia". Doesn't quite have that "ring", does it.

OK, the tongue's in the cheek here but in fact all the points made above are serious and valid comment on our approaches to illicit drugs, and would stand up in a debate. Those who simply brush them aside as 'ridiculous' are, in my opinion, being dishonest to themselves.

Daily Terror mangles the truth again

Propaganda rag The Daily Telegraph continues its campaign against the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre with a story by one Kelvin Bissett, an "Investigations Editor".

Bissett reported on 5 January:

"THE Kings Cross safe injecting centre made no difference at all to overdose death rates in its local area in its first five years of operation.

"Statistics show death rates from drug overdose in the area around the injecting room are no less than in other areas across NSW.

"The report assessed overdose deaths from heroin, morphine and other opioids in those postcodes - 2010 and 2011 - near the injecting centre and concluded that deaths rates fell at the same rate they did elsewhere in NSW."

Ah, statistics. Simply by combining the two postcodes Bissett creates a convenient distortion that obscures the truth.

Consider other statistics I recently published in The City News -- ones that Bissett also had access to:

"...zero deaths from 2,476 overdoses at the Centre is a pretty good score. Before the MSIC the area averaged two deaths per week. Between four and ten per cent of overdoses elsewhere result in death. Draw your own conclusions."

Simple maths, based on the most conservative measure of 4%, indicates 100 deaths probably averted. 

and

"There were 355 ambulance call-outs to ODs in the Kings Cross strip alone in one year before the Centre opened. Now, while the heroin drought has reduced ambo callouts generally, they have dropped 80% in the MSIC’s 2011 postcode but only 45% in neighbouring 2010."

and

"the MSIC... has made 7,500 referrals to treatment facilities."

Parts of 2010 postcode are several suburbs away from the MSIC, and a junkie who is hanging out for the next hit does not walk several suburbs. At their own peril! Edgecliff in 2027 postcode is closer to the centre than much of 2010. Where are the Edgecliff stats, Mr Bissett?

But statistics obscure the human truth. In the words of one worker at the centre: "When someone is on the ground turning blue and you bring them around, you know you’ve saved a life.”

Another fact Bissett and his ilk ignore is that the centre is closed every night so its services are available only half the time.

Bissett needs to do a bit more investigation and a little less reporting.

Pictured: Recent fallout from an illegal injecting den in a Kings Cross back lane -- the sort of thing we would see a lot more of if the MSIC did not exist.

Beckley Commission to push cannabis legalisation at UN

New Scientist has reported on the Beckley Commission's (BC) push to legalise and control cannabis, calling it a 'radical alternative'.

They quote figures that illustrate the irrationality of prohibiting it:

"Despite the undoubted dangers associated with marijuana, the Beckley report concludes that it is far less harmful to users and to society in general than other illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine, and far less damaging than the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol. There have been only two documented deaths from marijuana overdose, the report notes. This contrasts with 200,000 deaths from all causes each year attributed to other illegal drugs, 2.5 million deaths annually related to alcohol and 5 million to smoking."

That's 7.5 million deaths annually from the legal drugs and only two ever from cannabis (although most sources claim zero deaths).

The prohibitionists assert that legalised control would produce "a nation of dopeheads". In doing so they ignore swathes of evidence to the contrary even though it is served up in easy-to-read bites by the BC. This is one of the sure signs of spin.

By contrast, the BC fully recognises the dangers of cannabis -- in my view exaggerating them considerably. But even so, they demonstrate that the harms of prohibiting it are greater than those of using it.

See previous post on the BC here.

Taking the mickey out of Council

Apropos the stencil-buffing issue blogged below, artist Numskull made the theme the centrepiece of his show at MTV Gallery in Yurong Street recently. See the pic! 

Friends tell me the opening was PACKED. This pic was first to sell @ $650. That's a lot of money to pay for "graffiti" or "vandalism"!

Prohibition is bursting our jails

"Jails bursting at the seams," the front page of the Sun-Herald shouted at me as I lined up at the supermarket this morning to buy my breakfast and lunch ingredients.

Back home, the SMH graphic you see was coincidentally up on my monitor. It illustrates the fall in burglaries paralleling the heroin drought of the past few years, clearly showing how much of the crime we bear and the justice system we pay for is caused by addicts who need wads of cash to buy prohibitively expensive illicit drugs.

Yes, we know they shouldn't, but the fact is they do.

While the government's response seems to be to privatise jails, neither they nor the media have the guts or the intelligence to question prohibition, a major contributor to the overcrowding problem, even as it is falling apart at the seams.

One classic response of conservatives is to claim that legal, controlled availability would increase drug use and they have small selective data sets to support this.

But globally, the trend shows the opposite: Tough-on-drugs countries almost all have higher rates of drug usage than relatively liberal countries – for example rates of cannabis use, heroin use and incarceration in The Netherlands are about half those of the US, home of the War on Drugs. In the UK, cannabis use declined significantly during the time it was downgraded to a Category C substance, in line with worldwide trends. Despite this, an electorally challenged Gordon Brown has ignored the advice of his senior advisory panel and upgraded cannabis to Category B.

In Australia, states which have decriminalised to some extent show usage trends similar to other states who have not.

If our jails are bursting at the seams, let's look at the role of prohibition in that and whether it is in fact achieving any of its aims. 

PS 8/12/08: An article in The Wall Street Journal celebrates the anniversary of the end of prohibition in 1933. It points out that people at the time not only understood prohibition had failed but also could remember a time before prohibition so they were not so alarmed at the prospect of legalisation. It's an eloquent piece. Read it here.

Rare commonsense about recreational drugs

At the same time 68% of Swiss voters supported their prescribed heroin  program, Lisa Pryor published a thoughtful view in the SMH about why alcohol is legal and ecstasy isn't.

She reports on a drug conference which looked at personalities in terms of strong engines and weak brakes (or vice versa). Confidence, outgoing personality, goal-setting and reward-seeking make for a "strong engine" and are qualities we try to instill into young people. Research shows that "strong engine" types are also those who use ecstasy to enhance the good things in life, as opposed to "weak engine/strong brake" types who are more likely to choose drugs which provide an escape from bad times -- like alcohol, valium [and heroin]. 

Prior says ecstasy should be legal and ways should also be found to minimise drug use in teenagers who are still developing their prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that controls inhibition or its opposite -- in other words, the brakes.

Ideally, people should have strong engines and strong brakes.

Pryor challenges the 'normative' view that people who drink are OK and those who take ecstasy (MDMA) are 'screwy', a widespread misconception that underpins prohibition.

PS: A Swiss mother who opposed heroin prescription said she would rather her four children were dead than on prescription heroin. Now that's screwy!

PPS (22/12/08) A "bad batch" of GHB (also known as fantasy or liquid ecstasy) hospitalised 12 and overdosed another 30 at a Melbourne rave party, reports The Age.

GHB is the drug that killed Dianne Brimble on THAT cruise. No prizes for guessing that this blog sees this latest incident as another failure of prohibition -- first because the drug was so freely available despite the law, and secondly because this sort of waste of people and resources would be  far less likely if people could get reliable, good quality ecstasy MDMA at their local Chemist. Why would you take illegal and dangerous GHB when safe, legal ecstasy is available? The effects are similar, I am told. Meanwhile the prohibitionists rant about MDMA as if it was just as dangerous as GHB, so kids are put at risk through misinformation. GHB is dangerous and MDMA isn't but the truth is apparently "the wrong message", so lies prevail.