A Scott Morrison bushfire meme

As Scott Morrison continues to sideline Australia's bushfire holocaust,
we can only send him our thoughts and prayers.

Feel free to share! As the worst bushfires in our history destroy people, homes, forests and animals, Scott Morrison is enjoying Christmas in Hawaii. He has left the nation in the charge of Deputy PM Michael McCormack, who says only "raving lunatics" accept the science of climate change. It's amazing that the very thing those lunatic 'alarmists' warned about is coming true, but denialists are not alarmed. That's why they call it denial.

Sniffer dogs not so effective as top cop claims

As young people at music festivals continue to die at alarming rates, harm reduction experts call for pill testing while police and the NSW government dig in and defend the use of sniffer dogs followed by strip-searches.

But Police Commissioner Mick Fuller has misrepresented their effectiveness, claiming that the dogs successfully found drugs in 40% of indications. Never mind that many of these are for cannabis, the world's safest drug with a death rate of zero – he's wrong anyway.

ABC Fact check looked into it with the help of data wrung from the police via multiple Freedom of Information requests from them and Greens MLC David Shoebridge. It looks like the true rate is significantly less, at 24.3%.

And everyone seems to have forgotten that the dogs were brought in under the pretence they would target dealers rather than users.

The fact-check says, "However, evidence from as early as the 2006 NSW Ombudsman's review of the use of drug detection dogs suggest that the dogs have been ineffective in targeting supply offences.

Of more than 10,000 drug dog indications during the review period, 141 identified a trafficable amount of drugs (1.4 per cent). Just 19 (0.19 per cent) led to a successful prosecution for supply."

So the credibility gap from NSW cops has shrunk from 40% to 24% to, arguably .19%.

What a great way to spend taxpayers' dollars.

How good is prohibition?

"A Florida man was jailed for 90 days after cops had suspected he had cocaine in his vehicle, which turned out to be white powdered drywall."

All the initial tests – and a sniffer dog – indicated the white powder all over this black handyman's car was cocaine. Because obviously if you were dealing cocaine you would have it dusted all over the inside of your car. The lab tests – after 90 days of jail – later showed it was plaster residue. 

Prohibition arguably causes more injustice in the world than any other law. How many people has Fentanyl-addict Rodrigo Duterte had gunned down in the Philippines by now?

Hello Australia? Portugal exists, you know

As conservative Australia rushes headlong down its prohibitionist path, with Attorney-General Christian Porter threatening tp overturn the ACT's recent legalisation of cannabis and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian ignoring all the Coronial recommendations about pill testing and burgeoning strip searches of children, – a story on Radio National reports that since Portugal decriminalised all drugs the country has saved 18% in associated costs, treated and rehabilitated many problem users and vastly improved health outcomes while usage has not changed significantly.

Too sensible for Australian conservatives and their 1930s ideology?

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/decriminalisation-of-drug-use-and-procession-in-portugal-and-au/11582930

Drug war persecution chases its own tail

What a waste of time and money. This amazing campaign of persecution makes no difference to the availability of drugs. Legalise, regulate and tax. That would finance treating the small minority who have drug problems. Police could get on with things like protecting medical staff from assaults. Too simple.

Scott Morrison drinks beer on the job while persecuting drug users

Beer is not a drug. Repeat after me. Beer is not a drug.
Because Jesus said there is only one acceptable drug, possibly the most damaging one.

Welcome to a nation of craven dobbers

I picked up this flyer in a Queensland police station. When I went to school, dobbers were about the lowest form of life. Police themselves are very hard on 'dobbers' in their own ranks but they seem to have a different standard when they want the public to do their work for them.

In other news, a reported 60,000 complaints have been received by the Tax Office, dobbing in people for tax-dodging. Now at least tax-dodging, unlike drug use, is an actual crime that hurts others. But I just wonder how many anonymous complaints are tricked up to satisfy a personal grudge or simply used as a bullying tactic?

I very much doubt that any of the authorities involved will publish figures on how many dobs prove baseless.

Dept of Home Affairs supports prohibition failures

Peter Dutton projecting an image of the
inside of his brain. "If they don't live
just like me, go get 'em, boys!"

Credible NSW bodies including the Bar Association are calling for the decriminalisation of drugs including ice, saying that criminalisation of personal users is often more harmful than the drugs themselves.

But Peter Dutton's Home Affairs Department is pushing back, arguing the move would create “uncertainty for law enforcement and at the Australian border”.

Yup. Gotta have "certainty" or the world will collapse. No shades of grey in Peter Dutton's world. Meanwhile the victims of this stupid and ineffective regime can keep clogging up the court system for no good reason and with few good outcomes. That's a certainty! Read more here.

By Gove, that cocaine sure is dangerous

Michael Gove – addicted to hypocrisy

The blatant hypocrisy of conservative politicians on drug prohibition is on show once more.

British prime-ministerial hopeful Michael Gove is under fire for snorting cocaine in his younger days. He says it was a 'mistake', and reiterates that the drug is 'dangerous'. So dangerous it could put one in reach of the top job, it seems.

But the real hypocrisy is Gove's history of being 'tough on drugs', happy to have people jailed for something he has himself done, in pursuit of power via the votes of ignorants. He denies this is hypocrisy. Sheesh.

Almost 300 children strip-searched in NSW Police State

Police in Kings Cross clearly targeting an Indigenous man
with a sniffer dog, pulling it close to the man by its lead.
The dog made no indication.

NSW is descending further into something resembling a police state, with thousands of citizens being strip-searched in the name of drugs prohibition – a regime with little or no rational justification.

Most people searched are young or Indigenous, according to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald.

"The number of NSW Police searches has increased by almost 50 per cent in the four years from financial year 2014-15 to 2017-18," says the report. Almost 300 children, one as young as 10, were searched.

Two-thirds of the searches turn up nothing, and among the "successful" searches police say they have found items such as vehicle number plates.

I'm pretty sure I would be able to detect number plates on a person without stripping them.

Other searches turned up such deadly items as "art" or "stationery".

The justification for the searches can only be described as dodgy: "Under NSW law a police officer can carry out a strip search if it is necessary for the purposes of the search and if the seriousness and urgency of the circumstances make it necessary," reports the SMH.

I'm not sure how "serious" or "urgent" it is to detect someone carrying an amount of say, cannabis, so small it can't be detected without stripping the citizen. Or stationery for that matter (I'm guessing that may have been a case of shoplifting, another "serious" and "urgent" matter it would seem).

Most of the drugs-related searches are triggered by indications from a sniffer dog. In other words, the search victim had been doing nothing wrong and was apparently no threat to others.

New York cannabis arrests target the usual minorities

An analysis of crime and arrest statistics by the New York Times shows that Black and Hispanic people are arrested for low-level marijuana offences at rates from six to fifteen times that of white people.
This is despite the number of complaints coming from residents of predominantly black or white districts being about the same.
Even as the drug is legalised in other states, and New York courts increasingly dismiss these charges, the court benches each day are filled with mostly young black or Hispanic men facing low level charges such as smoking in a public area.
The original, evidence-free prohibition of Marijuana has often been ascribed to the Establishment's desire to find a way to target minorities (and jazz musicians, purveyors of "the Devil's music"). It seems not much has changed nearly 100 years later.
This gross waste of public funds takes Police attention away from real crimes – those with actual victims – and seriously damages the lives of the arrested victims.
Police plead that many of the arrests happen because some neighbourhoods have higher overall crime rates than others and are therefore more heavily policed. This defence would seem to have some validity. All the more reason to legalise the stuff and stop this nonsense.

President Duterte addicted to Fentanyl

Rodrigo Duterte flaunting his manhood.

It's gobsmacking that President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines admits to being addicted to Fentanyl because it "stops the pain and puts you on cloud nine". At the same time he continues to have suspected drug dealers shot on the street (if they "resist"). Thousands have now been murdered, without trial, for suspected involvement in drugs that are way less harmful than the one he uses.

Donald Trump admires this man and is making noises about imitating his policies, even after recently decrying America's crisis of overdose deaths, mainly from Fentanyl which is said to be far more potent than heroin.

And Trump's Secretary of State Geoff Sessions, decrying the same Fentanyl problem, showed himself to also be a deluded idiot when he added that he had spoken to many police chiefs who assured him that it all starts with marihuana - the old, completely discredited gateway theory here peddled by people propping up their massive War-on-Drugs budgets.

Duterte also recently encouraged police and vigilantes to "shoot women in the vagina so they will be useless afterwards".  And The Phillipines is an overwhelmingly Catholic country which largely supports this monster. Go figure.

Source: ABC Radio National

Police use road tragedy to mislead about drug driving

The sad news that life support is being switched off for Jessica Falkholt (fifth victim of the fatal Boxing Day head-on crash near Bendalong) comes also with the news that the other driver involved (who also died in the crash) had a string of road offences which included jail time, and he was driving home to Ulladulla from a methadone clinic in Nowra. This opens a whole can of worms. A police spokesman immediately launched into the usual spin, saying ob ABC radio that the main causes of crashes were "drugs, speed and fatigue". 
"Drugs" is a conflation Police always use because it politically supports their Roadside Drug testing campaign, which focuses on recreational drugs. It's reasonably sophisticated spin on their part, something their spokespeople have clearly been coached on. The conflation is misleading because it implies that Methadone caused this crash, but of course RDT does not test for Methadone, opioids or Benzos (Xanax etc). Yet these drugs along with alcohol cause far more accidents than cannabis, a primary target of RDT. 
The police never suggest that something should be done about drivers who are under the influence of these legal drugs – that's off limits even as the "War on Drugs" sticks to its well funded agenda. Result: Most of the preventative resources are poured into the least harmful drugs. 
So the Police are not focused on protecting people on the roads, rather prosecuting a political position that attracts major funding to their organisation. It's especially cynical and hypocritical when they exploit tragedies like this crash. Actual statistics about different drugs and crash rates can be seen below here and here:

Big Pharma shells out to block cannabis legalisation

It's always been interesting to see who spends money to fight legalisation - big pharma, the alcohol industry and police and jail unions - all keen on scaring the public to increase their budgets and profits.
Here's the latest in the saga, as Arizona takes the plunge.

"For big pharma, however, an expanding amount of data explains their fears. Opiate overdoses dropped by roughly 25% in states that have legalized medical marijuana"

The company that produces Fentanyl, 100 times stronger than morphine, is paying big bucks to stall cannabis legalisation.

It's interesting to see the copy used in the anti-cannabis ads. They remind me of ads opposing marriage equality they showed on Gruen. We truly live in a post-truth world.

One ad says: "Colorado schools were promised millions in new revenues when the state approved recreational pot use", says the voiceover in one ad. Instead, schoolchildren were plagued by “marijuana edibles that look like candy."

While the candy-like edibles were definitely a regulatory oversight (now rectified I believe), the ads ignore real benefits like this:

"In Colorado alone, marijuana sales reached $996m in 2015 and raked in $135m in tax revenue. Towns have earmarked the money for road improvements, recreation centers and scholarships for low-income students."

Legal cannabis revenues deliver major economic boost

The Marijuana Policy Project in the USA has been researching legal sales revenues for cannabis.

In the report, Arcview found that the legal marijuana market grew from $4.6 billion in 2014 to $5.7 billion in 2015, while also projecting that the 2016 market will be $7.1 billion. This incredible growth is the result of enacting new state-level marijuana laws, mostly driven by MPP.

These results must cause fiscal conservatives and prohibitionists some discomfort as it becomes more and more obvious that their ideology robs the public purse and makes their beloved tax cuts less feasible. Wedged and on the wrong side of history!

NSW population study of medicinal cannabis challenges the official program

Further to my previous post, which questioned the approach to medicinal cannabis research being taken by the NSW government, the ABC reported today on a Sydney University study in which parents of epileptic children who are being treated with the illegal substance are being asked to tell their stories.

I had been wondering why the academic conducting the government research, Professor Jennifer Martin from Newcastle University, had published the opinion piece (linked above) years before her research was complete. The piece talked up the risks of the drug and argued for the Big Pharma approach of finding selected molecules from cannabis and offering them as a (presumably) patented medicine. Academics usually go public only when research is complete and has been peer-reviewed.

When I heard today's news a penny dropped. Perhaps the Sydney University study, looking at actual users of the whole oil, might threaten the direction the NSW government and Professor Martin have taken?

Ms Martin claimed:

There seems to be a sudden rush to make it available, as if the world was going to run out, or the evidence to use it was new and overwhelmingly good. Sadly, none of this is a reality. There is no new evidence.

If that's what the professor and her colleagues think, perhaps they are concerned that more such evidence will emerge from the Sydney University study, and that could disrupt and discredit their own line of research?

Such internecine rivalry is not unknown in academia. This might explain the unusual opinion piece with its several questionable arguments - an attempt to sway public opinion to the conservative, Big Pharma prohibitionist side.

Given the wealth of anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of medicinal cannabis, the parents of afflicted children may not agree with Professor Martin and her view that "we already have safe and effective therapies available" and there is no need to hurry with legalisation.

One mother who used cannabis oil to treat her child for severe epilepsy, quoted in the ABC story, reports:

Within a week the seizures had gone from 20 or 30 big ones a day and 100 little ones, to probably four in a week - it was amazing.

Perhaps that mother is lying, but what on earth would she gain from that? She's risking a lot outing herself as a buyer of an illegal substance. If she's not lying, Professor Jennifer Martin's assertions seem both highly contestable and distinctly lacking empathy.

And of course Professor Martin seems to fall into the old prohibitionist fallacy: that cannabis should remain illegal because there is no evidence of its medical benefits, while on the other hand there is little evidence because the substance is illegal and unbiased research on it has been actively suppressed.

Professor Martin falsely conflates medical cannabis - which, properly produced, has little or no psychoactive effect and is usually taken as oil - with smoking marijuana recreationally. Even the picture with her article shows chopped green cannabis, ready to smoke, next to a baby monitor. Scary perhaps but quite misleading.

NSW is legalising medical cannabis - so why is it devolving into a Big Pharma spinfest?

Something very strange is happening in NSW. To the surprise of many, Liberal Premier Mike Baird last year announced he would legalise medical cannabis. He cited the plight of Lucy Haslam from Tamworth whose son had an incurable fatal condition and who received palliation from cannabis oil where normal treatments had failed. Her sterling activism had apparently shifted the mountain, although her son has sadly since passed away.

This seemed strange because Mike Baird appears to be in lockstep with Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, and the police always oppose any moves to legalise cannabis because they garner huge budgets from prohibition. And Big Pharma always opposes it because anyone can grow it and it might threaten sales of their own drugs. In fact that's happening - the use of pharmaceutical painkillers is dropping rapidly in US states which have legalised medical cannabis.

But wait. People in the know tell me that actual cannabis oil will not be legalised - the research ball has been thrown to the pharmaceutical industry to extract relevant molecules from cannabis and produce medicines accordingly.

The real risks of drug driving and drunk driving

With the NSW police tripling their drug-driving tests, especially targeting cannabis, it's worth noting the actual risks involved.

In summary, cannabis increases the risk of a fatal accident: 1.8x

Opioids (which are legal): 3x

Stimulants including meth: 3.7x

Benzos (Valium etc, also legal): 4.8x

Alcohol at .02 Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) - which is legal for most drivers: 4x

Alcohol at 0.8 BAC: 13x

Alcohol at 0.16 BAC: 35x

[As an interesting aside, people with Sleep Apnea are 7-8 times more likely to crash a car than people without the condition - As reported on ABC's PM program 4/7/2016]

Full details below courtesy of Paul Dessauer:

Drug use and fatal motor vehicle crashes:
A case-control study.
Guohua Li et al
Accident Analysis and Prevention Sept 2013

<<< ABSTRACT Drugged driving is a serious safety concern, but its role in motor vehicle crashes has not been adequately studied.

Drug testing drivers doesn't work, but Duncan Gay doesn't care

"Evidence-based" seems to be a term not comprehended by some NSW Coalition ministers, especially the National Party's Duncan Gay, Roads Minister.

The decision to drastically ramp up drug testing on NSW drivers, despite the program being almost farcically ineffective, demonstrates again the ideological fairyland inhabited by Gay and his colleagues.

Too bad for the victims of this pogrom.

Greens MLC David Shoebridge has posted a comprehensive rebuttal of the program which should be read by all drivers, especially Duncan Gay.

But it's a cinch the man who just increased penalties for bike-riders by 350% won't bother. After all, those pesky bike-riders all probably smoke dope anyway, right Duncan? And after all, the rash of 4WDs being written off by cyclists just demands action, right?

You're an intellectual giant mate.

Large, long term study shows no health harms from cannabis

I've always said we needed large population studies to properly assess the long-term effects of smoking cannabis. It's too easy to skew small reductive studies, as we have repeatedly seen.

This one is a huge study of 408 males tracked from adolescence into their mid-30s and it found no difference between heavy early-onset smokers and low/non-users:

Findings from latent class growth curve analysis identified 4 distinct subgroups of marijuana users: early onset chronic users, late increasing users, adolescence-limited users, and low/nonusers. Results indicated that the 4 marijuana use trajectory groups were not significantly different in terms of their physical and mental health problems assessed in the mid-30s.

Strangely enough, it doesn't seem to be getting much of a run in the media.

The War on Drugs is unjust nonsense.