My attempt to embed the video didn’t work. Interesting stuff from Russia Today. My video is near the bottom of the page. Contrast with total tosh from NATO spkesman.
http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-06-10/drug-heroin-afghan-conference.html
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PS. Scousebilly/Redders: On the subject of hard drugs, given that prohibition is liable to lead to crime, I think the methods of the Dutch may be as wise as any.
Scousebilly,
I really sympathise with our doctors. They have a big workload and put in long hours. They also have to keep up with developments in medication, and here they are vulnerable. Well funded concerns (Big Pharma included) warp the literature and the research, funding research under non-disclosure agreements, and funding counter research to discredit inexpensive or natural treatments, and simple preventative measures. I strongly doubt that many doctors are malicious.
Clark,
I wasn’t implying all doctors by any means. I refer to many psychiatrists and doctors that have been politicised like Donaldson and WHO/ EU/Pharma scum.
Your post at 5.45PM is very informed and analgous to prostitution in terms of the peddled orthodox myth as opposed to reality.
‘The Best-Known Afghan Business’
http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=3095
Scousebilly: ‘Libertarian’ is a good word, not a bad word, as far as I am concerned. So I am for democratic debate, for instance. But poppy fields – no, I’m all for preventing them producing opium. Likewise I approve of efforts directed at preventing undemocratic regimes getting hold of atomic weapons. If, by some chance, Iran has any secret A-bomb factories that share the fate of Osirak, I won’t shed any tears, libertarian sympathies or no.
Abe Rene,
Craig’s argument, that there is a shortage of medical opiates, is important; Afghan opium production should certainly be used in that direction.
Also, opium itself is not so bad. Some of our finest literature was written under its influence, or by users, in those days not so long ago when it wasn’t prohibited. The same goes for cocaine – I certainly wish that I could have nipped out and bought some last time I had a toothache.
The refining of opium into morphine, and then isomerisation into diamorphine or heroin (how it is named depends upon whether the usage is legal or proscribed, not chemical structure) occur largely to increase potency and hence value, so that smugglers can avoid detection.
Clark: You make a good point about cultivation for medical usage. This would have to be done under careful supervision to prevent abuse. My understanding is that most if not all Asian and South American poppy fields are not intended for such use, not would such vast tracts be necessary.
Abe, the crop isn’t a problem, it’s prohibition. Look up industrial hemp prohibition in the US and see the, oft asked, “cui bono” expose some wealthy and powerful beneficiaries. Then ask yourself why we have a “war on drugs”.
Think about it.
Thank you, Clark, on all counts.
And to most of the others, Scousebilly, Abe Rene, Redders, anonymous poster, somebody, everybody (except Neil Baxter, who, miraculously given his reportedly Dickensian or perhaps, since he keeps claiming to be in a poor country, Conradian, level of poverty, seems still to be around) and of course, Craig himself, thank you also, I think you’ve all made very valid points.
Much of what Big Pharma does is self-perpetuating and self-aggrandising.
Suddenly, I find everyone and his dog is on anti-cholesterol medication on the basis of very questionable evidence. There’s a place for it, of course, but not as mass preventative measure! It’s nuts.
Doctors all too often are forced to be bureaucrats, tick this box, follow this flow diagram, much of it for most people is bullshit. Managerial bullshit. The grey men (yes, and women) have taken over and have turned the country into a lunatic asylum where everyone has OCD – points, points, points! League-tables! Corporate image.
But of course, it’s not just big business, it’s alienated society as a whole. All too often doctors are secular priests – people come with stuff with which in the past they would’ve taken to their priest. The populace expect and demand drugs. Many people live shit lives and need, demand, expect, something – anything – to blot out the pain. Well, of course, The City Of London rides high on cocaine. Perhaps this part of the human condition. That’s part of the job.
The swine flu ‘pandemic’ (which, far from being a Pharaonic plague, as one of my public health colleagues quipped at the time, was really ‘epidemic cold’), was a prime example of mass hallucination. Yet we were being told this and that and Tamiflu and this and that and Tamiflu and this and that and Relenza and this and that and the other.
So there I was, last summer, dressed-up like a Mediaeval plague quack, sticking metal swabs up people’s noses. People with colds. Pointless. A pantomime.
It was being pushed by learned guys with smooth voices, that kind of smooth, BBC voice that oozes authority, you know, guys in bow-ties, who, when questioned, like: “Excuse me, dude, what the fuck are we doing here? Shouldn’t we be keeping these drugs for when they’re really needed like in 1919 or SARS or something and not promoting viral resistance at the drop of a hat, I mean, the flip of a hankie (!snort it, suck it, inject it!)?” would respond with arrogance – much as those (whether deemed among their own elite as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ or ‘eccentric’ or ‘streetwise’) in positions of power and influence in literary London respond to people like me, a variation on:
“Shut up, you stupid provincial wog.”
I think it’s common knowledge that most of our post-industrial diseases are a result of wealth mal-distribution, obesity/ lifestyle, crap environment, industrialised food production and crap, processed, hormone-injected/ fed food. The remedies – as during the time of A.J. Cronin, though in very different ways – are primarily economic and societal.
The secret is: never trust a man in a bow-tie.
N’Drangheta-Camorra-Mafia-Italy-EU-Russia-Albania-China-Colombia-West Africa-Everywhere.
Organised crime has not infiltrated the world ecomomy. It is the world economy. Porn is bigger than oil, bigger than arms. It is inside this computer, it is in the food I ate this evening, it is in my tissues. It is my tissues. It is me.
Abe Rene,
cultivation for medical purposes was a point that Craig made in his video interview, with which I agree. I don’t know how much production this would account for, but quite a bit, I suspect.
Reducing abuse is a matter of education and integration. I’ve been told (I haven’t verified) that in France, it is quite normal for older children to be served wine, watered down 50%, at the dinner table, and that this is believed to reduce teenage drink problems, by breaking the mystique of alcohol.
Many tribal societies use intoxicants. Older users guide novice users through the experience. The lack of a taboo integrates drug use into everyday life, whereas prohibition produces subcultures.
People can intoxicate themselves by so many means that prohibition cannot work. Solvents, petrol, cleaning agents, painkillers, plants of many varieties. Just about anything that will kill you will intoxicate you if you take a smaller quantity of it. Drugs are ‘drugs’ precisely because their toxicity is *low* compared to how much they alter how you feel. Prohibition causes people who want to become intoxicated to ingest substances that are *more* toxic.
And people need a life. How many people are drugging themselves because all they see ahead of them is being a ‘consumer’ and a worker (or not even employed) in a pointless system in which they have little self determination, and being permanently in debt for the privilege? If people have an engaging life, they’d rather live it than be permanently out of their minds.
Suhayl,
hello. That’s a good post, and it really made me laugh. I know, it is serious, but you have to laugh, what else can we do?
These smooth talking empty suits that drone on, pontificating about how everyone else should live. They’re everywhere and they really piss me off.
I can just see you, sticking swabs up people’s noses…
I know, it’s surreal, Clark, it really is. Thanks again. While doing the noses, I kept thinking about the Gogol story I mentioned earlier on another thread, ‘The Nose’. Here’s some light – or rather, some soft – relief. It’s better than Viagra, heroin, Tamiflu, Prozac and better even than old tea-bags:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv0eN2s56cM&feature=related
Clark/Scousebilly
The evils of prohibition and the need for quality of life need to be considered. But I would add that the availability of the stuff is part of the problem too. If the fields were destroyed it would be more difficult to get hold of the stuff. It would not make it impossible for youngsters to experiment with self-poisoning (which is what we are talking about) but it would make it more difficult. And so I say: let the bugs loose on the Asian and South American poppy fields. Cold Turkey for all!
Abe Rene at June 14, 2010 11:50 PM
Poison is defined by the dose not by the consensus of others.
Are you a control freak, Abe?
Ah, Soft Machine. Thank you. For its title alone, I love ‘Snodland’. I have the Matching Mole album. It is the same band, but all written by Robert Wyatt. ‘Matching Mole’ is a pun on “machine molle”, French for ‘Soft Machine’.
A related band, named just for you Suhayl; National Health, performing The Collapso. After the improvised introduction, this incredibly complex piece is performed live, identical note for note with the studio version on ‘Of Queues and Cures’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzsTdY5Xlwo
Abe Rene,
they’ll never destroy the fields, except as a showcase, so that some other region can become the producer. To fight a war you need an enemy with funds. War on terror, war on drugs. Of course the ‘War on Drugs’ could have been ‘won’ decades ago, by just the method you propose. How many times has the CIA been caught with its grubby little mits on the stash?
Hell, one of the probable reasons that the Taliban were attacked is because they’d nearly eradicated the poppy crop.
Clark at June 15, 2010 12:10 AM
Correct – have a eureka on me 😉
Scousebilly
I wouldn’t say so. If you, a mature adult, want to ingest something dangerous (or go tombstoning or bungee-ing off London Bridge) that’s your business, as far as I am concerned. But in the case of schoolkids – I would wish to protect them from real danger by making it as difficult as possible for them to get the stuff. So bombs away on the poppy fields, burn the lot!
repeating again–
it was the British who led the way in Afghanistan,with operatives like Lords Avebury and Bethell using Radio Free Kabul to enlist mujahadeen.
The “arc of crisis” Central Asian strategy is often credited to Brzezinski but really came out of London via Bernard Lewis of the Mackinder school of international geo-politics (RIIA).
Far too many people see Britain as the junior partner or poodle.In fact in the special relationship the shots are called from London.
People are not generally aware of this because the London-based system of usury-sorry international finance,which was the real reason behind most of the revolutions and wars of the last century uses a supine media and a set of what Ezra Pound called “court historians” to obscure the facts.
The CIA isn’t going to give up its’ opium profits that easily…
Opium production EXPLODED after the US invasion.
Ever wonder why?
CIA Heroin has a premium over generic in the world market. Good profits too!
Posted by: Ydotheyhateus on Jul 16, 2008 8:28 AM
“”
There was a point in Afghanistan’s tortured history when the future looked bright, when a determined effort to lift the country and its people out of backward agrarian feudalism almost succeeded.
It began with the formation of the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) back in the sixties, which opposed the autocratic rule of King Zahir Shar. The growth in popularity of the PDPA eventually led to them taking control of the country in 1978, after a coup removed the former Kings’ cousin, Mohammed Daud, from power.
The coup enjoyed popular support in the towns and cities, evidenced in reports carried in US newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, no friend of revolutionary movements, reported at the time that ‘150,000 persons marched to honour the new flagthe participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.’ The Washington Post reported that ‘Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned.
Upon taking power, the new government introduced a program of reforms designed to abolish feudal power in the countryside, guarantee freedom of religion, along with equal rights for women and ethnic minorities. Thousands of prisoners under the old regime were set free and police files burned in a gesture designed to emphasise an end to repression. In the poorest parts of Afghanistan, where life expectancy was 35 years, where infant mortality was one in three, free medical care was provided. In addition, a mass literacy campaign was undertaken, desperately needed in a society in which ninety percent of the population could neither read nor write.
The resulting rate of progress was staggering. By the late 1980s half of all university students in Afghanistan were women, and women made up 40 percent of the country’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers, and 30 percent of its civil servants. In John Pilger’s ‘New Rulers Of The World’ (Verso, 2002), he relates the memory of the period through the eyes of an Afghan woman, Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who escaped the Taliban in 2001. She said: “Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian movies. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. It was sad to think that these were the people the West had supported.”
Under the pretext that the Afghan government was a Soviet puppet, which was false, the then Carter Administration authorised the covert funding of opposition tribal groups, whose traditional feudal existence had come under attack with these reforms. An initial $500 million was allocated, money used to arm and train the rebels in the art in secret camps set up specifically for the task across the border in Pakistan. This opposition came to be known as the mujaheddin, and so began a campaign of murder and terror which, six months later, resulted in the Afghan government in Kabul requesting the help of the Soviet Union, resulting in an ill-fated military intervention which ended ten years later in an ignominious retreat of Soviet military forces and the descent of Afghanistan into the abyss of religious intolerance, abject poverty, warlordism and violence that has plagued the country ever since.
Brzezinski confirms: “Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
Thanks, Clark (23:58), brilliant stuff! Music for either late at night in pitch darkness or else in the middle of an open field with white rabbits in summer with the sky enveloping one’s mind.
Mae, please tell me more that story about the cartoons – it is fascinating and also rather worrying. Is there a link?
What happened, did a guy get six months in jail, commuted to two years’ suspended, for leaving a copy of ‘Private Eye’ lying around in a chapel, ironically, at ‘John Lennon’ (he of the scurrilous cartoons, the Walrus drugs, the wanton nakedness, and the “I don’t believe in…”) airport in Liverpool?
I am not a retired policeman but a very busy current policeman. I look at your postings with interest. I see everyday the car crashes that people on drugs call their lives. Legalising drugs wont help one jot, drugs would still need to be paid for by addicts and prices at the moment are at an all time low. Even the pharmaceutical companies couldn’t undercut them. The posters who say alcohol is a drug are correct and that wrecks lives too. Would it be banned if it had just been invented? A can of strong beer cost a quid. But people beg steal and kill for a can of it. Making drugs legal wont stop addicts breaking into cars or selling their bodies. Instead of buying from the local dealer to buy their crack, heroin or skunk they will go down boots and buy one hit get another free deal I don’t think so? Please don’t have a romantic image of intelligent people sitting around in cafes taking opium before going back to the office. It isn’t like that in the real world that I see. I see sick 30 something girls with no teeth and scabs all over them selling blow jobs for a fiver to buy their next hit. Would you have a better conscience if they spent that fiver in Lloyds the chemist or Superdrug? Alcohol is not addictive to the vast majority of people that use it. Drugs are addictive to most who use them. People keep saying Holland this Holland that. Holland has very recently toughened its drug legislation realising its social experiment has led to huge drug abuse amongst its population. I took a male suffering mental health issues to the local mental health unit recently. Whilst waiting the customary hour for the doctor to turn up I was speaking to a very friendly mental health nurse from Ghana. I don’t know why but most persons working in mental health units are from West Africa? He showed me the ward of 14 patients and said everyone in here uses cannabis why does everyone want to legalise it? They (meaning the politicians etc) don’t realise its a different drug to the one they smoked at university. I hope this gives some insight to the world that most don’t see and if you have seen it and truly believe that making it legal will help then maybe you have taken a bit too much yourself.
See this written answer of April 2009 regarding ‘Estimate of Afghanistan heroin/morphine derivatives available for export’:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/le6dgn
(Note the 2001 figure of 19 tonnes, compared with the most recent [2008] figure of 630 tonnes).
Note also the caveats galore…
Thanks, Steve, yes I recognise those same people as you’re mentioning; it’s as though they deteriorate before your eyes, in relation to heroin often within around five years; sometimes they die; and it all has a major impact on families. Here in Scotland, as well as illicit and licit drug addiction/ abuse, as you’ll know, alcohol is a particularly major issue. ‘Vomit Methadone’ is also a speciality of the chef: Drink-vomit-drink; a perfect communal recycling operation, very green, in all senses of the word.
You’ve rendered a very cogent argument against legalising currently illegal drugs.
I admit that I don’t know the answer(s), or even whether there is one/ many. Perhaps it is post-indutrial, post-religious society, several generations of broken families/ unemployment/ capitalism (of which, globally, organised crime is a major driver) or simply history and the march of the inevitable. Or a combination of all of these.
Can I ask you, what would you do? What’s your ‘prescription’ (if I may put it like that!) for society’s ills in relation to substance abuse and the associated issues? I’m genuinely interested to hear. Thanks.
Even if legalising (all ?) drugs changed nothing on “the street”, it would still have effects. It would deprive the Mafia of income, in favour of the State. I know, there will be a cry of “what’s the difference ?”. The difference is, the Mafia is who you don’t vote for. Also, the possibility of quality control, redress against ripoffs, etc etc. Maybe even, fewer people with reason to see the police as hostile ?
(Abe Rene, 12:14 – we don’t protect schoolkids from alcohol by bombing the breweries. Should we ? What about all the fields of tobacco ? How far do we go ? Coffee ? Tea ? “Pinpoint humanitarian surgical precision strikes with no more than acceptable levels of collateral damage” on Coca-Cola ? or why not ?).
Paying good prices for high-quality Afghan hash might be an improvement on the current state ? Give them a feasible alternative cash crop ? No, I don’t expect this to happen, on more than an individual level.
@steve
My point is that legalisation would help considerably in dealing with the filthy conditions and circumstances drug users have to resort to in order to take drugs. Needles and equipment would be available were they ‘legalised’ which would ‘help’ to reduce the growing AIDS problem because of cross infection from communal needles.
If the pharmaceutical companies engage in controlled production using, say, Afghanistan as a preferred, legal supplier, where are the criminals going to get their ‘cheap’ raw materials from then? Low prices depend on volume production, a fundamental business principle, therefore any raw material would likely be low volume and probably low quality.
Another point I made, and as an ex copper I witnessed it many times, is the death of addicts from a badly cut bag of Heroine, usually when it’s a good quality bag ironically and the user takes their usual hit only to find the stuff is twice the strength. Furthermore I never met an addict that wasn’t suffering from at least one communicable disease or other contracted from, usually, dirty needles and I can’t think of one incident where it was the drug itself that killed a user unless it was found to be an accidental overdose, in almost every case it was the diseases caused by the filthy kit they used. I have known ‘clean’ users, using heroine for years with seemingly little ill effects, in fact I know of people kept pain free for years on prescribed opiates.
Clark makes some great points in his earlier post, there are different types of users: experimenters, dabblers, social, reliant etc. and regardless of how hard we come down on them or their pushers they will never be eradicated but they can be managed which is the best we can hope for. No one suggests that ranges of products are available in Boots, there are an awful lot of clever people out there who have thought long and hard about how it could work. Our current system obviously isn’t working so instead of throwing out the baby with the Dutch bathwater, shouldn’t we examine what they have done, where they have gone wrong and how it can be fixed before condemning it as just another failed social experiment.
Having said all that I’ll throw this into the mix: “…….the NHS issued 39.1 million, repeat, more than Thirty Nine Million prescriptions for ‘drugs to tackle depression’ in England during the year 2009. This compares with 20.1 million in 1999.”
I got this from Peter Hitchin’s post in the Mail today (not that I read that rag but I get Peter’s daily emails) and this illustrates the NHS’s gross mis-management and abuse of prescription drugs because nulabour, whilst chucking money at new hospitals and polyclinics, savaged the most important element of the NHS, it’s staff. If you read Hitchin’s articles you will understand his views on our society’s requirement to poison children, with prescription drugs, suffering from a condition he doesn’t believe exists, ADHD. Now whilst I don’t entirely agree that it doesn’t exist I also agree with him that it is often used as to excuse bad parenting and appalling behaviour, unfortunately the only one that suffers is the child who is given a concoction of powerful, mind altering drugs to deal with it.
This is the fault of over zealous and over PC politicians who have meddled in the NHS at the micro level instead of leaving it to professionals to run so how do we think they would, or could manage control of drug abuse by legalizing it any better than they are, is quite beyond me.
If we allow politicians to deal with it we end up with global violence and a gradual breakdown of sections of our communities. Can commercialisation and legalisation possibly do any worse than that?
Steve,
the problem with taking The Netherlands as an example is that their policy created a sort of ‘drugs island’ in the EU. Of course it attracted drug users, and created a local concentration.
Drug prohibition is a relatively recent development. Were the problems really much worse before prohibition, before the 20th century? What happened with alcohol prohibition in the US? Didn’t alcohol addiction, contamination related health problems, and alcohol related crime all rise?
I have met drug addicts, thanks, though as I’m not a police officer I could simply walk away; respect to you for your work. I also remember the meths drinkers in Whitechapel. Unable to buy commercial alcohol, they moved on to something more toxic. I really have thought about this, I really do believe that prohibition causes far more problems than it solves, and no, I don’t think that my brain has addled yet.
Yes, thanks, Redders, in relation to legal drug misuse, I forgot to mention ADHD.
Peter Hitchens is right.
That’s another thing that shocks me – why are we dosing kids on anything when it’s quite obvious, even to simpletons like me, that crap food, often parenting issues (to be euphemistic) and the expanding addiction to digital media (ironic, eh?!) is what is messing-up children’s brains.
Except for a very few, specific, cases, in the long-term ADHD drugs are compounding the problem, in my view. We will reap what we have sown.
I thought ‘do no harm’ was supposed to be our motto?
But when I make this rather prudent observation, while privately some/ many agree with me, in essence officially I’m treated as though I were suggesting to Dr Liam Fox (most definitely a man in a bow-tie) that we put Trident/ “our nuclear deterrent” on the table with a view to getting rid of it.
But I’m a wild-eyed dervish, so what do I know?
We need someone prominent – and white, and with a bow-tie (sorry, but it’s true), someone like Peter Hitchens in other words but respected in the scientific and media communities – to stand up and say clearly that the emperor has no clothes.
Do we never learn?
Clark, you have fine brain and a perfctly aligned consciousness!
Yes indeed, respect to Steve and Redders. The regular police in Britain do an awful lot of good work which never gets sung about.
The problems arise when they’re used for reactionary political purposes – eg. the miners’ strike and by definition, some of the nefarious activities of Special Branch – and/or get dumped with catching the fall-out from socio-economic distortions.