the devastation of cannabis...

 there are some of us who have lived in the demi-monde who were not criminals but dispatched to the other side for various and diverse reasons.

however the facts of existence did not remove all morals and respect for the law and the necessity for the existence of the police. 

in the underground the the currency of life is money, sex and drugs.

smack, heroin, cocaine, speed, alcohol, pot.

there is no doubt which of these destructive and vitiating of the human spirit.

the odd one out is cannabis.

it has been used since the dawn of civilisation and rates a mention in the histories of Herodotus.

It was freely available world wide from time immemorial till the powers who wanted to seize the opium monopoly off the fragmenting ottoman empire in 1912 included cannabis in their articles of contract.

from that time till the present more and more stringent prohibitions have been placed on its cultivation and use aided and abetted by an overlaid  spurious morality encapsulated by the bureaucrat one harry j. anslinger who turned his attention to pot after the prohibition of alcohol was enacted in the USA.

it should be noted that anslinger hated negroes and mexicans and believed that pot enhanced the sexual prowess of these people and it was he anslinger who would curb these appetites and protect society.

"By the tons it is coming into this country — the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms. ... Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him."

nearly a century later it has come to the point where  normal people who remain averse to the drugs mentioned above but like a toke now and then require the laws to be changed  to allow them their small pleasures.

however the press with its insatiable  desire for lurid stories and the police have united to prevent this occurring and justifying their stand with yet more spurious and lurid stories to whet the appetites of the proletariats  sell newspapers and ensure their support in maintaining the ban.

In todays Sunday Star Times sometime copper and member of parliament Chester Borrows is given space to lump alcohol and cannabis together as equal causes of societal devastation. 

He gives figures of police arrests of 200 for cannabis in 1972 to the hundreds of thousands a decade later.

It would seem the social devastation was caused by arresting people and banging them up for something inconsequential and entirely preventable if people were allowed to grow their own and the profit motif was removed.  

Douglas Browne in his history of Scotland Yard shows how policing has always been a business. e.g. the saying that if you want to know the time then ask a policeman relates to the fact that coppers were at one time the biggest fences of watches in England.

Now ex coppers like Borrows are still trying to protect their franchise and it is no surprise that Borrows was an MP when private prisons were allowed in New Zealand. 

Of course he has support from the sanctimonious, self righteous, punitive bourgeoisie and the justice industry itself, cops, lawyers, judges, corrections and newly created kannabis kounsellors who see a new opening for self appointed know alls to standover ordinary people with the sanction and approval of the AUTHORITIES for toking up.

.