The Destructive Dangers of Marijuana

My New Best Pal in the Drugs War? Stormzy!

Peter Hitchens
The Daily Mail

I don’t suppose the rapper Stormzy is a keen reader of my articles, and I have no idea what sort of hideous noises he makes, but we are now shoulder to shoulder, brothers in arms and hand in hand.

For Stormzy, whose real name is Michael Omari, says he has stopped smoking marijuana, after realising the drug was harming his mental health. And because of who he is, his message is likely to reach a lot of people who urgently need to hear it.

He said: ‘I have suffered with mental health problems for the past few years… When I used to feel depressed, I would lock myself away and smoke weed and I would just get worse and worse and worse.’

Professor Sir Robin Murray, a psychiatrist who has warned for years of this danger, thinks the singer’s admission could have a significant impact on young marijuana smokers.  He says: ‘The evidence is very clear that heavy cannabis use can cause mental health problems including anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Young people may be reluctant to believe this when a psychiatrist like me says it but are much more likely to accept it when a star like Stormzy says it.’

It is interesting just how little coverage Stormzy’s confession has had.

"She'll Definitely Not Be Right, Mate."

Perpetual Vigilance Required

Three people have been arrested after a massive meth bust in the Waikato. 

James Fyfe
Newshub


More than 200kg of the drug, valued at around $86.4 million, was seized by police following an investigation in collaboration with Western Australia Police.

As well as the 216kg of methamphetamine, police also seized around $100,000 in cash, a number of vehicles and a number of firearms.  Two New Zealand men, aged 38 and 40, were charged, as well as a 47-year-old Australian man.  Two of the men appeared in Hamilton District Court on Thursday, with the other man due to appear in Rotorua District Court on Friday.

"Since July, Police and Customs have seized more than a tonne of methamphetamine around the country," said Detective Inspector Paul Newman.   "That overall figure is an extremely significant amount and represents well over a year's worth of supply nationwide."

Police said they would be continuing with enquiries regarding the seizure.

Drug Corruption At the Centre of UK Government

Corrupt At The Core

The truth is Britain's entire elite has been corrupted by drug abuse for decades

Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday


Nobody will now be able to get the picture out of their head of the Right Honourable Michael Gove, Cabinet Minister, intellectual and parliamentarian, perhaps our next Premier, snorting cocaine up his nostrils at some louche London gathering.

In the background, his heedless fellow guests are braying and giggling. Thousands of miles away, the trade they have helped to finance is destroying lives by the hundred. But the menace is close at hand as well. In the dark streets not far away, the same trade is spreading like a stain, unrestrained by police and courts who long ago lost the will to fight it.

And why did they lose the will? Because they take their signals from above, and they know, in the police force and the prosecution service, and on the magistrates’ bench, that their modern masters don’t want too much fuss about drugs. For where might it end? If the drug laws were enforced, who knows who else might be treading the fools’ parade in the exercise yards of Her Majesty’s’ prisons – not just Cabinet Ministers and Privy Counsellors, but police chiefs, judges, bishops, school heads, university professors, senior civil servants, newspaper editors and BBC executives.

So rather than see that, let us be thoroughly egalitarian and just let everyone off.

I have to say Mr Gove’s confession comes as no great surprise to me.

Dumber Than A Sack of Hammers

"They are Insane"


Mike Hosking
NZ Herald


It would appear, if Paula Bennett's Cabinet paper leak is accurate, the Government today is considering, once again, how to soften up laws around dope.  Make no mistake: this is a government soft on drugs.

There is a vote to be held in association with the next election. What they're considering today, apparently, is what sort of question that is, and what goes along with it. A pre-published bit of legislation, some ideas around potential legislation, or actual legislation that would potentially be enacted should the vote go the "yes" way.

The specifics aren't important. What's important is the madness of doing what they're doing.  I am astounded New Zealand First is going along with this.

Just this week, we had the story of some kids in the Far North planting trees, and the trouble employers have getting them off drugs.  For everyone they look at to hire, they might find one who's got potential. The rest apparently fail drug tests.

Dying By Degree

Does NZ Want Corporates Producing Potent Cannabis Here?


Is this what we really want for our country? 

Kate Hawkesby
Newstalk ZB

As we edge ever closer to our referendum next year on cannabis, the debate's heating up.

That's a good thing. We need to be as well informed as we possibly can before we vote.
It's easy to come at these issues from whatever your personal experiences or interests are.

But part of living in a democratic society is being able to look at debate from all sides. At the moment with the legalise cannabis debate, I tend to come at it from my standpoint as a parent.

But one angle which pricked my interest this week was that of its move into the hands of big corporates - and with that, it's increased potency.

If we look to overseas examples, which we should, a Colorado native and author of the book "Weed, Inc", Ben Cort has been shedding some light on what's happened in his hometown.  Colorado legalised cannabis in 2012. Since then, commercial interests have taken over sales and they're making millions.

Not only that, the product's been hijacked. The 'natural plant' as cannabis enthusiasts from the 1970s may've called it, is no longer just a plant. It's concentrated and distilled into edibles, eye drops, gum, lollies, nasal sprays, ice cream - whatever you can think of now contains THC – which is the active ingredient in marijuana. The part that gets you high.

Cort says it's so dramatically more potent now than it was back then. Where plants of the 70s may've contained about 4 per cent THC, the levels now are more like 42 per cent.  Why? Because it's now being grown in glasshouses and commercial production facilities, with pesticides, fertilisers and metals added to it.

In his TED talk, Cort cites a mate of his who quit working in one of the cannabis growing facilities due to his fears about the amount of chemicals he was around. Their employers were asking them to wear Hazmat suits – that's how much chemical spraying was going onto these plants.

So with the increase in THC comes of course the increase in addiction. The key factors in terms of addiction are age of onset, frequency of use, and potency. It's said that adolescents who take up cannabis these days have a 50 per cent chance of getting addicted. It used to be around 17 per cent.
The arguments against – that it's a health issue and not a criminal one – I hear that.

But don't we create a bigger health issue for ourselves than we already have with those other legalised corporatised addictive drugs such as tobacco and alcohol?   They're legal: look how that turned out.

Is this what we really want for our country?

A more potent drug than ever before, and in the hands of corporate giants milking it for every cent?

I wouldn't have thought so.

Disproportionate Penalties are Necessarily Unjust

End the ‘Three Strikes’ Law

People Should Not Be Condemned to Die in Prison for Drug Crimes

By Katherine Timpf
National Review Online


It’s beyond time to end the “three strikes” law that sentences people to die in prison for their third drug offense — and instead give judges the discretion to levy punishments as they see fit.

Take, for example, the case of Chris Young. According to Reason, Young was 26 years old when he was sentenced to life in federal prison because of drugs. The reason? Prosecutors filed an “851 notice,” which subjects offenders to a mandatory life sentence without parole if they’re convicted of a third drug crime.

Yes, Young had been in trouble twice before: He had two low-level crack-cocaine offenses on his record from when he was a teenager. As Reason notes, in those cases, the amount of crack he was found with combined was only 7.5 grams, “or roughly the weight of three pennies.” That’s not a lot of crack, but it was still enough to allow prosecutors to file that 851 against him when he was later charged with cocaine trafficking. In other words, those small amounts of crack are the reason he is now sentenced to die behind bars.

Now, I’m not saying that Young didn’t break the law. I believe that all drugs should be legalized. In a truly free country, people would have the freedom to decide what they do with their own bodies. But I do understand that many drugs are currently illegal. Regardless of the fact that he broke the law, however, dooming him to die in prison is both extremely harsh and incredibly unnecessary.

See, Young showed signs at his hearing that he had become a changed man.

Braying Donkeys

Some Reporters and Academics Are In Wonderland

Here is how inane some in the media have become when it comes to crime and punishment.

A lack of evidence jailing people longer puts them or anyone off committing crime makes it difficult to use deterrence as a reason to hand out long prison sentences, a High Court judge has said.  Justice Matthew Palmer told lawyers ahead of sentencing he wanted them to come to court with evidence longer sentences actually had the deterrent effect the law told him to consider.

Days later, defence lawyers came with research showing it didn't work.  The Crown turned up with nothing.  The sentencing notes of Justice Palmer reflect concern around the lack of evidence in an area which the Sentencing Act 2002 says should be considered when judges consider how long to send people to jail.  [NZ Herald]

This is how the story was played up ("framed")  by David Fisher, Herald reporter.  However, in the small print, the matter was quite different.

Myanmar's Unsavoury Export

From the Golden Triangle to New Zealand, With "Love"

Methamphetamine made by armed rebels and gangs in Myanmar jungles coming to New Zealand

Kurt Bayer
NZ Herald

Narco-guerrillas and ruthless foreign gangs in the lawless, remote jungles of Myanmar are cranking out high-purity crystal methamphetamine at unprecedented levels, which top drug experts say is appearing on New Zealand streets.

Safely nestled in mountainous, dense forests, with the Myanmar authorities and army turning a blind eye, and often aided by state-backed militias, high-tech meth laboratories and factories employing world-class chemists are fuelling a US$40 billion regional drug economy.

Record billion-dollar busts in Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand in recent months – with tonnes bound for wider distribution by organised crime supply networks – has the United Nations ramping up political pressure on troubled Myanmar, also called Burma, and other governments of the so-called Golden Triangle region, to help crack down on the rampant drug trade.

"What we see inside Myanmar right now is massive amounts of really-high-purity crystal meth being produced, and this supply push or oversupply is being connected to high demand across the region, including in places like Australia and New Zealand, which have some of the highest crystal meth prices per kilo in the world," says Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and the Pacific regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The last three years have seen a "massive surge" in crystal meth production in northern Myanmar, especially from outside gangs moving into the territory controlled by ethnic armed groups, says Douglas, the veteran Bangkok-based UN head of office.  The mass-produced methamphetamine, widely known as P in New Zealand, is typically produced using pseudoephedrine and ephedrine – everyday cough and cold remedy ingredients. Huge quantities of the precursor chemicals are smuggled into Myanmar, mostly from China and Northeast India, the Herald has been told.

Once synthesised into crystal meth, the finished product is trafficked across the country's porous borders before being shifted through established Southeast Asian organised crime networks.

Hypocrisy on Steroids--Literally

Celebrated Drugs Cheating

Transgenderism is a deliberate attempt to rebel against the Creator.  There is a basic polarity in creation when it comes to human beings: their gender is determined by the sex chromosomes that combine (one from the female; one from the male).

Females have an XX pair of sex chromosomes, and males, an XY pair. A baby’s gender is determined by the sperm cell that fertilizes a woman’s egg. Sperm carry one sex chromosome, either a Y (male) or X (female). [Gender Baby]

Transgenderism would subordinate this natural law to the demands and requirements of human choice.  If a man wants to be a woman, or a woman wants to be a man this change can be manipulated into existence by drugs.  This is an ultimate expression of human self-determination. Now it has become all the rage.  And the biggest fools in this biggest of fool's paradises are sports people.

In recent decades there have been huge ructions, demands, postulations, and storms of anger over some athletes and sports people enhancing their performance by drugs.  They have been labelled as cheats and treated as pariahs.  Why the entire Olympic team of Russia has recently been suspended from competition because of their regime of chemical additives.  That's on the one hand.

Government Handout To Further Impoverish Children

The Poor Are Going to Become Poorer

We are on the cusp of being driven to conclude that lefties are dumber than a sackful of hammers.  We mean really, really stupid.  Not just inchoately naive--but perversely stupid.

All week we have been lambasted by politicians telling us that 88,000 children will be lifted out of poverty in New Zealand by a brand new tax funded lollypop that will be winging its way to their respective households.

It is projected to lift 88,000 children out of poverty through a combination of higher Accommodation Supplement changes, more generous Working for Families scheme, a "Best Start" payment for parents of young babies, and a "Winter Warmer" grant for beneficiaries and superannuitants.  [NZ Herald]

Let's charitably grant that the Gummint is all full of naive genuineness when it makes such claims.  It really believes that its new grant will lift 88,000 children out of poverty.   Gummint politicans will go home for Christmas, stroking themselves in self adulation over the wonderful change it has wrought in thousands upon thousands of Kiwi families and households.  So simple, too.  Just spend an additional $5.3 billion over four years, and it's done and dusted.  The Finance Minister tells us how he and his colleagues are swollen with pride at the accomplishment.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson said it would transform the lives of many and was a far better way to improve the lives of children than across the board tax cuts.  "This is one of the most significant packages to reduce child poverty in recent memory, We are very, very proud of this package." [Emphasis, ours]

This wonderful transformation of human nature that will allegedly lift 88,000 children out of poverty will deliver an extra $75 dollars per week to 384,000 families.

Letter From the UK (About Mind Distorting Drugs and Violent Crime)

Nothing to Do With Terrorism

Peter Hitchens
MailOnline

Far too often, we make the world worse than it is by imposing a pattern on it that has little or nothing to do with reality. I say this though I am a keen pessimist. I know the glass is half-empty unless someone is actually refilling it at the time.

But what a foolish mess we get into over so much of the violence that has recently ripped through our society. For instance, we have been marking the terrible death of Jo Cox, a young wife and mother and a delightful, beloved person missed terribly by all who knew her.  It is quite right that she should be remembered. This was a dreadful event. Yet the authorities and the media have decided to insist that her murder was political.  I think this is wrong. Her killer was quite obviously a deranged, muttering loner, with no serious understanding of politics.




Psychiatrists know that such people often latch on to political or religious movements to make themselves seem important.  Why help him magnify his wretched life, his twisted mind and his cruel violence? I have my own suspicions that, by classifying his act as terror, the authorities closed their minds to other possibilities.

It's Hard to Find a Job in New Zealand

Chattering Classes on the Wacky Backy

There is a shortage of employees in some industries in New Zealand.  The Prime Minister, Bill English stated the other day that he has been told repeatedly that one reason employers are short staffed is due to applicants failing drug tests.  The Chattering Classes, the media and left-wing political opponents, all still living in the musty back rooms of Sydney and Beatrice Webb, went all apoplectic.

Where's your evidence?  What surveys was this based upon?  Ignorant prejudice, you stupid man, etc.  The PM was quietly firm: "that's what employers have been telling me".  Once consequence is that employers are ending up giving jobs to immigrants, who, for some inexplicable reason, don't spend their lives smoking weed and P.  They actually want to work.

One media outlet broke away from the pack.  Stuff reported:

A Hamilton-based farm recruitment agency is backing Prime Minister Bill English's claims that Kiwi workers' inability to pass drug tests are why overseas workers are needed.

The Falsest of False Gods

The Scourge of Meth

A significant piece has been published recently in the NZ Herald on P-addiction and its consequences.  Here are some excepts:

Two days before Christmas, Lisa lost her baby daughter.  She lost herself 18 months before in a glass pipe of crystal meth passed to her by an older man, "from a very respectable profession".

"It became a huge problem. It hooked me quickly. I chased it every day. My entire life tumbled down in 18 months."  Lisa (name changed to protect privacy) smoked up to a gram a day. She kept the cost down by selling meth to friends and selling her body working as a prostitute from home while her daughter was at daycare. Men would come from 10am to 2pm.  "I didn't think it was wrong. I just wanted more."

Her clothes hung off her skeletal size six frame.

Putin's Poodles--Vlad the Impaler Wins Again

The Mobsters, The Rackets, and the IOC

International sport is up to its neck in the proverbial, it would seem.  Firstly, there is the now open secret that Russia, under the direction of its government, has systematically doped up its athletes, and conspired to cover it over with faux drug testing.  The secret intelligence services have been involved, revealing just how much the Russian regime views this as a form of warfare.

Secondly, there is the widespread view that Russia, while utterly and cravenly complicit in cheating (for national "honour") is not alone, but many other nations engage systematically in doping up their athletes.  No-one appears to be challenging this as an untruth.  Then there is the Russian bribery of the International Olympic Committee to ensure the IOC sniffs just a little, and looks the other way.

As a consequence we have lost what little interest we had in the Olympics.  But grim realism acknowledges that there will be no changes of any substance.  The IOC is as corrupt as Sepp Blatter and its patron, Vlad the Impaler, it would seem.  The only thing that will bring rogue states like Russia and the IOC itself to heel is a universal "turnoff" from the Olympics, the IOC, and the Olympic "movement".

This would be very easy to do.

The Tyranny of the Administrative State

Asinine Tyrannical Law

The administrative state is one which busies itself organising the lives of its citizens.  Granted, there must be a certain body of administrative law.  Road rules, which prevent accidents, are an excellent example.  But more and more secular Western states seek to administer the lives of their citizens by means of endless administrative regulations.

Breaches of administrative law result in fines and eventual imprisonment.  Note that under administrative law the "criminal" might not have done any actual harm to his neighbour's life or property.  His "crime" was that he transgressed an administrative law which had been promulgated to prevent any harm to his neighbour in the first place.  Administrative law is what we call "cocoon" law.  It is preventative in nature and intent.  But the outcome is a progressive statist tyranny, where, in the end, the only part of the human anatomy not regulated by government rules, regulations, and statutes is the rear end.  For every other human function and activity there are bureaucratically promulgated rules and regulations.

Taking Advantage of the Vulnerable

Worse Than Fiction

John Le Carre's novel, The Constant Gardner is a story of pharmaceutical exploitation.  Big Western drug companies distribute drugs in African countries, but the drugs are untested, dangerous, and end up killing people.  They were not approved for use in the US and other Western countries.  Since the West was smart enough not to distribute them, African countries were easy pickings.  Sound far-fetched.  Not at all.  It is actually happening, as the following article from Turtle Bay and Beyond reveals:

Letter From America (About Marijuana)

My Trip to the Pot Shop

Medical marijuana is quite literally a life saver.

By Michelle Malkin

National Review Online

March 26, 2014

Pueblo West, Colo. – It’s 9:00 a.m. on a weekday, and I’m at the Marisol Therapeutics pot shop. This is serious business. Security is tight. ID checks are frequent. Merchandise is strictly regulated, labeled, wrapped, and controlled. The store is clean, bright, and safe. The staffers are courteous and professional. Customers of all ages are here.

There’s a middle-aged woman at the counter nearby who could be your school librarian. On the opposite end of the dispensary, a slender young soldier in a wheelchair with close-cropped hair, dressed in his fatigues, consults with a clerk. There’s a gregarious cowboy and an inquisitive pair of Baby Boomers looking at edibles. A dude in a hoodie walks in with his backpack.

And then there’s my husband and me.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Getting Lost in the Deep Weed

Posted on Friday, January 3, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

I have written before on the sinfulness of recreational marijuana use. In an appendix to Future Men, entitled “Liberty and Marijuana,” I argued that the one use for alcohol that is prohibited in Scripture is a condition remarkably similar to the effects of marijuana — and to the extent that there is a distinction between being drunk and being stoned, marijuana is demonstrably worse. For more detailed argumentation on that issue, I refer you to that place. So it is a sin to get stoned.

At the same time, I have also repeatedly urged us to remember the distinction between sins and crimes. Not everything that is sinful ought to be against the law. Granted that marijuana use is sinful — although many Christians today are muddled enough to not understand that — ought it to remain against the law? I believe so.

Now I say this acknowledging that many of our current penalties for pot use have been draconian, and I believe that our “war on drugs” has been an over-reaching and very expensive joke.

Drugs as a Health Issue, Not a Crime

Assume the Position

We reproduce below a piece on a serious problem--the over representation of blacks and hispanics in US jails.  This has led to an unfortunate consequence of police profiling of blacks and hispanics in poor neighbourhoods, which in turn has many deleterious additional unintended consequences.   A major contributor to this vortex of bad consequences is the policy of drug prohibition and criminalisation.

H. David Schuringa is  the president of Crossroad Bible Institute, an international discipleship and advocacy agency for prisoners and their families, with headquarters in the United States.  Crossroad Bible Institute is active in New Zealand prisons providing educational material, Bible studies, tutoring, and other support to prisoners. 

Dr Schuringa wrote the following piece in a US blog:

Enslaved to Power

Tobacco in Plain Packages

New Zealand is the second country in the world to opt for restricting cigarettes to be sold only in plain packaging.  The objective is to make the weed less attractive to smokers, thereby cutting the power of advertising to pull people into smoking.  There are inevitable legal challenges--which in our case will be dependant upon legal challenges in Australia (the first country to implement such a ban.)

This move has long been an objective of the Maori Party because Maori have a disproportionately high number of Maori smokers when compared to the rest of the population.  Maori co-leader, Tariana Turia probably believes that tobacco is just one more conspiracy by white capitalists against Maori. 

We suspect that the move will be welcomed in many quarters.  Few people will be prepared to endorse the damage that smoking can do to lungs and its connection with lung cancer.

But, as always, there are broader issues which thoughtful folk will have considered resisted and will see this as a wowsering move by a nanny state.

In the first place there are the rampant political inconsistencies of the Greens