Sex and Agriculture

The old man and I were walking along Mayoral Drive in the Auckland CBD one afternoon back in the '90s. Another even older man had just walked out of the Pan Pacific Hotel and headed towards us. My father, aged sixty-mumble, did something I'd never see him do before.

He lost the expression of a man wearied by sixty-odd years on the clock, and reverted to a mumbling child as he praised former child actor Mickey Rooney in person. This crinkly polite Yank - accosted on the streets in a strange land by some quixotic stranger in the three piece armour of an attorney - had brightened my Dad's day considerably.

Needless to say, Mickey Rooney's golden days of Hollywood were a bit before my time. Growing up two generations prior to my existence, the old man grew up on tales of conquest by proxies of the British Empire in books, as well as the pulp fiction churned out by Hollywood, leeched as it was of reality by the censors and purveyors of moral rectitude.

The Ten Commandments of Hollywood back then, summed up in one picture, were:



An artifact of this celluloid puritanism popped up last week, nicely raising the profile of Eva Green and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For in the process. In America at least, nipples are still considered Satan's cherries.

In contrast to the old man, all my heroes were outlaws. I grew up with '70s cinema and early '80s auteurs, the golden era of the film director. Years before the blockbuster killed the independent studios' diversity with superheroes and cloned plots, it was all Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bugsy Malone, the Blondini gang from Goodbye Pork Pie, Bruno Lawrence, Sam Lowry in Brazil, Buckaroo Banzai, David Lynch, etc.

Moral ambiguity, anti-heroes, irony and pathos were main ingredients. Ultra-violence was used as allegory or hyperbole (A Clockwork Orange, The Evil Dead), as opposed to today's serious yet CGI carnage purely for the sake of it.

But I digress. The Mickey Rooney intersection came into mind on Thursday, as John Banks walked out of court a guilty man. My old man shared airtime with Banks on Radio Pacific. Of all the things Banks could have said as Michelle Boag quietly photobombed away in the background, Banks had to come out with an esoteric 1930's song about standing in puddles. A man so pole-axed, the child came out.

Three days later, John Banks announces he is exiting the political stage once more. Up until this afternoon, it looked like he was blithely looking at hanging around in Parliament, upstaging the election theatre cast from Jamie Whyte to John Key, before crashing through the footlights head first into the orchestra pit.

Farewell then, John Banks. You will be forgotten. Cannabis will be legalised. Look who's stupid then. Auckland will one day reverse your rates poll tax (aka the Uniform Annual General Charge), as well as your puritanical Brothel and Commercial Sex Premises bylaw. Charter schools will be folded back into the integrated schools system, where state accountability sits in judgement over religious schools.

Everything John Banks did will be dirt.

Hanging Out with Beck, Whodini and Queen Camilla

Please pardon my break from blogging. Although I've been following the headlines, watching the gossip on Twitter, and occasionally popping into the House to witness some absurd theatre, I've really been preferring the company of chickens.

Kapiti Gothic; Beck and Queen Camilla. Whodini AWOL, as usual.

Sartre was wrong about a lot, but not Hell being other people. If the Psychoactive Substances donut wasn't bad enough, here's a sample of righteous puritanism from today's headlines alone:

One (vanilla) farmer gets fined $7500 for gross animal cruelty, while another farmer (with a Maori name) gets fined $15,000 for stubbornly refusing to wear a quad bike helmet on his land. Don't quibble the obiter, the law is still an ass. Actual harm > potential harm.

The coronial inquest into the Masterton balloon tragedy continues, with cannabis still being the whipping boy for the mess. Never mind an almost identical accident occurring in the US (wind changes, balloon hits power lines). Never mind testimony saying there's no evidence cannabis played any role in the balloon failure, the government is welcoming drug testing in the tourism industry.

NZ I love you but you still really piss me off.

Do Focus Groups Dream of Synthetic People?

April was one of those months. Vanilla skies with no news, followed by a vanilla religious holiday, concluding with a vanilla hailstorm of moral panic complete with pitchforked lightning and a flood of recanting politicians.

The Easter shopping anomaly went to 11 this year, with everything open in Wanaka over the mandated religious period except the pubs. Apparently the town was tipped off that there would be no enforcement of the archaic law against Easter trading (unless you were a pub or an unsuccessful special event applicant, in which case there would be). This fickle absence of enforcement gave Wanaka an excemption reserved in legislation only for Taupo and other listed 'tourist towns'.

Alcohol was still available at the traditionally excempted premises. If you were middle class enough to afford to dine in licensed premises, you could drink booze uninterrupted over Easter. This exclusion is an artifact from before the Sale of Liquor Act 1989, when every Sunday was Easter Sunday and all the pubs were closed. Churches could still serve booze (to minors!) in the Eucharist, Synagogues could still serve booze (to babies!) at circumcisions / genital mutilations. For the secular Gentile others, we had to stockpile booze at home over Easter like a survivalist.

Survivalism sounds like what is increasingly a pastime for the residents of the Flockton sinkhole. The recent rains have washed away more hope from them, with the balance between fight and flight swinging inexorably towards the latter. Winter is coming, and there may be more once-in-a-century floods on their way. There's no sign of help from King Gerry, who has kicked the problem firmly into the city council's realm to deal with.

Not entirely dissimilar to the buck-passing bug in last year's visionary Psychoactive Substances Act, which led to hicksville mayors around NZ landed with responsibility for a new and complex regime they knew absolutely nothing about. The upshot of this led to the government siding with vigilante arsonists in banning legal highs outright last week.

In retrospect, all the signs were there. Nationwide protests that looked like a working class Sensible Sentencing Trust lynch mob took place. Associate Minister of Health (and temporary drug czar while Dunne was in the naughty corner last year) Todd McClay agreed with a Rotorua crowd that legal highs were bad. Labour party shadow drug czar Iain Lees-Galloway appeared in Palmy saying legal highs were bad. Only Peter Dunne was singing the Act's positives until last Sunday night, when Dunne finally capitulated and agreed that legal highs were, as they say, bad.

Blame for this vanilla victory rests firmly with National and Labour. National for under-funding the project to the point of sabotage, and its ignorance of what was at stake beyond "The focus group said no." Labour for the inane local government authority bug they inserted into the Psychoactive Substances Act, demonstrating that they have learned precisely nothing from the local government fallout over the Prostitution Reform Act. Secondly, Labour's populist crusade ran counter to their support for the original bill.

It shows bad faith from both main parties. A lack of imagination from the Nats is to be expected, but Labour's faults are unforgivable. Thank Dagg for MMP and third party software, because there's too much salt sown in the fallow fields of Team Blue and Team Red.

Bush Toasts Police Cannabis Conservation Efforts

RNZAF's Green Hornet, fresh from seeding the Waitakere Ranges

Police Commissioner Mike Bush today praised Police efforts in their annual cannabis seeding project.

"Every year, the NZ Police spends millions of dollars in an attempt to conserve the endangered cannabis plant. In association with the NZ Air Force, Police locate fertile female cannabis plants, uproot them, and fly them over dense bush land, in an attempt to spread cannabis seeds over as wide an area as possible," said Commissioner Bush to an assembled group of police and selected members of the media.

"The NZ Police has a long and proud history of planting things," said Commissioner Bush as he set alight a Wicker Man full of cannabis. "Normally, possession of cannabis seeds is a criminal offence. There is no statute of limitations on the growing of cannabis. It falls to the NZ Police to fulfill this duty."

"We sow the seeds. Nature grows the seeds. We seize the plants. And so the circle of life is complete," chanted Commissioner Bush from amidst the smoke.

After a few minutes, Commissioner Bush re-appeared.

"I have spoken with TolleyMachus. This year's budget will be bountiful," Bush concluded, before retiring to the lunch buffet and finishing off a platter of sausage rolls.

National and Labour's Too-Hard Basket is Full of Pissed Off Voters

Good on Colin Espiner making an eloquent plea for NZ to revisit this futile and destructive War on Drugs.

The National government has ignored the Law Commission's first review of the Misuse of Drugs Act since the law's inception, even with its mild conclusions and Jim Anderton rooting its terms of reference with a conservative reading of the United Nations Conventions. Not altogether unlike National ignoring the recommendations of the Electoral Representation Commission on MMP, which they themselves commissioned.

In fairness, Labour is rooting the hamster on both the War on Drugs and MMP reform as well. Labour MP for Palmy, Iain Lees-Galloway, should have presented his private member's bill on MMP reform with the MMP Commission's findings intact, not cherry-picked to Labour's flavour. The party has learned nothing from their Electoral Finance Act fisting.

Lees-Galloway is also Labour's shadow drug czar, and there's no sign of ceasefire in the War on Drugs from him. He's no different from the general ignorance of current drug czar Todd McClay. Vanilla? Don't get me started on vanilla.

Power before public good, eh. And still the main parties wonder at the rise of the micro parties and the enrolled non-vote. The fish are not apathetic. They're just not going to swallow the same stale bait that these anglers are dangling any more.

Confidence and Paranoia

Seven Sharp grows up with a mature look at Medical Cannabis. It's a strange world we live in where NZ doctors can prescribe opioids out the wazoo, but the doctors still can't prescribe cannabinoids (In the 1950's, the UN complained that NZ had the world's highest per capita use of prescribed heroin).

If only the MSM can transfer that maturity to other areas of news. Violent crime, for example. In the 1950's, NZ had an imprisonment rate of around 56 prisoners per 100,000 population, while Finland had a rate of 189 per 100K. By 2008, the countries had swapped places. NZ now has an imprisonment rate of around 200 per 100K, while Finland has quartered its prison population.

Ours is the second highest rate of imprisonment in the Western World (Never mind David Farrar muddying the waters. I will slap him with a wet bus ticket next time I spot him in the pub). Here's Roger Brooking explaining the details of imprisonment rates (starting at 15:40):


Roger Brooking on Prison Reform from Will de Cleene on Vimeo.

How did Finland drop its imprisonment rate? As Roger Brooking explains around the twenty minute mark, one thing was that politicians and media agreed not to sensationalise violent crime any more. Hope would get airtime, not hate. For instance, more space was given to stories of successful rehabilitation of prisoners on their own terms. One of the final Court Report programs that went out to air on TVNZ 7 was a good go at this angle.


I know this is a big ask, people. My old man was one of the original shit-stirrers who sensationalised crime for political gain back in the 1980's. It went full bloom at the beginning at MMP, when all the fresh messiahs were staking out their turf on the new political landscape. No party could be too tough on crime.

For the journos, crime is easy news that writes itself, comes with its own graphic appeal, and is the cheapest clickbait this side of the latest poll results. Pandering to the crowds' need for vicarious blood is a cheap trick. It takes writers of sterner stuff, investigative journalists for example, to challenge the status quo and improve the public good.

True discoveries are seldom glamorous.

Leaving Las Vegas via New York

The Year of the Horse is off to an inauspicious start with the apparent death by heroin overdose of Philip Seymour Hoffman. The autopsy report has yet to be concluded, let alone released to the public, but this hasn't stopped the NYPD hunting down and arresting four suspected heroin dealers.

Using the same Salem Witch Hunt logic, the cops should also detain the car dealer who handed the keys to the Fast and the Furious' Paul Walker. Alcohol brands would have their assets seized if screenwriters stockpiled their product and drank themselves to death with it.

Such is the weird world of prohibition and liability in the US, this does not happen (although some states do allow drink driving victims to sue the last tavern, usually because they have more insurance money than the drunk driver).

Tests on the heroin found at Hoffman's apartment have reported it to be high quality, free of adulterants and contaminants that have blighted other parts of the North West states. The cops might have just increased the market share of dodgy horse in NYC.

Apparently, dozens of bags were found at the scene. It isn't noted whether this was accumulated stock or a bulk purchase - a horse cellar or a shopping spree at the yearling sales, so to speak. Without going into too much speculation without evidence, I ponder what drove this character actor's motivations in his final act.

Either way, this current witch hunt will end up burning the wrong people. If you live your life in a burning house, you may end up dying of smoke inhalation. No point arresting the real estate agent.

Mazengarbling

Back in the late 1990's, National MP Roger Sowry was the Associate Minister for Health who launched NZ's first National Drug Policy. The document was partly a response to NGO pressure groups, from drug counsellors through to NORML NZ, hassling for a more mature policy framework to deal with NZ's love of drugs than just the blunt tools of the Misuse of Drugs Act and the liquor laws.

This comprehensive document was reviewed in the 2000's, when Jim Anderton put his spin on it. John Key's government has finally got around to reviewing the National Drug Policy, presumably under the guidance of Associate Minister for Health Todd McClay.

A discussion document has been released seeking feedback on the latest incarnation of the National Drug Policy. This paper is notable for two things. Firstly, it doesn't once mention cannabis. There's no mention at all of the global legalisation trends.

Secondly, there is a not so subtle swing away from addressing direct drug harms:

Traditionally, the NDP mostly focused on minimising harm to the users of alcohol and drugs, by controlling drug supply, dissuading use and providing users with access to treatment.

However, families, communities and society are also impacted by these substances and the children of drug users are at greater risk of growing up to become drug users themselves.  Breaking this intergenerational cycle requires a whole-of-system response, including an emphasis on how whānau, communities and settings such as schools can be supported to minimise drug-related harm.

You see what they did there? Adult drug use is now all about the kids.

The Greens' Jan Logie points to a similar hollowing out of intents with protection orders by National as well:

This government has shifted the focus from domestic violence to vulnerable children despite domestic violence being one of the most significant risks for children in NZ.

Domestic Violence was not mentioned once in the white paper, despite a large number of submissions raising this issue. There is nothing in the legislation to progress our response to Domestic Violence. In fact it may well move resources away from domestic violence.

It looks a hell of a lot like sweeping problems under carpets. And if Colin Craig becomes Minister for Families and brings back the belt, the return to the 1950's pavlova paradise will be complete.

4:20 News - Countdown to Election 2020 Edition

President Obama recently admitted in an interview that cannabis was no more harmful than alcohol, indicating that he won't be bringing the federal hammer down on the state experiments with legal cannabis sales in Colorado and Washington any time soon. Many miles south of his border, Uruguay has become the first country to legalise cannabis growing and sales.

Meanwhile in NZ, the War on Drugs is alive and well. Our lawmakers continue to remain wilfully ignorant of the high cost of cannabis prohibition, while claiming the moral high ground. Take aspiring Act party leader John Boscawen, for example (HT Lindsay Mitchell):

"We had Don Brash come out and promote the liberalisation of marijuana and while that may have had the support of five per cent of the population..."

According to the Ministry of Health, twice as many NZers use cannabis daily than who voted for the Act party last election (50,800 compared with 23,889). The same source says that 14 percent of the population use cannabis at least once a year. Boscawen knows as much about cannabis prohibition as Katrina Shanks knows about the internet.

Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party's misguided missile, Fred MacDonald, has turned up at Ratana and was savaged by Shane Jones. He's not the most subtle activist, but Fred was on message. Labour's most prolific wanker can only throw a tissue of insults in riposte.

Mac may have broken protocol, but I'm sure he would have had a parlay/korero to explain his actions with the locals later on.

Last election, the ALCP received 11,738 votes, around half the Act party's haul. But can the ALCP get MSM airtime along with the other political minnows? Like hell. ALCP aren't welcome at the TV minor leaders' debates. The MSM can lavish attention on spanners like Colin Craig or Dotcom, but Cannabis Law Reform is the butt of every joke.

Off the record, I have personally yet to meet a journalist who doesn't like to get loaded and have a good time. But put them in a TV studio and on the record, they vomit the tabloid puritanism of prohibition. The mainstream hypocrisy came to a head at Waitangi some years ago when a Close Up crew exploited the hospitality of cannabis law reform activists for a slot they ended up calling Reefer Madness.

I hold high hopes that this media perversity will wane as the baby boomers are replaced by Generation Xers. Conservative or liberal, few Xers share their forebears' pavlova conditioning. The transition has already begun and should be complete by 2020, when the last Muldoon groupie leaves Parliament.

Cannabis and Conservative Exceptionalism

Silly season continues in NZ, where all the jaded journos are on holiday and the MSM mastheads are manned by toddler news hounds. Little wonder that the headlines are full of uncritical reprints of police press releases. If I had a budget of $1.6 billion a year, I'd be spamming the press with happy clappy goon tunes too.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, recreational cannabis has been legalised. Local authorities report no signs of apocalypse, but it's still early days. The federal government has yet to stick its oar in.

Conservative exceptionalism is alive elsewhere, as always. The Vanilla Prince of the New York Times, David Brooks, penned a column where he distilled the white privilege down to its raw ingredients:

[M]ost of us developed higher pleasures.

Therein lies the snobbery. Sure, some may move on to other pursuits; private golf clubs, charity gigs and other pissing competitions between trust fund babies, for example. Whatever floats your boat.

But not everyone desires such aristocratic inanities. Brooks not only pulls the ladder up behind him, but then tries to beat everyone else below his lofty perch with it. Good on Brooks' old stoner buddy calling his bullshit.

NZ has its own parrots of privelege here as well. Rosemary Macleod is a reliable squawker, with her monotonous cry of "Tried it, didn't like it, don't make it legal."

A few politicians have admitted historical usage (eg. Goff, Dunne, Groser), giving them similar sanctimony to continue this civil war on drugs.

It just goes to show that wealth, power and privilege can be more harmful and addictive than any plant from the wrong side of the Magnolia family tree.

UPDATE: This just in from Matt Taibbi.

Kiwi Killjoys; 5 Fun Criminal Acts That Weren't Illegal in NZ When I Was Born

1) Drinking on Wellington's Waterfront at 3am. In the parlance of The Wire, on a hot summer night, the corner is the poor man's lounge. There are few things more memorable than getting drunk in the small hours with a beautiful woman on Wellington's waterfront, the best lounge in the world (weather permitting).

Unfortunately, an unholy alliance between local government busy bodies and national government police goons have produced liquor-free zones that would make alcohol prohibitionist Kate Sheppard proud. Soon, every part of NZ will be highchair-friendly 24/7 , and no-one will witness those Yayoi Kusama-like infinity moments on the Wellington harbour again. Not without a private patch of Oriental Bay real estate, at least.

2) Dancing til dawn at an NZ nightclub. The party may never end at John Key's house, but due to new alcohol laws which came into force this week, all bars must now close at 4am. It's like a puritan mash-up of 6 o'clock closing and daylight saving. Patricia Bartlett must be genuflecting in her grave. Her vision of a bland NZ mindset has come true.

David Farrar points out the empty vessels of youth binge drinking hysteria. Lest we forget, NZ is out-drunk by 48 other countries.

3) Cycling without a helmet, another National party crime. Jim Bolger's car-happy used car salesmen constituents got a fuel injection in the 1990's. Not only was a new line in cheap Jap imports flooding in after import restrictions were lifted, cycling was actively discouraged as an alternative form of transport by making it illegal to cycle without wearing a polystyrene tit on one's head.

Even rotan-happy Singapore, which cruelly and unusally punishes people for smoking, long hair and chewing gum (among many many other fickle deviances) has no laws mandating bike helmets. New news everyone, legally required bike helmets may cause more harm than good.

4) Smoking in an adult environment (i.e. bar). One of the great joys I used to look forward to after a hard day of dealing with other people was sitting down at the local bar with a pint of ale, a blank pad of paper, a pen, and a pack of cigarettes. Alas, this is now considered a crime against humanity. This just in, a longitudinal study has shown that second-hand smoke cancer does not fucking exist .

5) Cannabis. First grown in NZ by a nun, popularised by visiting US soldiers during WWII, blamed by the vanilla people for the Bassett Road murders. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 gave police increasing powers, to the point where dope fiends are now treated more harshly than murderers and fraudsters. Persecution on this level hasn't been seen since the Anglicans tried to wipe out the Catholics.

Downstage Down

It's a sad to note the demise of Wellington's Downstage Theatre. I've seen some good plots there, Ian Mune's King Lear topping the list.

It is some small consolation that one of Downstage's board treaders (Untold Tales of Maui's Taika Cohen) has managed to monetise his art into a memorable skit adored by dope fiends and Soccer Mums alike:



It's a sort of sequel to Two Cars One Night, which was set outside a pub, the most common childcare centre for Generations X and older.

Presumably there's a third part, involving Mums monged on prescription meds. As the Law Commission pointed out in their drugs review (Part One, pg. 43), between 1958 and 1971, 11.6 percent of married women were on prescribed hypnotics, tranqs (or both). If recent research is anything to go by, little has changed in this area.

Mainstream Monomania

After bearing witness to the passing of the Psychoactives Act into law, albeit via modem, a few observations can be made.

1) The MSM tend to focus on their own pre-conceived narrative to the exclusion of all else.

The day the Law Commission released the generational review on the Misuse of Drugs Act, all the MSM buzzards wanted to talk about was artificial cannabis, a slender part of the broad spectrum review. Cannabis? Stuff what the Law Commission said about that. Synthetic cannabis was where the heat was at.

This time, instead of focusing on the new rules over the lolly weed, the MSM fixated on animal testing. Fair go and all. The Greens' Mojo Mathers should chalk up the interest in that as a win, but it's far from the entire story.

2) Speaking of that Law Commission report, Colorado and Washington State's cannabis legalisation roll outs make a mockery of the Commission's blinkered terms of reference regarding the UN Conventions.

3) Is this new law really world leading? Wasn't the world leading legislation really the Schedule D of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which created an R18 schedule for recreational substances way back during the Clark years?

4) It's amazing how such fluff as the Pakeha "Party" rakes in the headlines, while everyone ignores the elephant in the room wearing the Rastafari tricolor. Steve Braunias is right. This is NZ's lamest decade since the 1950's.

The beige bastards and vanilla people might have won this round, but it'll be all on in 2020.

Twatting the Messenger

A few thoughts on the political stories du jour.

# Foreshadowing 2015-17; Member for Doublespeak, Winston "No Baubles" Peters, has used the word Orwellian in a sentence, thereby signalling that he will support the GCSB spy bill. After a few sweeties have been thrown in, of course.

Having birthed his nemesis over a cup of tea with John Banks back in 2011, John Key will have no choice but to hitch Winston to his wagon in 2014 to stay PM. Werewolf Peters will join Zombie Banks at the reins of the same government for the first time since the 90s.

Little wonder Key is trying to voodoo up any Green Lab coalition in the public imagination. No-one has yet imagined the terrible price of a Nat/ NZ First/ Act coalition. Charter schools popped out of nowhere post-2011. Dagg knows what Peters will fart out for his price in 2014.

# The Law Society's written submission on the GCSB Bill is getting a justifiably glowing response around the blogs. Ex post facto, I'd nail my proxy to their words as well.

The security services don't work for New Zealanders. They're sworn to serve the Queen and her successors, not us. Their Big Daddy, GCHQ, is a squalid corrupt shambles. Dagg knows what the state of the GCSB is like, but judging Kitteridge's words, I wouldn't trust them with the keys to the nation's grid.

# Cannabis law reform has proved an acid test in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti by-election, separating the realists from the conservatives. It's good to see a Mana candidate speak well on the subject. Hone Harawira has always been too conservative to grok the problem, as have the Maori Party gerontocracy.

# And finally, Peter Dunne. After considerable stirring of my mixed feelings, I must conclude that the worm has turned and good riddance.

United Future lucked it on the back of a worm in the 2002 election, a subject I spoke of for one of my post-grad papers in 2006, just before one of my meltdowns. Dunne killed cannabis reform with his coalition agreement with the Clark administration, ruining some sensible plans from Labour's Tim Barnett, who had seen through Civil Unions and Prostitution Reform.

That kind of damage is unforgiveable. No sympathy for Captain Sensible. He has ruined so many lives, his least of all.

Obligatory Lazy Link Post

There is no news today, so here's an obligatory post of interesting things.

# Aaron Gilmore might be getting attacked by batsmen swooping and diving around his head like mental magpies. Thank Dagg Pablo and Manhire are awake and staring in horror as the new GCSB and Communications Intercept Bills move at warp speed into select committee stage of indeterminate length and intensity.

This is real, and much more dangerous than some bug-eyed born-to-rule cretin with bent antennae screwing with a one seat majority government. Even if you're naive enough to believe in a benevolent John Key appointing everyone from the Governor General to the GCSB Head, think what some future, less scrupulous prime minister might do with that unbridled power. What would Muldoon do? And when the hell did NZ did decide to adopt the US presidential style of appointees to the new royal court anyway?

# I've finished reading Patched; The History of Gangs in New Zealand. It's way too early to blurt to conclusions, but the thesis of pivots proved illuminating. On a completely different subject, the NBR headlines a call for an end to the NZ Police's lethal car pursuit policy. It is certainly responsible for more carnage than any of the other gangs in New Zealand right now.

# This week has seen the moral panic over fake cannabis come to some kind of crescendo with Duncan Garner hitting the bong. For the public good, of course. We wouldn't have all this madness if BZP was still legal. Or real cannabis.

If we're to sit through exploitation media on the divide between the clueless and the guileless, give me this witty Dragnet remake over any of the MSM drivel any day:


# And finally, the Telegraph looks at the life of one of the most respected of this household's gods, an icon of iconoclasts, Richard P. Feynman. He made a great leap from observing the nature of spinning plates.

Aaron Gilmore is unwell

Aaron Gilmore, raconteur and bon vivant, has burst back into the Court of St. James in style.

Looking back as a burnt-out hospo droid, I had to put up with a lot of shit in my time. Oh, the stories I could tell, but my lips are zipped. What goes on in hospo stays in hospo.

However, these are not the old days. Waitrons and bar managers can get hefty fines (for a waitron, if not a National Party tit sucker) or lose their licence for serving drunk arseholes.

But what really grinds my gears is that these Bachanalian bastard lawmakers refuse to stop arresting and jailing less surly behaviour from the cannabis hippies.

And call me a dope fiend, but aren't all these Nats beginning to look the same whiter shade of pale?

Odds and Sods

A random assortment of niggles and observations.

# Brickbat to Martyn Bradbury / Maritime Union's new Daily Blog. I am not going to click through to read every damn repost and Bomber polemic from the RSS feed. Your signal to noise ratio does not warrant a headline or summary feed in the way I accept from, say, Public Address. Put the full post in the RSS, you hit count-obsessed idiots.

# For some reason, the signal to noise ratio over at Tumeke has improved dramatically. It's crystal clear, matter of fact. No static at all.

# Google is throwing a Googly over the Swedish neologism ogooglebar, among other matters. Harden up, you tax-dodging excuse for a new paradigm. The Old Reader is still looking the better alternative for the soon-to-be-extinct Google Reader, if only they can get the bugs and lazy load settings sussed.

# Alain de Botton, you poor wet Brit. Please stop banging on about the need for athiests to have secular churches. We used to call them pubs, bars, nightclubs and cafes, before they were put out of business and turned into daycare centres. Adult spaces just need space and tolerance, and there's not a lot of that going around right now.

# How come parents can feed their babies opiates and I'm not allowed to smoke cannabis at the age of 43? Even parts of Yankland are freer right now than these small narrow islands (A shout out to Colorado, Washington and even California, with a higher medpot store density in L.A. and Denver, Colorado than Starbucks. If it wasn't for all the thick racist bible thumpers, it might almost be worth going there).

The Shining City

Two facts are immutable in human behaviour; money corrupts and power corrupts. Balzac nailed it when he wrote "behind each great personal fortune lies a crime."

Polite society passes over their kin's amorality in favour of lordly titles or other absurdly over-priced pissing competitions between suitable peers, while the rule of law is purely for show trials with proles.

Take, for example, Matt Taibbi's latest scathing piece of financial journalism in Rolling Stone. Too Big to Jail expands on his already caustic look late last year at HSBC, and ties it into the LIBOR scam. All told, some hundreds of trillions of US dollars has been skimmed by bankers, and no-one has to do an hour of jail to pay for it.

It all makes our royal toady John Key look bent on a nano scale. The deputy Auditor General has found no evidence of foul play in the Sky City Conference Wining & Dining dodgy tender.

John Key sez "Vindicated!", bringing the Obama Doctrine Dictionary into play by bending words into opposites. i.e. imminent meaning in the fullness of time. Or as Dexter, the fun-lovin' homicidal TV character might say, there's no crime without evidence.

The White Elephant has the Green Light. The Black Box wins again.

Kiwi Grundnorm

Waitangi Day seems a fitting time to share some conclusions from my summer study of How Things Change in New Zealand.

It is already well understood how things don't change around here. Colin Espiner's welcome return to blogging highlights the Kiwi mantra of "She'll be right". This laconic, laid-back philosophy has a nasty duality which can be summed up thusly: If we ignore a grave injustice for long enough, it will inevitably resolve itself to everyone's general satisfaction.

Your choice whether this is fantastic naivete or helpless optimism. As a philosophy though, it has more plot holes than a Scientology chapter. As a security blanket however, it has provided New Zealanders with a warm glow of smugness from inertia.

So, how do things change in NZ? Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. Everything always changes. Hate it or loathe it, we are glued to the arrow of time. History doesn't repeat, although it may be fractal with self-similar blobs.

Political reform must also be continuous, as that PriceWaterhouseCoopers wonk said last year. Otherwise, as Malcolm Tucker said in the final episode of the Thick of It, "Dark shit builds up." And then you get a Rogernomics enema.

Unfortunately, the law is usually the last thing to change. Take, for example, our alleged national symbols. Our current cobbled together official national flag was officially endorsed after over thirty years of informal use by the public and military. The dreadful dirge that is our current national anthem was written by an Irish Australian in 1876, and recognised officially only in 1977.

Lewis Holden makes a good point along these lines in today's NZ Herald. The Silver Fern is used by an increasing number of NZers to represent them instead of the old defaced ensign. Never mind that the Silver Fern was first hoisted during the Boer War, around the same time the blue ensign was adopted as de facto flag of convenience. The people are deciding to adapt the Silver Fern for themselves, and damn whatever the law says.

Similar cultural adaptation has been replicated in Deaf culture. Official government policy outlawed sign language for 99 years. That didn't stop the underground proliferation of NZSL, which evolved from a BSL, ASL mash-up into its own linguistic space.

Although it was illegal for many years not to report deaf people to the government, at least they didn't ruin their lives by locking them up in prison. The same cannot be said for the substantial proportion of the NZ population arrested and persecuted to this day for using cannabis.

Happy Bob Marley's birthday. Get up, stand up. Live free or die Kiwi.

Drugs? You're soaking in them, NZ

Contrary to what this article implies, NZ has had a long history of women hooked on prescription stims and tranqs. Here's the Law Commission on the Blake-Palmer Commission from around 1971 (pg. 43):

The [Blake-Palmer ] Committee was particularly concerned at the growing reliance on a range of new hypnotics and tranquillisers marketed as Mogadon, Valium and Librium. A detailed analysis of the prescribing of hypnotics and stimulants by New Zealand doctors between 1958 and 1971, revealed that the use of these drugs doubled over this 13 year period. The analysis also revealed that “married women” (a category which included women who had been divorced or widowed) were by far the largest consumers of hypnotics and stimulants. As highlighted earlier, the researchers estimated that on a typical day in New Zealand in 1971, 8.3 per cent of “married women” took a tranquilliser and 11.6 per cent took a hypnotic, a tranquilliser, or both.

But its main conclusion was that in many instances doctors were resorting to prescribing these drugs because they did not have the time or resources to deal with the underlying patient issues:

Hypnotics being used at double the level of 13 years ago; tranquilisers disappearing down our throats to the tune of $2.3 million a year; what excuse can there be for such a situation in a country like New Zealand? – except shortage of doctors and lack of time to spend on sorting out psychological troubles.

One thing seems to be clear. For many women in New Zealand marriage is a stressful occupation, which is getting worse instead of better. Hypnotics and tranquillisers are not the answer.

The risk of addiction associated with the prolonged use of benzodiazepines such as Valium and Librium was not well understood at the time of the Blake-Palmer review, but the Committee was concerned about both the cost to the health budget and the potential for doctors to be influenced by the “overzealous promotion” of new prescription drugs by competing pharmacological companies. 

The more I research drug use in NZ, the more the laws seem moulded solely due to drug snobbery. Harms, real and imagined, have absolutely no bearing on legal status.

UPDATE: It was a high old time for the generations of Kiwis before that too. From the Law Commission Discussion Document Controlling and Regulating Drugs (pp. 47-8):

It should be noted here also that many of the drugs regulated under the Dangerous Drugs Act had medical uses and, despite the restrictions, were readily available on prescription. Health records from this period suggest that various drugs covered by the Act were liberally prescribed, particularly once prescriptions were publicly funded after 1941. Heroin was, for example, readily available on prescription in an oral dose form and was used widely in linctuses until the mid-1950s in New Zealand. Regulations made under the Dangerous Drugs Act during the 1940s permitted doctors to prescribe up to 16 oral doses of heroin in one prescription. By the end of the 1940s New Zealand was one of the highest users of heroin per capita in the world.