Archive for category Drugs

Drugs. We’re Hoping You Don’t Know Anything.

“I don’t need no drugs in my system ’cause my dancing and didge sets me free.”- Bruce AKA Boy BC.

Reading through the material the Australian government has provided to the public as part of various drug campaigns has been very effective in both testing my patience and draining my hope that policy disgraces of this variety can’t persist for much longer. The fact that these campaigns are not subject to any serious scrutiny seems to suggest a level of misinformation about drugs that surprises even me. How anyone could process this shit and not be left at the very least confused is something I am having difficulty comprehending. To better illustrate what exactly I mean, here’s some of the content on heroin from the most recent government mindfuck, entitled “Where’s Your Head At?” (An understandable question).

Heroin is an ‘opioid’, which is a term that refers to substances similar to the drug morphine. Street heroin is mixed with other substances, such as glucose, caffeine, sugar and paracetamol. These additives can be dangerous when added to heroin.

Hold your questions, there’s more…

Because there’s no way to tell the purity of heroin being used, users can’t gauge the amount they are taking and can accidentally overdose. Heroin overdose is one of the leading causes of death in Australia in 18 to 34 year-olds, and non-fatal overdoses are common amongst heroin users.

Other than perhaps the imprecise definition contained within the first sentence, this is accurate information. That is, information about the heroin supplied illegally under current conditions. It conveniently ignores two simple questions. Why is street heroin mixed with other dangerous substances, and why is there no way to tell the purity of heroin being used? The answers to these questions are simple (The market is furious), yet they expose the huge flaws in the conclusions that the government is attempting to convince the reader to accept. From that point, the real causes of the drug problem that don’t receive any form of acknowledgement in the campaign materials at all become easily identifiable. The agenda falls apart from there, and the most important question of all eventually arises-

Wouldn’t it be more effective to legalise all drugs?

Of course, getting that far also means the realisation that by maintaining a policy of drug prohibition the government is willingly causing countless preventable deaths. Oh dear!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: , ,

George Carlin

It’s not news to many that George Carlin died the other day, but it did give me a chance to reflect. Even at my young age (21), the people I admire are dying off. Carlin and Hicks both blended their comedy with thought provoking messages about the state of society.

And despite the internet being a new medium allowing us to reach far more new creations, as well as new types of content flowing out, people like these are rare enough that even expanding the distribution methods won’t allow us to reach more like them.

Sorry I don’t have a solution, just figured it was worth reflecting on. Just remember that the people you admire are gonna die and that will be the end of them. Make sure to enjoy them while you can.

Anyone interesting in seeing Carlin’s material, there is loads on youtube, best example here. Plenty of Hicks on there as well.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Rudd Laws… are they being circumvented?

And I don’t mean by the obvious buying of spirits for a cheaper price with more alcohol, or drinking beer or wine (bottle or cask). I mean by the companies who make RTDs, who might feel a bit miffed by the reduction in their sales.

Case in point: the store I work in currently recieved an interesting shipment of Jim Beam Cans.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: unranked [?]

All exams and no sleep make Maldark something, something…

What my dreams would look like, if i had the time to sleep

boris is still a talentless hack.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: , , , ,

Tokenistic Gesture #307

Yay, Kyoto. We’ve signed it. But we’ve got to wait until the UN Ratifies it, but we’ve signed it, even though we were on track to meet those targets, but we’ve signed it.

We’re also going to send Indigenous Australians a Hallmark card wishing them “Great Sorrow UnJoy at the Passing of their Much Repentance.” It’s necessary for the Government to get past this elephant in the room, but I think whatever carefully worded statement Ruddkip throws out will just seek to really really piss off Indigenous community members. Think the guy’s capable of saying the word “Sorry”? He can barely say the word condoms.

One journalist decided to try to make safe sex the story of the day, and began going through a list of questions about condoms. What did Mr Rudd tell his own children when they were growing up about safe sex? What did he think of condoms generally?

So he responded with a classic Ruddism. Ignoring the guffaws of several members of the travelling press bus, Rudd talked about “effective AIDS-prevention-mechanism contraceptives along the lines you describe”. There was no way that was going to make it to air, and Mr Rudd had, yet again, succeeded in keeping his day’s campaign on message.

I cannot stand that form of answer, why Ronan Sharkey didn’t call ‘bullshit’ is beyond me.

Yes, I know this is rehashed content-less material, but I feel it’s in my best interests to regularly update this blog with things that aren’t just blatant party-based hit-pieces.

Idiocy must be punished, and I’m looking forward to Rudd’s world-leading plan for tackling Climate Change. I’m a huge fan of Solar, Wave, Wind, all that jazz what with knowing how it works [Ask a greens kid or any of the getup kids to explain generation and the photovoltaic effect to you, they'll stumble over the answer as much as getup pretends to be non-partisan] but any Climate Change solution that doesn’t include the truest of all forms of power Nuclear fucking Energy, won’t meet base load and will be even more of an impotent gesture. Nuclear energy is free non-dangerous power (Handy hint for those playing along at home Coal is more radioactive than Nuclear!) what done make gobs of delicious energy for our fat devices to slurp down.

Also, I was listening to the Hack podcast again and there was a segment from some “Youth Activist” currently in Bali for the Youth ‘Climate change caucus’. She made a comment that actually made me burst out laughing:

We were great at, throwing aside our political causes and committing to action. Youth are really great at action. We’re going to speak to and get the government to commit to our ideas.

Woo, action! A non-binding but vitriolic personal commitment to try and force misunderstood and impassioned knowledge of base psuedoscience on proper adults. Though I’d have to say that the current Government may be slightly more in favour of listening to the idiotic ramblings of more NUS-like-types.

Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of policy by collectivist groupthink!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Warning: Anti-Social? It’s because you’re on drugs.

I’m sure most of you this week received the government’s lovely attempt to look moderately like they were enforcing the moral will of the millions of people who think “Joe E Johns” is a witty title, by sending out a booklet outlining the government’s stance on drugs. The booklet outlines with a sense of self-rewarding glee the ridiculous amount of money the government has poured into a bonfire in their endless struggle against the evil drug menace! Hiring customs dogs, extra officers and prosecuting countless individuals who are guilty of as much a crime as your local pub. Throughout the booklet are many sections including one designed to update parents with the ‘drug lingo’ so that when you’re invading the privacy of your children you can know exactly what substance they choose to ingest, and punish them accordingly (There is no chart of appropriate punishment based on the substance class, but I assume a stern ‘no’ usually does the trick).

However, the greatest part of the booklet? The section:

How to tell if your child is using Illegal drugs

Symptoms of which include

  • Minimal family contact
  • Lack of enthusiasm or motivation
  • Aggression
  • Lack of interest in sporting activities

That’s right, you heard it here first. Every single child is a budding NRL wunderkind until the evil menace drugs take away their… INCLINATION TO ENGAGE IN PHYSICAL ACTIVITY!

I’m sorry, but I experience all of these behaviours on a regular basis and the only thing I’m guilty of having high levels of in my body at the moment is contempt.

Maybe that’ll warrant a booklet “Justifying specious and facile governmental propaganda to your children through systematic intellectual dishonesty”. Nah, too long, how about; “Lying to your kids, through beatings!”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Where’s the Australian Ron Paul?

For a group of individuals stuck in a feckless nonsensical political debate about which shade of grey we should nominate, one who appears to be in the pocket of the workers, the other who appears to be in the pocket of the people who own the workers, we don’t really see any manner of radical thinking coming out of our country from a classical liberal perspective. Apart for a bunch of Hayek-quoting gestapo Young Libs who’d as soon garotte you for using the word ‘fraternity’ as question your bank balance, we seem to be stuck in an ever increasing spiral of mediocrity. Now, I’m one of those young types whose first real exposure to politics was during the Charisma Bounty days of Keating and Clinton. Keating who’d call it as he saw it and Clinton who preferred other actions in response to sights, both stellar examples of master political knowledge compared to the race to the middle we’re currently faced with.

In fact the last serious event of pure political inspiration was a large segment of the young right trying to figure out exactly what commandments Kevin Rudd’s trip to the Stripper Store broke as well as adamantly protesting that Howard had never even heard of the concept and could only spell the word ’stripper’ if he was pressured very sternly and had Janette holding his hand. Even then, that was about as politically motivating as the aftermath of a barium enema frugally sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.

It seems throughout the last couple of decades the only party that’s made a decent strive towards classical liberal tendencies was the Australian Democrats, purely by coincidence in that they self-destructed, moving us one step closer to minarchism.

The only motivations and inspirations for the young on both sides being the utterly nepotistic and ethically unscrupulous rewards spewed upon them for toeing the party line (In the case of Young Labor large endowments from Unions which constitute most of their budget, from the Libs side, nubile women-flesh to be consumed and discarded after crushing their idealism with arse-slapping and cringeworthy sex under the context of being a true ‘blueblood’ [without undergoing blue-balls, it would seem]). The hackery just seems to continuously extend beyond the confines of human imagination until it erupts in an orgiastic fountain of arrested development.

The fact that the parties are so similar and their policies are so incredibly similar (However the Libs seem determined to continue this drugs war as some kind of moral crusade which will inevitably fail. I feel this is the first time the Libs have ever felt so proud about spending so much money on something so incredibly foolish [if we keep those repugnant workchoices ads out of our vision for just a moment]) just goes to show how much Australian politics have stagnated. The most irritating thing being that the only forms of social and political reforms that seem to be developing are growing like a strangling tendril from the greens and the other loonies. We’ve had policies on drugs decriminalisation, Environmental responsibility (again a hot button issue, but for the most part one that shouldn’t be divided on political grounds, I can argue for energy efficiency and investing into efficient and alternate technologies due to the massive amounts of profit to be made and money to be saved) and international law reforms. Excusing for a moment that most of their concepts are based on closing the borders, printing money and writing hundreds of new laws for ‘funsies’, it seems as if society is willing to live in a perpetual state of political stagnation brought upon through having this continuous incumbent. Most of the people who have just become able to vote don’t know much about any system that ISN’T under Howard. As such the beat rides on and we become completely satisfied with the same rehashed nonsense and political rhetoric that holds no real answers for anyone.

What it comes down to is this, where is the political individual who is going to reform or at least REINVIGORATE the current system we’re in? Where is the ardent Austrian who is going to throw the factual smackdown onto the audience of these debates and provide some people with hope about achieving some level of reducing government in general and getting the government out of our lives? Where’s the person motivating young people such as myself to get up and get serious about political issues? I understand that my own views aren’t that widely represented in Australia in their entirety, but where’s the person who argues for free trade AND gay rights? Where’s the person who wants to leave the Iraq war but not raid the future’s fund? Where is the person who wants to reduce the level of governmental approval and beauracracy so that the development of key infrastructure can begin ASAP from the pockets of industry players and NOT the government?

Where’s the person who can really, truly make us believe something more than our ballot being equally useful both as a pile of ash, or with a 1 marked on it?

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ultimate Science Team is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!