justice – Page 67

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Meets the Industrial Needs of This Century

For better or worse, humans will always use drugs to help them cope with the demands placed on them by the daily need to survive. Whether to help focus, relax, kill pain or to see beyond, people will always find reasons to want to change their perceptions so as to best meet the demands placed on them. This article will argue that cannabis law reform is superior to prohibition when it comes to meeting the industrial demands of our time.

During the Age of Exploration, the drug of choice was alcohol, usually rum in particular. Rum had a high alcohol volume and was easy to keep. For men spending months or years at sea in ships, rum offered the best bang for the buck. Wherever European sailors took harbour, the rum trade followed. Names like Port Royal and Kororareka became synonymous with drunken debauchery and destruction.

In the first half of the 20th century, we ran out of places to explore and started killing each other over what had been discovered. This required a combination of drugs, and these – because of the necessities of wartime – were indulged in without shame or sanction. Alcohol was still used to a great extent, particularly for its ability to give men the courage to face enemy gunfire, but use of opiates and tobacco were also widespread, the former on account of its use in physical medicine and the latter on account of its use in psychological medicine.

In the second half of the 20th century, the focus shifted from killing the enemies of liberal capitalism to making money. During this time, people were mostly tasked with social office work. This required more tobacco, but also more caffeine. It was here when the idea of becoming “caffeinated” to deal with the pressures of the day came from. The idea was that the buzz from caffeine would make the inherently safe and secure office jobs less boring.

So far this century, a lot of this work has become antisocial. This has necessitated the rise of caffeine, in order to concentrate for longer periods of time despite low levels of stimulation. This rise has been aided by the increasing unfashionability of tobacco smoking, so that caffeine has now become the go-to drug for anyone wanting more yang energy.

It’s not easy to forecast the precise details of the future, but if one understands the basics of a subject it’s possible to forecast general trends. What seems apparent, in the case of the Western World, is that cannabis has come to replace some of these other drugs as the one that best helps people meet the demands of the workplace, and will continue to do so.

Because of automation, it’s no longer as important for the workforce to be attentive, alert and focused. This is still important for certain roles, but those roles have become an ever-diminishing proportion of the workplace. The roles that have become an ever-increasing proportion of the workplace are those in the creative professions, and the demands of these roles are compatible with cannabis use.

It’s widely known and accepted that much of the world’s production of quality music is made by people on drugs, and this is true to a lesser extent of literature as well. Cannabis (especially cannabis sativa) helps with the process of creativity by breaking down old conditioned pathways of thought and replacing them with novel ideas. This has made it a favourite substance of people in many creative occupations – not just music and writing but also design, cuisine, hospitality and programming.

In order to meet these industrial needs, we will not only need to legalise cannabis, but to go further. At a minimum, cannabis will need to become legal so that people who need to use it for the sake of their work can do so. For the sake of creative occupations, it will need to be gently encouraged in the workplace in the same way that coffee is encouraged in offices, and tobacco is encouraged in factories, already now.

The world is changing faster and faster, and as a result of this people find themselves confronted with original situations ever more frequently. These original situations demand original ways of thinking. The desirable qualities for employees of the future will be flexibility, originality and breadth of thought, instead of the obsessive focus and repetition that has characterised the workplaces of the past. These qualities are well enhanced by cannabis, which makes it a good choice for the workplace of the future.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

Are The Greens Sexist Against Men?

The male suicide rate is over 300% of the size of the female suicide rate, suggesting that men must suffer a much greater share of society’s burdens.

Despite this, the Green Party has only 2 men out of 8 Members of Parliament, and one of them is willing to state that men are solely to blame for all the poverty in the world.

Are the Greens a sexist party? If so, should they face repercussions?

Why There Are No Honest People in Politics

Westerners have possibly never had less confidence in their politicians than right now. Confidence is so low that an ever-increasing number of people are losing their faith in democracy. Most people are aware that politicians are basically crooks, but it often hard to say precisely why. This essay explains why there are no honest people in politics.

The simple reason why there are no honest people in politics is because they are either filtered out before they get to the top representative level, or they are made to keep their mouths shut while at that level. This is achieved by a variety of mechanisms, some calculated and some incidental.

One of these mechanisms, a very deeply calculated one, was made apparent in New Zealand by the Jami-Lee Ross saga and the ensuing revelations about the National Party culture and its inner workings. It turned out that the National Party had taken six-figure sums worth of dodgy donations in exchange for pulling strings for those donors, and kept it secret. Many members of the National Party were aware of this corrupt conduct, but said nothing until Ross blew the doors open.

Getting to the top only sometimes involves demonstrating competence and winning the respect of your peers. Sometimes it involves finding out secrets about other people and using them to threaten those people into obedience. The value of a piece of information is inversely proportional to the number of people who know it, and therefore there is an incentive to keep secrets. If you can’t demonstrate that you can keep secrets, you can’t be trusted by the other members of your party – after all, the party will have secrets of its own that need keeping.

So not only do you have to keep secrets on the way up, but you have to keep keeping them while up there, otherwise the other people who are up there will throw you down. Jami-Lee Ross threatened to tell the country the secrets of the National Party, and he was swiftly ushered into psychiatric care. A similar fate awaits any other high-ranking politician who comes down with a sudden bout of honesty.

Of course, Jami-Lee Ross had a much easier time of it than Socrates did. Socrates once said “I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live,” which relates to the second of these mechanisms. Just as there is a mechanism from within a politician’s own party to lie, so is there a mechanism from other parties to do so (i.e. from within the political system). This mechanism has accounted for not only Socrates but also Jesus, William McKinley, Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, John F Kennedy, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

The people who are permitted to rise up from the masses into the ruling class are heavily vetted before being allowed to progress. The main objective of this vetting process is to determine their inclination towards obedience. The ideal candidate will be perfectly obedient to all those above them, and will demand perfect obedience from all those below them. To the degree a candidate deviates from this pattern, their advancement through the mainstream political parties will be hindered.

If a candidate shows signs of creative ability, or signs of any original thinking, they will find their progress blocked. This is why the current ruling class is full of lawyers, and almost entirely absent of writers or artists. Lawyer is an inherently dishonest profession (in contrast to novelist or poet), and this is seen by the incumbents in the ruling class to be a qualification for office.

The less honest you are, the more able you are to keep secrets by twisting and distorting truths and shamelessly dodging questions. Related to this is the fact that, if you go into politics, many of your fellow politicians will be absolute scum, and you will have to accept and account for this otherwise they will destroy you. Some of them, like Peter Dunne, are happy to kill people to advance their careers.

In 2002, Dunne forced the Fifth Labour Government to accept a confidence and supply agreement that promised no movement on cannabis law reform. As a consequence, many people died from either being unable to access medicinal cannabis, or from taking the synthetic drugs that Dunne did allow in lieu of natural cannabis. If Dunne is willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of Kiwis for the sake of his political ambitions, he’s certainly willing to have you killed for them.

A third mechanism serving to keep honest people out of politics comes from the nature of the whims of democracy. Politicians have to follow fashions, or they will rapidly be turfed out of office by the voters. The populace cares not for right or wrong, nor for any issue of justice: they merely get angry when they’re told to get angry. If the television tells them to get angry about apartheid, or the prohibition of homosexuality, or cannabis prohibition, they will do so.

Observe what happened to the individuals who spoke out about the issue of widespread clerical sex abuse within the Catholic Church before it became fashionable. Sinead O’Connor did it in 1992, and it was a career-terminating move. If something is unfashionable, a democratic politician will not support it: it’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter if it’s morally right.

Male infant genital mutilation, for example, is an obscenity, one of the most evil practices that the human species has ever devised, but Western politicians remain too cowardly to oppose it on account of that doing so is yet to become fashionable. You could bet money, however, that when opposing this practice does become fashionable, the politicians will claim to have always opposed it.

The opposite can be observed with the case of cannabis law reform. Until recently, a desire for reform was an exceptionally libertarian position for a politician to take, and only the real mavericks were willing to do so. The Cannabis Activist’s Handbook was published by this company in 2012, and copies sent to all of the political parties then in Parliament, but politicians remained resolutely silent on the subject until very recently.

Even though many people knew decades before the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook was written that cannabis prohibition was a complete sham, these politicians all calculated that it was in their best interests to maintain the net of lies. This even though it was killing their own people. If politicians are willing to yield to pressures like this, what hope is there that they will tell the truth about anything but the least controversial of things?

In summary, the reason why there are no honest people in politics is because both our culture and the political system itself weeds them out before they get to the top, or it destroys anyone at the top who reveals themselves to be honest. There are at least three major mechanisms by which this takes place, and the combination of all three means that our democratically-elected political class are some of the most pitiful, wretched and corrupt individuals that anyone could be burdened with.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Case For Cannabis: Reform Doesn’t Mean Stoned Workers

One of the most hysterical arguments against cannabis law reform is that it will lead to a spate of workers coming to work stoned. This will be a disaster, we are breathlessly told, because some of these intoxicated workers are responsible for other people’s well-being. As this article will examine, such fears are not grounded in reality.

The reasoning seems to be that the nation’s workforce cannot handle the temptation of easy access to cannabis, and will inevitably come to start using it all day in the nature of severe drug addicts, such as before work. Images of surgeons giggling maniacally while slicing arteries open are thrown about by pants-pissing old conservatives, who seem to think of cannabis users akin to a horde of zombies.

This argument is false in at least three major ways.

In the first case, people already have access to plenty of legal recreational drugs and choose not to use them. There are a number of industrial jobs that people can’t safely do while drunk, and there are a number of customer services roles that can’t adequately be performed while stinking of tobacco smoke. In the vast majority of situations, employees in either of these roles don’t partake in alcohol or tobacco before work.

If one thinks rationally about the idea, there’s no reason to think that legal cannabis would be any different. The case of surgeon is especially ridiculous – surgeon is a professional occupation. The type of person who works in this profession is hardly the sort of person who would experiment with recreational drugs before they go to work anyway.

In the second case, the availability of swab tests that can test for actual cannabis intoxication means that a blanket ban on cannabis is unnecessary. There may have once been a point in such a blanket ban, on account of that there was otherwise no way of telling if a person was dangerously affected by a cannabis high. But accurate swab tests mean that it is no longer necessary to take urine samples (if it ever was).

Most importantly, legal cannabis does not in any sense mean that employers will lose the right to send home workers who are dangerously high. Workers who are intoxicated on any substance, legal or otherwise, are first and foremost a safety risk to other workers and to themselves. So if an employee comes to work stoned, the employer has every right to send them home on the grounds that they are in no state to discharge their duties.

In the third case, the vast majority of cases of cannabis intoxication are immaterial to the job at hand. This is clearly true if one considers that a large number of people who work in roles where attentiveness is paramount are on sedatives, anti-histamines or psychiatric drugs of some kind, and that this is nonetheless acceptable to their employers, who do not drug test them for those substances.

Psychiatric drugs such as Olanzapine have been shown to increase the chance of fatal car accidents, and benzodiazepines are even worse. Many people drive while sleepy, and many elderly people are significantly more dangerous behind the wheel than the average driver. If all of these risks come within the bounds of acceptability, then a small amount of cannabis in the system is acceptable as well.

The idea that cannabis law reform would inevitably lead to masses of stoned workers is the kind of overblown hysteria that is typical of cannabis prohibitionists. There are at least three major reasons to think that reform would not impact the safety profile of the workforce. Repealing cannabis prohibition would bring protocol about workplace safety back to sanity and logic.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.