philosophy – Page 103

The Case For Cannabis: A Criminal Record is A Disproportionate Punishment

Cannabis possession or cultivation are currently crimes, which means that a criminal record is a common result from being arrested for a cannabis offence. Our justice system, however, is supposed to operate on the principle that “the punishment fits the crime”. This article will argue that getting a criminal record for anything to do with cannabis is grossly disproportionate, considering the severity of the crime.

Having a criminal record makes a person’s life a lot harder. Many employers will filter out applicants with criminal records before they even seriously consider them. This is true of almost every job that requires any real responsibility. This means that a future of poverty, or at least severely limited economic opportunities, is a common consequence of getting a criminal conviction.

Of course, having a criminal record is supposed to make people’s lives harder. A criminal is a person who has declared that they are unable or unwilling to abide by the rules of decent society, and it’s fair that they’re marked as such for the safety of other people. We’re not allowed to chop people’s hands off anymore, so there’s no other way to clearly mark a person as a member of the criminal class other than to give them a record.

The problem is that cannabis use isn’t a crime like a real crime is. Real crimes have victims. It’s fair that a criminal record marks a person who has acted with gross disregard or malice towards life and towards suffering. But a person who grew some medicinal cannabis plants has not shown any callousness or ill will. If anything, they should be rewarded for taking actions to alleviate suffering in the face of discouragement from the law.

Becoming unemployable because of a criminal record is one thing if you are a murderer, rapist or fraudster. In cases like these, it’s probably fair for the vast majority of employers to rule such people out from the beginning. But a person who used cannabis, even if they grew it, has not done anything to warrant being placed in the same class as those who have callously brought harm to others.

In any case, that’s not where the punishment ends. Most fair people can agree that it’s unnecessarily brutal for a person with a cannabis conviction to have trouble finding work for the rest of their lives, but it’s also extremely hard to travel with a criminal conviction. Many countries – Canada and America among the most notorious – regularly refuse to let people in if they have a criminal record, reasoning that they have failed to demonstrate sufficient good character.

These two punishments tie in with each other. Many jobs nowadays involve international travel, and this pattern looks set to continue as the world continues to globalise and integrate. This means that, in order to be able to perform an increasing number of jobs, one needs to be free to travel internationally. A person with a criminal conviction preventing them from travel is effectively disqualified from all of these jobs.

Forty years ago, when the War on Drugs was just ramping up, the sort of person who got a cannabis conviction probably wasn’t likely to travel overseas anyway. But in 2019, being restricted from overseas travel for life is a heavy punishment indeed.

It’s worth noting here that a criminal record also affects the wider family. An adult whose employment and travel opportunities are restricted will have trouble providing not only for themselves, but also for their families. So the children of people who grow up with cannabis convictions are also punished.

All of this constitutes obscene cruelty, especially when it is considered that cannabis is a medicine, and that most people who grow it do so to alleviate suffering.

It was once – falsely – believed that cannabis caused a lot of harm. When it was thought that cannabis was a dangerously addictive drug that destroyed peoples minds, then giving someone a criminal record for cannabis may have made some vague kind of sense. Now that we know that cannabis prohibition was built on false premises, it is apparent that giving someone a criminal record for dealing with it is unfair.

In this case, the correct thing to do is to formalise this state of affairs, and as soon as possible, by repealing cannabis prohibition. We can no longer, in good faith, argue that giving someone a criminal conviction is a punishment that fits the suffering caused by the supposed crime.

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.

The Four Alchemical Realms of Law

When people talk about whether or not something is illegal, they’re talking about whether or not something is against the law. The problem with this logic is that there are several different kinds of laws, and some of them override others. As this article will examine, there is a realm of law corresponding to each of the four masculine elements of clay, iron, silver and gold.

The realm of clay corresponds to natural laws. These laws are fundamental, and therefore they underpin all the laws of iron, silver and gold. Like the clay, these laws are so fundamental that they don’t need to be written down, and they don’t need to be understood. They are simply Nature doing its thing, and they have applied long before any human laws existed, and still apply to the vast, vast majority of the Earth’s creatures.

In a state of Nature, most people are barely aware that these laws exist, until they feel the pleasure or pain that comes with acceding to, or violating, those laws. But the laws of Nature exist no matter whether a person is aware of them or not. Fall off a cliff, you die. Eat poison, you die. Get too close to the big animal with the sharp teeth, you die.

Although the basic laws of Nature are physical laws, and then chemical laws, some of them are also biological laws. Laws of clay that start to approach the realm of the laws of iron are those like “Don’t try to have sex with female X or male A will thump you over the head.” These are essentially the same laws that non-human creatures use to defend their territory or resources. “Might is right” is an example of the laws of clay.

The realm of iron corresponds to the the laws that are enforced by organised human violence. When civilisation began, all offences against the sensibilities of property owners were written down into a code of laws, and penalties for transgressing them proscribed. An entire class of judges and jailers came into being to enforce these laws, paid for by the surplus wealth generated by the order that came with civilisation.

These are laws of iron because the Police will beat you up or put you in a cage if you disobey them. You may even get your head chopped off with an iron axe. Unlike natural laws, legal laws are written down, and therefore can be enunciated very clearly (although some will always quibble). The point of this was to distinguish them from the laws of clay, which were never any more than simple animal instincts.

Like iron, the laws of iron are unyielding. The Justice System doesn’t care if you knew it was illegal or not, or if you really meant to do it or not. Justice is blind, which is another way of saying that it is merciless. Laws degrade into laws of clay once money starts getting involved in the justice system and better lawyers get lighter sentences. But when they don’t degrade, the edges of them become gilt with silver.

The realm of silver corresponds to the laws that are enforced by society. These are the laws that relate to social status, i.e. whether or not a person is considered high value by their community. Violating laws of silver doesn’t carry a risk of arrest like violating laws of iron does, but they can lead to people being less friendly towards you, and giving you fewer employment, social or romantic opportunities. Obeying laws of silver tends to lead to the opposite.

As silver is softer and brighter than iron, so are the laws that fall under the realm of silver more malleable than those that fall under the realm of iron. A person who has transgressed a law of silver, and who has earned some enmity from his fellows, can escape punishment by making a sufficient compensatory effort. Therefore, the laws of silver are more subtle than the laws of iron, and can also change on a whim.

However, like iron, they are cold and sharp enough, in their own way. Many a man has been found innocent at trial but nevertheless destroyed by whispering and gossiping. Social exclusion might be more subtle than an axe, and the consequences less permanent, but it is still enough to cause suffering, and therefore enough to modify social behaviour.

The realm of gold corresponds to the laws that are enforced by God. In this sense, the laws pertaining to the realm of gold are similar to those pertaining to clay, in that they are not written down, and neither are they social. Although other people might be able to help a person understand the laws of clay and gold, they can’t force that person to abide by them, unlike the laws of iron and silver. They can only instruct and leave it up to that person’s true will.

It isn’t easy to speak about what the laws of gold are, but it can be said that they are even more subtle than those of silver and iron. Here we are speaking of laws like the law of karma and the law of attraction. It has to be understood at this point that the realm of gold is the realm of consciousness, and its laws relate to how to alter the frequency of one’s consciousness.

Much of alchemy is the art of playing higher laws off against lower ones, so that one causes change in accordance with one’s will despite being bound by laws the entire time. This is a subject of its own and deserves its own essay, but there are some things that can be said about it here.

One can alter one’s consciousness by obeying laws in higher realms at the expense of laws in lower realms. The most powerful example of such a thing was the example of Socrates. By obeying the laws of gold, and completely ignoring all of the laws of silver, iron and clay to the point of causing his own death, Socrates made himself immortal in this world. Likewise, gathering with friends to break unjust laws of iron (such as drug laws) can create magically powerful bonds of solidarity.

This is another possible interpretation of Aleister Crowley’s saying that “The key to joy is disobedience”. By disobeying the cruder laws, such as the law of biological entropy, unjust statutory laws and by prising the truth above social fashion, it’s possible to raise the level of one’s consciousness. A skilled alchemist can therefore reduce the level of their suffering, and the level of the suffering around them, even as they disobey laws, and even though disobeying those lower laws consistently brings suffering.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

Red Pill, White Pill, Blue Pill, Black Pill

There are many theories that describe the change in personality traits over generations. The most well-known is the Strauss-Howe conception of generations that gave us terms like “Baby Boomer”. Local anarchist philosopher Rick Giles has expanded on this conception, giving us a spiral idea of history based around the ebb and flow of moral cycles. This essay attempts to map both these theories onto the “pill theory” of modern Internet culture.

The Red Pill-Blue Pill dichotomy is a metaphor seen everywhere on the Internet of today. It is based on the famous scene from The Matrix, the film that made a powerful impression on Generation X and, consequently, Internet culture. In this scene, the character Morpheus offers the protagonist Neo a choice of one of two pills: a blue one that will send him back to the dream world of being a normal person, and a red one that will awaken him to the truth of reality and show him “how deep this rabbithole goes”.

It’s a metaphor that hearkens back to Plato’s Cave and the mystery schools before that. The idea is that anyone who has taken the red pill is someone who has voluntarily accepted the truth of reality, no matter how terrible, and who has escaped delusion. They are therefore enlightened, so much so that their lives are now fundamentally different to the bluepilled. Thus, ‘bluepilled’ is effectively a synonym for ‘unenlightened’, ‘gullible’ or ‘a sucker/pleb’.

A related conception is the dichotomy of the White and Black Pills. These serve as rough spiritual metaphors. The idea is that anyone who has taken the white pill is optimistic, full of life, happy and positive. The blackpilled, by contrast, are pessimistic, morbid, depressed and emo. One way of characterising this axis is using the Bloomer and Doomer images, the former blossoming like a spring flower, the latter seeing death and decay around every corner.

As this essay will now demonstrate, it’s possible to map the Blue Pill-Red Pill-White Pill-Black Pill quadrichotomy from popular Internet culture onto both Strauss-Howe’s and Giles’s conceptions of human generational change.

The generation that fought in World War II are the red pilled. They got redpilled harder than anyone since could really understand. It’s impossible to have any illusions when you are facing an artillery barrage or a Panzer charge – you appraise reality accurately and act accordingly or you die, simple as that.

As the war was winding up, they naturally got together, first in their companies and then in their Returned Services Associations, and asked themselves what the fuck the whole war was really about, and who was ultimately to blame. Eventually, they came to understand that the whole idea of a heroic narrative was a complete sham, designed to manufacture consent for a war that really only benefitted arms manufacturers, bankers and politicians. To understand that the world works like this is to be redpilled.

Commensurate with being red pilled is a somewhat traumatised disposition. As a highly social, highly traumatised generation, they hit the booze, and hard. Theirs is an Honour Culture in Giles’s conception, because they risked everything for what they have, and only very rarely complain or show pain or weakness.

The Silent Generation are the white pilled. They grew up during the Great Depression, and so became accustomed to having very little. This has meant that they instinctively feel gratitude for the plenty that we currently do have. They also grew up hearing about how the previous generation saved the world from terrible evil, so they grew up believing that they lived in a society where their forebears only wanted the best for them and where authorities could be trusted.

They are white pilled because they are naturally the most optimistic. This generation grew up with the suspicion that God may well have favoured the Anglo-American style of governance over its German, Soviet and Japanese alternatives. For them, everything works out in the end, and success is simply a matter of continuing long enough.

Their characteristic drug is tobacco, which is appropriate because they are a social generation, and also for the reason that you have to be whitepilled to smoke tobacco because you have to ignore the likelihood that it will kill you. Theirs is more of a Dignity Culture because they haven’t had the need to fight quite as hard as the World War II Generation. They’re not inclined to butt heads over honour; they would rather let things slide.

The Baby Boomer generation is bluepilled. They are Cypher from the Matrix. They don’t care at all about thinking or struggling to overcome, they just want an easy ride and someone to wipe their arse when they get old. For them, staying informed is a simple matter of switching the television on and being told what the truth is. They have a vague sense that reality is truly terrible, so it’s best to not look too deeply into things.

Their problem is that they are essentially doubly gullible. Not only are they not aware of how reality works, having been raised by televisions in an age of wealth, but their parents weren’t redpilled either, having lived in an age of plenty. The Boomers don’t really get it at all, which is why their characteristic drug is opiates. Preferably administered rectally by cheap immigrant labour.

The bluepilled don’t want to think, they just want their entitlements. This is why they correspond to a Victimhood Culture in Giles’s conception. Every obligation they are made to feel is considered an unreasonable imposition, and they deeply resent the implication that they’ve fucked up the world. Their greatest fear is someone cutting their pensions.

The offspring of the Boomers, Generation X, are the black pilled. This is the natural result of having bluepilled parents. Because their parents wanted nothing but the easiest ride possible, they didn’t end up passing on as much knowledge as they could have. Indeed, Generation X were pretty much left to it, many becoming “latchkey kids” who had both parents working. They felt that their parents not giving a shit, and that led to them not giving one either.

Among Generation X, the highest moral value is not giving a shit. This manifests in an exaggerated sense of coolness. To give a shit about anything is to be uncool, which is to be shunned. This is why grunge was so popular among this generation’s teenage years, and why they have been so apathetic towards politics and religion. Apathy means that you can be trusted; ambition means that you might abandon them like their parents did.

Generation X is a natural slave cohort, which is the result of their apathy towards politics. Because they have shunned those who tried to understand the political world and to organise, they are almost completely bereft of both guidance and power. Their characteristic drug is cannabis, because once you realise that there truly is no hope and that no-one gives a shit, you might as well just spark one up and enjoy your day.

It’s not clear how the Millennials will end up defining themselves, because at the moment they seem to be an extended form of Generation X, replete with nihilism and apathy. At some point, one would expect there to be a revolution so that some kind of Honour Culture reasserted itself, but whether this will come at the hands of the Millennials or of a generation that comes later remains to be seen.

What can be predicted is that the nihilistic apathy of the younger generations today will lead to a cataclysm of some kind. It might be military in nature, it might be climate-related, or it might be simple revenge on the Boomers. Whatever happens, the generation that follows the bloodshed will be redpilled, and the cycle will begin anew.

The Case For Cannabis: Legalisation Would Not Increase Rates of Cannabis Use

A common prohibitionist double-whammy is to argue that cannabis should remain illegal because, if it were made legal, people would use it more, and because its use is harmful, legalisation would therefore lead to more harm. This article will not argue whether cannabis is harmful (this is done elsewhere), but will simply summarise what the evidence suggests: that legalisation will not increase rates of cannabis use.

It seems intuitively obvious that making cannabis illegal lowers the rate of cannabis use. After all, the whole point of making it illegal was to make it harder to get, and if it were legal people would be able to buy it from shops.

Fair enough, but the statistics show a different story.

The truth is that cannabis cultivation is so common (believed to account for 1% of electricity consumption) that pretty much anyone who wants to get hold of it can, except for times of unusually high demand. This means that the cannabis market is already saturated – and this can be demonstrated with reference to real-world examples.

The most obvious counterpoint to the argument that legalising cannabis will increase rates of use is the fact that rates of cannabis use are not higher in places where it is legal.

In the Netherlands, 8% of the adult population has used cannabis at some point in the last 12 months. This rate is lower than in Australia (10.6%), where cannabis is illegal, and much lower than in New Zealand (14.6%), where cannabis is also illegal. In countries such as Israel and Ghana, the rate of cannabis use is higher still. Cannabis might not be technically legal in the Netherlands, but in practice anyone who wants to buy it from a shop can do so.

If legalising cannabis will inevitably cause rates of use to increase, how can it be possible that rates of use are lower in a place where it is legal, where getting supplied is as simple as walking into a shop? If the link between cannabis being legal and higher rates of cannabis use is so certain, we could expect to see higher usage rates in all the places where it is legal, and lower usage rates in all the places where it is illegal. In reality, any such correlation is hard to discern.

The truth is already known to anyone who has ever been to the Netherlands. Cannabis is easy to get hold of, yes, and the Police won’t harass you for it, that’s true, but the bulk of the population would rather drink alcohol anyway. Cannabis law reform didn’t turn a large number of non-drug users into cannabis users – a small number of alcohol users became cannabis users, and the rest stayed the same.

The absence of a correlation between the legal status of cannabis and the rate of use within a jurisdiction is not the only place that statistics disprove the idea that legalisation will lead to more cannabis use.

A poll by the Colorado Department of Public Health found that cannabis use rates declined among teenagers after legalisation, with rates of teenage use in Colorado lower than the American national average. Another study, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, supports the idea that teenage cannabis use rates actually declined after it was made legal.

In fact, the latter study suggests that teen cannabis use rates declined in the majority of states that recently made cannabis legal. It may be, as some have suggested for decades, that the Government lying about the effects of cannabis and exaggerating its dangers was what led to many young people becoming attracted to it. Had there never been an unjust law prohibiting cannabis, it’s possible that the rebellious section of society would never have felt obliged to defy it.

At this point it could be countered that, even if teenage usage rates of cannabis go down, and even if this was the most important thing, adult rates of cannabis use might still increase if cannabis were legalised, and that this might lead to more harm. Leaving aside the fact that this argument has already been countered in the first part of this article, it doesn’t even apply here.

There is little doubt that some people will replace recreational alcohol use with recreational cannabis use if it were legal to do so. Technically, this would mean that the rate of cannabis use would increase, but the rate of recreational drug use would remain the same. Moreover, the rate of harm caused by recreational drug use would decrease if some people replaced boozing with cannabis, on account of that alcohol is more harmful.

Ultimately, the argument that cannabis legalisation would lead to more suffering through increased rates of cannabis use is in error, for multiple reasons. A review of the statistical data shows that cannabis use is not higher in places where it is legal, and also that rates of teen use have declined in American states that have made it legal.

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.