society – Page 111

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Is Not A Gateway Drug

A common argument for cannabis prohibition asserts that cannabis is a gateway drug, in that using it inevitably leads people to using harder and harder drugs. The idea is that we need to keep cannabis illegal so as to keep people off the pathway that leads people onto truly destructive substances. As this article will examine, there is a modicum of truth to the gateway effect, but not in the way it’s usually presented.

The usual way that the gateway drug theory is portrayed is as follows. An individual tries cannabis for the first time, and experiences a cannabis high. This is a pleasurable sense of peace and euphoria that the user decides they want to have again. So they try cannabis again, and have a good time again. So they use it some more, and soon find that they need more and more of it to get the same level of hit.

Eventually the user is addicted to cannabis. After a while, cannabis is no longer able to do the job. At this point the drug user naturally comes to seek out harder drugs, such as methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, in the hope of getting a chance to relive the original amazing high that cannabis gave them. For some reason, the idea that cannabis use leads to heroin use is particularly prevalent in some circles, especially among the elderly (which reveals that the genesis of the gateway drug theory is in old-fashioned superstition).

The logic is that cannabis prohibition should prevent people from getting exposed to that initial cannabis high, by way of making the substance harder to get hold of. The harder it is to get hold of, the fewer people get addicted, and so the fewer people who seek out really hard and destructive drugs. Therefore, cannabis prohibition protects people from the harmful effects of, for example, methamphetamine or heroin addiction.

The reality is that the gateway effect is a phenomenon that is caused entirely by cannabis prohibition, and which would mostly disappear if there was cannabis law reform, except for in the case of people who have a deathwish.

Many drugs are illegal. Of those, cannabis is particularly badly suited to serving as a contraband substance. It has a strong smell, is bulky and doesn’t generate much raw profit if one considers how much time and expense goes into cultivating, transporting and storing it. Most other contraband substances are much easier to deal with and more profitable, especially those of the powdery kind.

For this reason, many unscrupulous cannabis dealers use cannabis as a kind of lure, by which customers can be induced to buy more profitable (and/or addictive) substances. It’s common in New Zealand for cannabis dealers to suddenly “run out” of cannabis when a particular customer comes around, only to offer a hit of methamphetamine by way of compensation. If the customer decides that they do like it (and this is very common), the dealer is right there to sell them a point bag.

When the would-be cannabis user is then hooked on methamphetamine, they are much more profitable than they would have been if the only other option was to sell them an ounce of weed every two weeks or so. A person who is into methamphetamine is able to burn through thousands of dollars in a week. A dealer can potentially make twenty times as much money selling methamphetamine to a person than they could selling cannabis.

So the idea that cannabis is a gateway drug is untrue. There is such a thing as the gateway effect, but this only exists because of prohibition, in particular because of the opportunity that prohibition creates for drug dealers to get naive cannabis-seeking customers hooked on harder drugs. Far from being a gateway drug which leads to people recklessly doing coke, crack, meth, smack and anything else they can find in search of a buzz, cannabis has shown promise as an exit drug for conditions like heroin addiction and even alcoholism.

If cannabis was legal, people who want to use it could simply go to a cannabis cafe or cannabis store, buy their sativa or indica as desired, and then go home without being exposed to methamphetamine or heroin or anything else. A clerk at a cannabis store is no more likely to offer the customers methamphetamine than a bartender would. After all, they already have a steady and secure income through selling a legal drug to a set market, so why would they want to screw that up?

The truth is that cannabis prohibition forces people into the arms of criminals. This is the true causal origin of the gateway effect. Repealing cannabis prohibition would mean that the people who want to buy cannabis don’t need to encounter criminals in order to so, and consequently never get exposed to a dealer offering to sell them a truly destructive drug.

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 New Zealand Student Media is Just as Gutless as the Mainstream Media

It’s rare for a Kiwi to look towards the New Zealand media establishment with reverence or even anything approaching respect, on account of that the profession is little more than a bunch of corporate whores cheerleading for neoliberalism. Even so, it is sometimes astonishing to learn quite how gutless the New Zealand media is, as local anarchist Rick Giles found out earlier this week.

The depths to which the New Zealand yellow press is willing to sink can be observed by the treatment of Giles by Auckland radio station bFm. bFM had Giles on their live show, where he was interviewed by Laura Kvigstad. The segment was called “Anarchy in Aotearoa” and featured Kvigstad and Giles talking about Giles’s interest in anarchy and some of the realisations that had led him to anarchism, and some of the things that anarchism had led him to believe.

This was a part of a wider series called “Wire Worry Week”, which was a week at bFM dedicated to “focusing on the concept of anti government; expanding upon how movements that have worked against governmental systems have influence on the current state of the world.” Giles, as the man behind AnarKiwi, was invited onto the show to speak freely about his political opinions. Readers can listen for themselves to decide whether Giles said anything genuinely worthy of specific repudiation.

In response to – presumably – the shrieking of upper-middle-class Social Justice Warriors all over Auckland, bFM made the following statement:

NB: Following the broadcast of this interview it has come to 95bFM’s attention that the subject of this interview, Rick Giles, espouses political and historical views that the station finds particularly unsavoury. We will not be removing or editing the interview, but wish to make it clear to all listeners that 95bFM does not support or align itself with the personal politics of the interviewee. Our decision to provide Mr. Giles a platform during a week-long discussion on anti-government movements was one that, with hindsight, would not have survived greater scrutiny and vetting process. The station, its volunteers and wider associates do not wish to endorse Mr. Giles’ particular brand of historical revisionism in any way, shape or form and we sincerely apologise for any concern or aggravation caused via our negligence in this case.

It is an incredibly pathetic measure for a radio station to go to these lengths to repudiate a New Zealand intellectual who is guilty only of wrongthink. So gutless are bFM that even when they decide to specifically give a platform to the counterculture they can’t bring themselves to allow alternative points of view to pass without condemnation. Even worse, they are not even decent enough to say exactly which of Giles’s political opinions were so heinous as to be worthy of deplatforming.

What’s hilarious is that you know if Hillary Clinton wanted to appear on bFM to speak to the students of Auckland, they would fall over themselves to provide her a platform, despite that she has killed at least 2,500 more people than Giles, and that’s only counting one of her many crimes. After all, they’re happy to happy to give Peter Dunne a platform, despite the fact that the lies he told about cannabis and about synthetic drugs are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of young Kiwis.

The really terrible part about all of this is that bFM, and by extension the University of Auckland, have failed in their primary purpose of being a university. The primary purpose of a university is to provide a safe space for free-thinkers to discuss ideas that might otherwise be too controversial to discuss in public, on account of that the public would chimp out upon being asked to consider (not accept, just consider) some of the assertions that are necessary to discuss such things.

Apparently the fashionable trend in mainstream media circles right now is to take the exact opposite approach to VJM Publishing; we believe that dialogue is the way to destroy ignorance. The mainstream media don’t care about ignorance; they believe that destroying dialogue and virtue signalling is the way to greater profits. bFM, by making a statement repudiating Giles, are simply learning how to be good, obedient corporate whores. This is, after all, what they will be after graduation.

Part of being a corporate media whore is deplatforming anyone not part of the Establishment (such as Giles) while happily platforming anyone who is part of the Establishment, no matter how many people have died as a result of their negligence or dishonesty (such as Dunne). bFM are willing to give a platform to a Government agent whose ham-fisted cruelty caused New Zealanders to die, but Giles is “particularly unsavoury”.

What bFM did to Rick Giles is a microscopic example of what the mainstream media does to New Zealand all day, every single day. They take uncontroversial ideas, and they sell them as rebellious and controversial so that the desire of some individuals to portray themselves as free-thinkers can be satisfied. In every case, genuinely controversial ideas are ignored as “loony” and their purveyors deplatformed, as happened to Giles. They are a pack of absolute fucking whores, and the alt-media will continue to be a thorn in their side.

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: Prohibition Raises Prices But Also Raises Incentive to Supply

One of the most common arguments for cannabis prohibition is a microeconomic one. The idea is that making cannabis illegal makes it more expensive, which means less people can afford to use it, which means the harmful effects of cannabis use are minimised. The logic is that people won’t be able to afford to harm themselves. As this article will show, this argument, common though it is, is mistaken.

If one assumes that cannabis use is inherently harmful, then one appears to have a clear-cut case for reducing the amount of suffering in the world by making it illegal (that cannabis is not inherently harmful is another argument, and will not be considered here). Making it illegal means that only the black market is able to supply it, which means that the end user has to pay a risk premium that takes into account the cost of Police harassment of the cannabis grower, and the inefficiencies that this harassment introduces into the growing process.

This risk premium makes cannabis more expensive, because the end user has to pay for all of the product confiscated by Police, or stolen by other criminal actors, or which was never grown because the size of the grow room was limited by the need to keep it clandestine. All of these factors serve to drive the price of cannabis up, which – according to the law of supply and demand – serves to reduce cannabis use.

The mathematics checks out. However, the core economic argument that cannabis prohibition reduces harm by disincentivising people from buying cannabis falls down, for a number of reasons.

It is true that prices fall sharply when cannabis becomes legal. The average price of an ounce in Colorado is NZD259, which means that it has fallen almost by half since legalisation took place. Websites that track the price of cannabis across various American states show that the price has fallen as low as NZD100 an ounce in places like Washington, where it is both legal and where the ability to supply is relatively unconstrained.

It isn’t true that this fall in prices leads to more use. Surveys in Washington have found that teen rates of cannabis use remained the same after cannabis legalisation. It is also noteworthy that teen rates of cannabis use in Holland are unremarkable in any sense. These surveys reveal that cannabis prohibition does not deter use.

In any case, the most important question to be asked about the high prices of cannabis caused by prohibition is this: who is getting all the money? In the same way that alcohol prohibition made Al Capone and his fellow Chicago gangsters rich, so too does cannabis prohibition funnel consumer wealth into the hands of the black market. This inevitably means criminal gangs, most of whom are deeply unpleasant people who are using the money to fund enterprises that genuinely do cause mass human suffering.

Once criminal gangs start getting involved in the cannabis trade, it means that there is going to be a lot more violence than if they weren’t involved. The black market means fighting for drug turf, which means intimidating other members of the black market away from certain territories through violence and the threat of violence. It means murders, kidnappings, gun violence, and all manner of other low-rent behaviours that lower everyone’s quality of life.

High cannabis prices incentivise all of this. The higher the cannabis prices are, the stronger the pull of the black market for cannabis on the various shady operators out there. Not only that, but the higher the stakes, the more ruthlessly people are willing to behave in order to secure a share of the profits. No-one is going to kill anyone else over the right to sell cannabis for $75 an ounce.

So the fact is that, in the final analysis, the economic equation balances out. The higher the price of cannabis, the lower the demand, true – but the higher the price, the higher the incentive to get into the black market opportunities for cannabis. If you are a criminal, and you don’t want to work, then growing some cannabis to sell to 15-year olds at $400 an ounce seems like an attractive proposition. If those 15-year olds are happy to wait until they’re 18 to buy it legally at $150 an ounce, well then you’re shit out of luck.

Cheap, legal cannabis would take a large slice of the black market, and render all criminal action in that slice uneconomic. This has several advantages, the foremost of which is that criminals can’t make as much money out of cannabis as before and therefore do not dominate the market. Another advantage is that people will be consuming a much higher grade of cannabis once it’s grown by professional horticulturalists and not gang members, and they will be able to do so more safely.

Cannabis ought to be made legal in order to disincentivise criminal actors from moving into the black market for it. Cheap, mass-produced, high-quality cannabis will take away the profit from what is currently a black market enterprise, which will have the effect of removing most of the criminal element from the cannabis trade. This will have the overall effect of reducing crime and suffering, because the criminal element causes more suffering than is prevented by cannabis being too expensive for some people to harm themselves with.

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.

Do We Need A National White Guilt Day?

Pressure on white people to acknowledge their collective racial guilt continues to grow. Various people in New World countries are agitating for their respective nations to have a day of remembrance for settler massacres or other colonial atrocities that took place in their nations. Suggestions like the one to ditch Columbus Day for Indigenous People’s Day in America or to mark a Parihaka Day in New Zealand are becoming more common. This essay suggests a more radical solution: that we institute a national White Guilt Day to take place once a year.

There is a large, and growing, ethnomasochistic sentiment in the modern West. Many leftist Westerners derive an almost sexual pleasure from heaping crap on other people on account of their supposed complicity in racial crimes – a kind of non-consensual symbolic salirophilia. Mostly this movement is driven by the same people whose sexual frustration morphs into other mass expressions of hatred, such as those behind alcohol, cannabis and speech prohibitions. Let’s acknowledge this, and agree to get it out of our systems with an orgiastic celebration of it once per year.

National White Guilt Day can be the day in which all white people are reminded of their collective racial guilt, which they carry on account of that white people are racist. On this day, all white people are to be reminded of their collective guilt in all of the crimes of slavery and colonialism, up to and including the Holocaust. Schools and government offices will have special ceremonies to mark the crimes of white people and how white people have failed to pull their weight in making a contribution to humanity.

It doesn’t matter if any white person’s ancestors also fought to stop those things. On White Guilt Day, white people will be told that their ancestors didn’t do enough. If you are white, you are guilty for slavery, even if you have ancestors who died opposing it. If you are white, you are guilty for colonisation, even if your ancestors brought prosperity, medicine and an end to tribal warfare to the places they settled. If you are white, you are guilty for the Holocaust, again even if you have ancestors who died opposing it, because they should have died sooner by opposing it harder.

On White Guilt Day, the white side of the narrative is not permitted to be heard.

No-one is permitted to mention that the life expectancy among Maoris is now forty years higher than it was pre-colonisation, or that the average Maori is five times wealthier than the average Tongan, whose nation was not colonised. No-one will be permitted to mention the proportion of Jews among the Bolshevik leaders who starved to death ten million people in the Ukraine. No-one will be permitted to mention the Musket Wars, or the the Holodomor, or Unit 731, or the fact that Black Americans commit murder at four times the rate of others, or any other atrocity that was or is being committed by non-white people.

On this day, the television will be forced to recount a litany of white crimes, perhaps going all the way back to Alexander. The narrative will leave listeners in no doubt that the white race has conducted a sustained campaign of hatred against all the other peoples of the world, who were purely innocent and lived non-violently in a state of harmony with all other living beings. All the evils in the world, on White Guilt Day, will be blamed on the scheming of the white race.

Perhaps we could even go as far as having street parades to mark particularly terrible acts of white evil. Willing white people can march in the street flagellating themselves with jumper cables, while onlookers pelt them with rotten eggs and excrement. Local churches will no doubt choose to march and be seen in such a parade. At the end of this day, all the people who worked themselves up into a saliromaniacal frenzy by going on about how evil white people are can go home and jerk themselves off, and then we can all continue as normal until next year.

Of course, White Guilt Day will have to take various forms based on the location. So as to not create resentment it will be necessary to minimise the free speech restrictions, so that no-one in America is allowed to mention that American slavery was stopped by white people, but people in other countries are. Likewise, Kiwis will not be allowed to mention that Parihaka was used as a base to conduct raids on nearby settlers, but people in other countries will be.

The most important objective is to have a day to signal to all humanity that white people are uniquely evil, among all the races of the world, on account of the unprecedented level of racism upon which all of their all-gotten gains have been made, and that all of their innovations and advancements would have been made by other races anyway so they deserve no credit. Then we can get all the resentment, envy and displaced class hatred out of our systems and spend the rest of the year being polite and normal.