More on the suppression of dope (hashish and marijuana) and the persecution of its users.

Part Two – Police and Policy
The first thing to note is that, if you live in the UK, especially if you’re rich, you are beneficiaries of the biggest drugs cartel and people trafficker the world has ever seen – the British Empire. So much for the moral position. We quit the trade in humans in 1807 and, after getting round to abolishing legal slavery altogether in 1833, compensated slave owners with the largest government payout of all time, which appears to have been a major factor in the growth of British industry in that century. However those enslaved people from Africa and the debt-slaves in and from India had been essential as producers of our drugs. Which ones? Opium*, tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa and sugar (yes, sugar) – all of them psychoactive chemicals to which many of us remain addicted … there aren’t many people in the ‘developed world’ and beyond who doesn’t use one or more of those. The claim “I’ve never used drugs”? Wrong, they’re just not illegal at this time. Then at the start of the 20th century governments began to worry about opium. This, it’s said, was primarily racist because they feared the influx of Chinese workers, both debt slaves and kidnap victims, to North America and Europe was spreading the smoking of opium. Ironic because it was the British who’d made the habit common in China by waging two wars to enforce their illegal trade in cheap opium. At the time the Brits produced the best quality opium in the world in Bengal but this was losing its status as synthetic derivatives, like morphine, could be made from any quality of plant. In 1909 an international commission was set up to regulate the trade and restrictions gradually grew tighter. Nevertheless, until it was superseded by other chemicals, opium was remained a big component in the pharmaceutical industry for many more decades and I may well have been fed some as a child. This is when prohibition began. Cannabis came later.
[* The best book on this I’ve come across is ‘The Opium War’ by Brian Inglis, 1976, who also wrote another on recreational drugs, called ‘The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs’, 1975]

There are accounts of why and how cannabis became a prohibited substance but I like the one I read in one of Pete Loveday’s ‘Russell’ comics (Plain Rapper Comix #2). Hemp is a very useful plant, not just for its medicinal properties but in the garden and in industry. Until suitable plastics arrived, hemp rope was the best you could get and in the age of sail you needed lots, it also provided the sails and canvas clothing – the British navy alone required thousands of tons a year. Simply put, the hemp that’s grown for fibre tends not to be much good for smoking, it has some of the alkaloids but concentrations are low. Consequently smoking or eating hemp and its resin didn’t catch on with Europeans before they had more contact with cultures that did in North Africa, the Middle East and India. It was regarded then as exotic and therefore dubious. Certainly soldiers and sailors who served in those parts tried it and still do (I’ve been told that it was also common among bargees when our canals were still industrial highways). In America, North and South, smoking weed came with black people kidnapped and shipped from Africa, as it was practised in many parts of that continent, whether brought there by the Arabs or discovered locally. That fact didn’t endear it to the racist establishment in the USA, so back to Loveday’s story. By the end of the 19th century the biggest producer of hemp in the world was Russia, then in the 1920s they developed a new method of making paper cheaply using hemp fibre. This scared the shit out of William Randolph Hearst, the original to Rupert Murdoch, who had bought whole forests to provide wood pulp for his newspapers. But Hearst had a friend, J Edgar Hoover, boss of the FBI. Prohibition of alcohol was in force and Hoover was sympathetic to the idea that marijuana, because of its link to jazz and black culture, shouldn’t replace booze. The ban was soon in force and the African-Americans got another stick to beat them. Whatever the validity of that account, it’s definitely plausible. What is certain is that in 1925 the International Opium Convention imposed its first regulation on hashish and the game was on.

Cannabis first became illegal in the UK in 1928 when the 1925 Dangerous Drugs Act came into force but no-one took much notice of it. The only people really affected by the law were the West Indian migrants to Britain after World War 2. I can remember seeing reports in my dad’s News of the World of ‘Jamaicans’ (they were all Jamaicans according to our ‘journalists’) being busted and often gaoled for planting budgerigar seeds in their gardens. I couldn’t see the harm in that but it wasn’t explained. Then in the 1960s white kids began to catch on and the moral panic grew. But this time the youth were often university educated and had friends in high places. The fightback started. So, while it was OK to persecute major black artists like Louis Armstrong, when the cops started busting famous white musicians like Jagger and Richards it didn’t go down so well. That’s when that notorious advert in The Times appeared. From 1967 onwards smoking dope and taking acid (LSD) exploded across North America and Europe and the authorities went mental. I’ve heard Trotskyists claim it was all just a middle-class diversion, which shows how out of touch they were with working-class youth, who embraced it and the music enthusiastically. The powers that be were terrified that these kids were out of their control and becoming too laid back to take work seriously enough for the profiteers. The UK’s anti-drug laws were amended constantly – the first time in 1964, then in ’67, ’71 , ’85 , ’86 , ’91 , ’98, 200, ’03 , ’06 – ’09, the latest in 2016. Drug squads proliferated and eventually became more effective. Likewise customs officers and the coast guards – as prices began to rise, the professionals moved in to smuggle and deal. The problem was that hashish is very bulky and aromatic, marijuana even more so, which made them easy to discover with sniffer dogs, however well packaged the goods were. The best hash from the tribal areas between India and Pakistan, from Nepal, Afghanistan and the Lebanon disappeared, even before wars broke out there, and was replaced with cheap, lowgrade shit from Morocco. Thus giving rise to the claim that ‘the cannabis available now is stronger than you’re used to’. Not me, sunshine! What happened instead was that the smugglers and dealers could make more money from powders like heroin and cocaine, which are harder to detect. The argument that cannabis is ‘a gateway’ to harder drugs is a lie, it was the law what done it. That’s the simple historical fact. Then we got the ‘War on Drugs’ and all hell broke loose.

There’s much that’s good about the American people but their grasp of history is probably worse than of geography. So the lessons of Prohibition hadn’t sunk in but this replay was no farce. Invasions by the USSR and then USA, destroyed peace in Afghanistan and the autonomous Pashtun and Waziri regions of Pakistan. The hashish industry virtually disappeared and was replaced by opium cultivation and heroin production. In the Golden Triangle of Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Thailand indigenous rebel movements and corrupt army generals (warlords) now got CIA backing against the ‘communists’ in China and North Viet Nam. As Brian Inglis described it, CIA planes flew heroin from Laos to South Viet Nam from where the local gangsters shipped it on. According to him this led to the insanity of the widows of Viet Cong fighters selling smack to GI, to come home as junkies if they survived. This was such an open secret that Hollywood made a film called ‘Air America’ (the actual name of the CIA’s airline) telling the story as a comedy with Mel Gibson in the lead!

In Latin America the situation became almost as catastrophic. Previously most of the good weed had come from Mexico and much still does, but interdiction made it ever harder giving rise to two results. One was entrepreneurial heads from LA and San Francisco moving to the forests in Northern California and Oregon where they set up up farms to grow their own. Not having the same amount of sun as south of the border, they went to selective breeding to boost the THC content of their crop. Firstly they popularised ‘sensi’ – sin semilla (seedless) weed – where the female plant produces more resin instead of wasting its energy on making the fruit. Then they created skunk and its relatives … and here we are. The second result of the success of border controls was to hand the business to gangsters who, as we’ve seen, make the Sicilian Mafia look like Boy Scouts. Marijuana still gets through but the big bucks are in cocaine, even more so since the advent of ‘crack’. These gangs terrorised whole countries and practically took over some smaller ones, most famously Panama, as they tried one new route after another to get stuff into the US. Economists are clear that, as long as there’s a demand, a supply will be found and in North America the demand was vast. Everything’s been used – shipping containers, small boats, small planes and, recently it’s said, small submarines but the favourite remains ‘mules’, human couriers poor and desperate enough to take the risk. As Inglis pointed out, and even officials have conceded, customs only finds about 10% of the smuggled goods coming through. The cartels can afford that and factor it into their prices. So prisons fill up with the by-catch. In the UK the men have HMP Verne, on Portland Bill, while the women were sent to Holloway when it was still open. Those people aren’t criminals but the victims of US and European economic imperialism and this stupid campaign to stop their better-off people having fun.

That’s enough for this episode so I’ll sum up. The current state of the world, including the levels of crime and drug misuse, is entirely the fault of governments and moralising pressure groups. Sloppy journalists should have the facts rammed down their throats or told to shut the fuck up – for one thing, everything they label as ‘the 60s’ actually happened in the 1970s. No authority on earth will ever stop humans using chemicals of one sort or another to give themselves a different outlook or a good time. More and more professionals, including senior police officers, have realised the truth of this and that cannabis is not the evil it’s been painted to be. States in the USA have legalised medicinal marijuana and more countries have stopped busting users, even if few have yet made buying dope legal, but still the war goes on and now there’s a psychopath in the White House who embodies everything that’s insane and perverted in the American character. He won’t win either but who knows what more damage he’ll create.

One final footnote: despite the subtitle, I’ve said little about the conduct and the crimes (and I do mean crimes) of police forces in all this because they’d fill a whole book, even to deal with superficially. The biggest of these is that throughout the 1970s and 1980s and probably beyond, there was a secret war between the CIA and the FBI, one supporting the drugs trade, the other trying to stop it. Talk about chickens coming home to roost!

RA 6.8.17

.. for sanity? BBC Radio 4 today (4th August) broadcast a discussion of sorts on the famous advert in The Times 50 years ago in the form of an open letter to demand the decriminalisation of cannabis. The programme was devised and presented by Peter Hitchens, a Tory and so-called journalist for that arseswipe called The Daily Mail. In it he interviewed a number of the signatories to that letter to see if they still agreed with it. All of them did, despite Hitchens’ attempts to get them to revise their position by repeating the lies about skunk being the ‘stronger cannabis’ now commonly available. Sadly, though some of them talked about their objection to prohibition, no-one made the point that it was precisely prohibition that led to skunk, to the spread of addiction to heroin and crack, to the creation of dodgy ‘designer’ drugs and all the criminal cartels and gangs, whose bloody trade wars fill the front pages of the tabloid press and their cousins in other media.

Should I write to the Beeb to request something to ‘balance’ that broadcast? Experience tells me not to waste the stamp. So, if there’s anyone out there reading this, here’s my reply to it.

Part One – Chemistry
Firstly skunk is not stronger than the weed we used to get hold of, it’s just been bred by dope farmers in Northern California to have a much higher content of THC than it normally had. Does that make it stronger? No, it just throws the balance of psycho-active chemicals out of kilter. What difference does that make? Well I’m a smoker not a neurologist and wasn’t aware of that modification when I first tried it, but I didn’t like the hammer blow it seemed to deliver to my brain and I quickly decided to avoid it. Forty years ago BBC’s ‘Panorama’ did an investigation into the current state of research. The reason for it was that the government had just imposed a tax on synthetic tobacco. You can be forgiven for never having heard of that as it soon died a death because it had no hit to it at all. Its development was clearly for a purpose and that was as the vehicle for mass-produced joints of fake baccy laced with THC. This is what the tobacco industry had lined up for us, if dope was legalised and a very good reason for preferring decriminalisation to legalisation. Only the well-off would be able to afford the real thing. The Panorama team interviewed a number of researchers into cannabis and they fell into two camps – those who claimed it was addictive and those who said it wasn’t. Sadly I didn’t get hold of a recording but came away with the distinct impression that the ‘addictive’ trials were using synthetic THC not herbal cannabis.

We’ve been here before – it’s called the search for the active principle. As chemistry became a science during the 18th and 19th centuries, it became clear that what made herbal remedies work were the chemicals they contained. So chemists went looking for them and the pharmaceutical industry was born. They had another idea, however, to remove the ‘impurities’ that caused problems like addiction. Opium was an obvious target, so they refined it and produced morphine (1804) – much stronger than the plant resin or tinctures and … more addictive. So they had another go and produced heroin (1874) and still the penny didn’t drop. This mindset has yet to change. Whatever they’ve evolved to do for the plants (mostly defence mechanisms against pests and diseases), in humans the effects of the chemicals associated with those ‘active principles’ may be good or bad. In the latter case practitioners have learned over centuries how to deal with them. In the case of hemp, on the other hand, there are a number of cannabinoid alkaloids that buffer the effect of THC and make it a much more benign drug. This has been realised by a number of researchers but ignored by law-makers and moralists who hate us having fun. As for tabloid journalists .. forget it, too complicated for their tiny brains.

Whatever the truth is for THC, traditional cannabis, herb or resin, is completely non-addictive and I speak from personal experience over several decades. In fact it has zero-tolerance, which means that, however much you use it, you don’t need more to get high. Medical practitioners who claim otherwise clearly don’t understand what addiction is – a physical change in the body – as opposed to a habit – a psychological dependency. Some people can succumb to the latter with cannabis but it’s easily dealt with if the underlying mental problems are sorted.

So dope is not a dangerous drug except to those who want to control our minds. In fact it’s been used by humans in many parts of the world for thousands of years and has appeared in the archeological record even earlier than alcohol. In our times, until it was banned and replaced, one of the commonest medicinal uses for cannabis tincture (extract in alcohol) was in childbirth, to relax the mother’s birth canal and make delivery easier. So much for it being a dangerous drug.

There’s much more to be said on this topic but I’ll save that for later. Meanwhile look out for more put-downs of the social revolutions that climaxed in the 1960s, the Tories are getting jittery again. Journalists, especially for right-wing rags, like to typify dope smokers as lazy and superficial – talk about pots and kettles!

RA 4-5.8.17

Just listened to an interview and Q&A with Matthew Taylor, who’s written a report for the government on these approaches to employment (or not, depending on your legal advisor). Although he claims an intention to protect the low paid and vulnerable, his main thrust seemed to be avoiding loading too much regulation on small and start-up businesses. While there are people who find these options suit them well, there are many more who are ripped off by them. As I’ve written before, ‘the flexible workforce’ means one that bends over so it can be screwed more easily. Whether or not there is genuine choice in taking such a job was raised but didn’t touch two key points. One is pressure from the Job Centre to take such a job or lose benefits; the other is that once on a zero-hours contract or self-employed, you’re not entitled to Jobseekers Allowance and virtually impossible to claim anything else because your hours, and therefore income, are unpredictable. I’ve met this when driven to sign on with a temp agency and found myself being hired from Tuesday to Thursday, laid off, hired from Tuesday to Thursday … etc. I managed to bail out of that but these days it’s a lot harder. What makes that even more of a rat’s nest now is the time it takes for your benefits to be processed, if you are entitled to claim, since computers have replaced paperwork in the Job Centres. Instead of a couple of days, it can now take 6 weeks or more. I’ve just learned that this situation will get worse because the misgovernment is planning to close about 1 in 10 of those Job Centres. What a surprise …

Meanwhile the self-employed and small-business owners have long been hard-line Tory supporters and see themselves as the most persecuted section of the population. It never seems to occur to them that they get turned over by Tory governments probably more than by Labour. It would be good if it was made easier for people to start a business, if they want to, such as letting them claim unemployment benefit or whatever until the business starts making a profit. There is too much regulation for small businesses but that could be eased by giving them quick access to the laws and regulations small employers need to me aware of and by providing more accessible legal protection and redress for workers. What we have now is a licence to rob and avoid responsibilities to staff.

RA 12.7.17