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The BBC reports that Westminster council are putting out a leaflet to warn foreign tourists about clip joints. Experience says they should probably start with naive young British boys. For it's twenty one years too late for me!

My first Christmas out of school was in London, three months into a job with a jobbers' firm on the Stock Exchange. I had one mate that I knew of from school in London, who was studying at the Royal College of Music or somewhere like that. The night I got my Christmas/annual bonus we decided to go to the West End. We were determined to go to the Soho highlight of the day, Raymond's Review Bar.

Well we got to the Review Bar and some bloke out the front dressed up in dicky bow and so on said "I wouldn't go in there chaps, it's gay night on Fridays, I'll show you a better place". Oh dear! We dutifully followed him. Duke Street I think it was, and a downstairs bar. Only a fiver to get in - what value! But then...

The only drink we could afford was the nastiest cheap German white wine on sale at £30 per bottle I think it was. Then these two "young ladies" came to our table. We didn't really know what they wanted, but let them sit down and be sociable. We went to share some wine with them...quick as a shot the boss comes over and says "Oh, no, sirs, the girls only drink Champagne". So we agreed - at £50 a bottle (this is 1985 remember).

Anyway - we didn't stay long. And the guy came over with a bill for us...for £200 - exactly my bonus (so much for million pound bonuses in the city!). I had to write four £50 cheques - three of them post-dated - so I could use my guarantee card. And that was my Christmas bonus. Of course, I would rather have been in Mr Raymond's gay night all along!

...their knee at the same time, do you think it might catapult them all off to Poland or similar where they'd no doubt find their authoritarian meddling in other peoples' lives more acceptable and satisfying?

Haroon Siddique and Matthew Tempest
Wednesday July 18, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Gordon Brown today announced the second review in two years into whether cannabis should be reclassified, in response to concerns that its current status does not reflect the drug's dangers.

Mr Brown announced the review, which will look at whether cannabis should be reclassified as class B again - rather than its present class C - at prime minister's questions.

Of course a "review" is also an opportunity to persuade of the opposite case, though anyone who received the government's reply to a pro-legalization petition the other day will know just how prejudiced they are heading into this latest review.

In 2005, 10,000 11- to 17-year-olds were treated for cannabis use - 10 times the number a decade ago.

Yeah - you know what - reclassifying will not make any difference in a black market where pushers don't really care about the age of their customers. Decriminalizing and penalizing people extremely harshly who sell to minors would.

But I'd love to know where this 10,000 figure comes from - before it becomes a matter of popular "fact" created by a political spin doctor. Officially there were just 946 mental health admissions related to cannabis in total in the UK in all age groups in 2005-6. So it seems extraordinary that, given the most common juxtaposition is between mental health and cannabis, that ten times the total number of mental health admissions can be attributed to youngsters suffering other problems as a result of the drug. By contrast, there were 5700+ hospital admissions of under 16 year olds due to alcohol abuse in the same year.

Plants are increasingly cultivated to include high levels of the active ingredient of cannabis, THC, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which encourages addiction and can cause a range of symptoms, from short-term memory loss, anxiety and panic attacks to triggering schizophrenia.

They are so cultivated because of the illegal market in which they operate. Where pushers and growers want to get the maximum value they can out of as little as possible to minimize their chances of being caught. It's not that difficult to measure the THC in any one strain or plant. So decriminalizing and forcing people to sell only with a statement of how strong it was would solve that one too. You don't expect people to be drinking pints of full strength Whisky when they go out for small beer do you? That's what the criminal nature of the market is forcing on cannabis consumers.

Prohibition has not worked and never will work. However unlikely, every review of the situation is an opportunity to persuade of the better course. Jacqui - read this first. On the other hand, given that most of us are criminals anyway, maybe if you stick to the paper clips and I'll stick to unwinding after work with a joint we'll all get along fine.

Technorati Tags: drugs laws, gordon brown, liberty, prohibition

Thanks to James Robertson for pointing me to this site in response to a call for fresh thinking on how to fund the EU after 2008. I'll no doubt return to this in the future but for now just have a look. How we can finance the EU and get a dividend back.

Technorati Tags: EU, monetary reform

"Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions - rearranges itself, and the people born then cannot even imagine a world in which their grandparents lived and into which their parents were born, We are currently living through such a transformation"

Peter Drucker, "The Post-Capitalist Society" Chapter 1, 1993

In "The Future of Money" former Belgian central banker Bernard Lietaer suggests two examples of Drucker's "sharp transformation".

First the invention of printing, and the unimaginable change it brought about in the literacy and therefore intellectual and political influence of a large part of the population from whom books were previously too remote. The ramifications of such a change included the Reformation and its huge upheavals as nations moved away from Rome, gave primacy to their own languages, and permitted scientific scholarship previously zealously suppressed by the Vatican.

Second, the invention of the steam engine which accelerated the process of urbanization, global trade in manufactures, created a working class steeped first in poverty, oppression and misery, and then rising up with revolutionary fervour.

Lietaer, following Drucker's suggestion, suggests that the next epochal change is on us. This time he paints a picture of four great movements that he describes as huge pistons pushing towards the same centre point, and that our reaction to these movements could push us to ever greater social inequity and environmental degradation to the disadvantage of future generations or to what he calls "sustainable abundance". His four great pistons are all too evident already: climate change, an ageing population, monetary instability and the advent of the super-connected information age.

So, you'll have spotted that this actually has nothing to do with the recent book from which I've shamelessly pinched the title. I haven't read it, and it appears now to be on reprint or something as Amazon can only offer 4-6 weeks delivery, but I will no doubt find it interesting once it arrives. But the point is that this epochal change will necessitate a reinvention of the state, the nation state, and probably every nation state on the planet.

Many of the institutions, commercial and governmental at least, that we have today were forged precisely because communication and information flow between disconnected markets was difficult. They are vehicles in which we put our trust when dealing with people and businesses we could not know personally. Even money itself is a construct that enables us to trust dealings with one another, a mechanism by which someone who sells us something can give us credit without knowing too much about us.

The information age changes all of this. The synopsis of David Cameron's Google speech yesterday at ConservativeHome does pinpoint the sort of changes we have seen in information flow and how they have been reflected in changes in the mode of government or, to use their word, bureaucracy. But it goes so much further than they seem to conceive (or maybe they're just trying not to scare the Tory horses too much).

The internet and other communication technologies enable us vastly to expand the networks of people whom we know well enough to form an opinion about whether we trust them or not. Look at things like e-Bay, where many participants rely on recommendations from others when making decisions about whom to trade with. An operation like e-Bay could just as well work in fact with a new, corporate, common currency into and out of which people trade other currencies as they need to. In a different vein, bringing new participants into the global economy, look at things like Kiva, the internet based microfinance scheme where people from all over the developing world can pitch for micro-loans from investors the world over to help them set up or develop their businesses.

On a more day-to-day level we have seen the internet make trade "arbitrage" available to the individual consumer - we can now search the web for the best prices in many goods and in different currencies. There is simply less of a need for national currencies. When, as we are frequently promised, we no longer need cash even for small transactions, it will not matter what currency our bank account is denominated in, so long as timely information allows us to convert it at the till into something the seller wants - which may even not have to be "money" in the conventional sense at all.

The internet is also radically changing the way we could choose to work, even if not many of us have so far done so. We could choose to live on a desert island with an internet connection and still work for our tech firm in Britain, or vice versa, we could retreat to our village virtual workplace and carry out open heart surgery on a patient in Tonga. Where do we get paid for these different patterns of working, and in what - Tesco vouchers anyone, after all you can pretty much buy anything you'd need there if you want to? How would a government know, except through every more intrusive surveillance of our affairs, what our incomes are, where they ought to be taxed and so on?

What does a state have left, if it no longer has control of information about its citizens' earnings and trading patterns? And when we can trade with smaller and smaller businesses around the world because of our widened networks of trust, what does the global corporation have left to keep us buying from them? This was the great hope of the nineteenth century anarchists, libertarians and mutualists who hoped for an end to the money monopoly held by states and bankers, and to government protectionism, which would drive down the returns to capital and drive up the returns to labour.

In the light of these huge potential changes in the ways we work, socialise, trade and trust we have the opportunity to look again at the argument, that once seemed so settled in the early part of the twentieth century, the great Liberal reform era, for truly free trade over protectionism. Individual choice over state intervention. If there is a role for the state in all of this, it is in trying to ensure that we all have fair access to the media of such a new economy - communications and delivery networks.