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The Independent and others today highlight a report from US "Intelligence Agencies" that says that Iran ended any nuclear weapons program it had going four years ago in response to threats of sanctions and force and international signs of disapproval

Iran 'has halted its nuclear weapons programme'

By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 04 December 2007
In a blow to Bush administration hawks demanding military strikes on Iran, a US intelligence report reveals that Tehran's secret nuclear weapons programme was shut down four years ago. The finding which has come as a surprise to friends and foes of the US concluded: "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." That is in sharp contrast to an intelligence report two years ago that stated Iran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons".

Now, I've never really got as worked up about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the powers that be in the west seem to want me to be. Armed with just a little knowledge of how Islam views the gifts of God - nature - and everyone's right to share in that bounty I see no contradiction in their claim that Iran has a right to the same advantages of nuclear power as anyone else on the planet and should be allowed to develop its own fuel security - perhaps especially so for an economy so tied to dwindling hydro-carbon fuel sources.

Scary mad? or Funny mad?

But I also have a bit more regard for the Ayatollahs' level of self control and state control than most I suspect. Ahmadinejad is not a Saddam Hussein. The autocrat in Iran is not the populist big-mouthed macho President, but the scion of the pious, quiet, considering religious cadre, the "Supreme Leader". And, despite the circumstances of their rise to power, I've always believed them to be that much more circumspect about dealings with the rest of the world, and a bit more interested in maintaining a place at the table rather than posturing as pariah state. And most importantly, it is they and not the secular presidency that holds sway over foreign policy.

So I hope this "news" will help some world leaders find a way of stepping back from the brink a little, though there is, it appears, enough comfort in the report that keeping a lid on the situation is a credit to Bush's hawkish policies towards Iran for the past few years for him perhaps even to ignore this report completely. But for me now the way forward with Iran must be one of constructive engagement rather than brinksmanship. Ultimately the way we may be able to change what is still to me an odious regime is going to be through showing ordinary Iranians by whatever means we can that liberal democracy is a better way and we can only do that if we both open up a bit.

A few years ago Iran was heading down a different path - with the opening up of their banking system to the outside world they were making strides towards the economic freedom that could eventually set the people free as well. We don't help those factions inside Iran get back to power by making the current conservative regime seem to be the stalwart defenders of their state and their faith against an always hostile world.

Of course the greatest irony in all this for me is that secretly, I'll bet the very people who got Bush into power in the first place, the evangelical Christian Right in the US, would dearly love to be able to modle their own state on the theocratic fascism of Iran. The thought of the Southern Baptist Convention choosing who may stand for Congress and who can be President and having control over that country's holy firepower is truly frightening.

So, once again Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan police commissioner, is targeting the Hampstead dinner party set and its use of cocaine. Apparently he's going to have "smartly dressed" officers posing as dealers in the sort of bars and clubs where posh people get their coke. He wants to stop it replacing wine at smart middle class dinner parties.

Now, fair's fair, his officers have long made life hell for poor users of cocaine and its sister freebase-cocaine, or "crack", so it's probably about time this law officer enforced the law more equally for all. But the lines he's using (sorry! I couldn't resist that) are that middle class coke use is not a victimless crime, that people in north London estates die to perpetuate the supply of coke and that the cocaine plantations of Columbia are now the land mine capital of the world.

So, do we finally have the appalling admission that the law itself, rather than cocaine use, is causing this killing? Why doesn't he do something about that, speak out on that? After all, he has shown himself and his organisation very capable and willing in the past not merely of enforcing existing laws, but in lobbying for changes in the law relating to terrorist activities that threaten all our civil liberties.

Cocaine has been used in a variety of forms, safely for the most part, for thousands of years. The peoples of its native growing area, the Andean mountains of South America, have chewed leaves as a pick me up since they arrived there. It helps them to cope with high altitude living by increasing circulation and therefore take-up of oxygen. It was used in tonic wines, toothpastes and popular drinks were named after it.

It was only scheduled as a proscribed drug a little under a hundred years ago, and the history of that is tainted with the sort of legal institutional racism Blair keeps saying he is against in all its forms - that it made "negroes" frenzied sex fiends.

The history of heavy addiction, and the dangers to health of tainted and constrained supplies all stem from its prohibition as a useful stimulant, not so much from any inherent danger in the drug itself. It is time a liberal world addressed these issues. If we're not going to prohibit absolutely everything that could possibly ever have any kind of effect on peoples' bodies or minds why should we choose these few substances? Cocaine use has been around for far longer than chocolate or coffee.

Alexis Rowell, of the Belsize Lib Dems blog, gets a fabulous write-up from Peter Stothard of the TLS:

A worm's eye for politics

After decades of living in North London, meeting politicians (too many) and writing about politics (too much), I'm beginning to feel for the first time that I'm genuinely represented by one.

No, not Glenda Jackson, the movie-star-turned-axe-face-of-the-old Left and my veteran Member of Parliament here in the Hampstead part of Camden. There is still some way to go before the House of Commons itself has anything for me.

No, not Lord Adonis of Camden Town, the former Andrew Adonis, the closest thing to a natural TLS-reader in the Blair and Brown governments. His choice of title for his appointed place in the Upper House of our legislature, while pleasing, does not make him strictly any representative of mine.

I do, however, have a local Councillor. He is called Alexis Rowell, a Liberal Democrat, an environmental campaigner, a blogger, a man with a wormery in his garden and good advice on electricity suppliers - and, mirabile dictu, he deals with his constituents about what is happening in the streets around us.

He genuinely represents.

Read the rest at The Times - nice one Alexis!

The Independent today reports that US researchers have found that Magic mushrooms can induce mystical effects.

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 11 July 2006
A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms, scientists claim today.

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, have for the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced safely in the laboratory. They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical".

Only a few millennia late. Maybe we can have 'shrooms' legalised again as a religious rite/right.

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