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Whisky, and other spirits, specially distilled to take their alcohol (the chemical that provides the "high" - well, "low" actually in both cases!) content up from the usual 3-5% of beer to 40% or more, are dangerous.

Non sequitur? Indeed - we all know that you don't drink whisky by the pint by and large. But people still use spirits to get blotto as fast as they can on as little liquid as they can and for those people, yes, it is dangerous. Yet such a FUD mantra (fear, uncertainty and denial) is routinely trotted out by the twenty-first century's New Temperance League in their relentless attacks on other drugs, such as here at the First Post:

Cannabis growing hits a new high (was the pun intended I wonder?)

The plant most popular with illicit farmers is actually skunk, a hybrid cannabis plant specially bred to be more potent: whereas standard cannabis contains about one to five per cent of THC (tetrahydro- cannabinol - the chemical that provides the "high"), skunk can contain as much as 30 per cent THC, making it dangerous.

And yes, of course, like whisky when drunk by the pint it could be dangerous. Now of course, with the benefit of regulation, we know exactly what the alcohol content is of every alcoholic drink that is sold (except that scrumpy stuff that is still brewing when it hits your stomach!). But cannabis users do tend to know how to dose themselves - and you don't, indeed physically can't in most cases, sit there and smoke yourself comatose like people do with booze. Unlike with alcohol, there usually comes a point at which your body actually cannot take any more well before you're actually semi-conscious - you're "toked out" in the lingo - and you cannot for love nor money force yourself past that point, often even having to stub out a joint halfway through, so it seems much more self regulating than strong alcohol is where you can down a bottle of the stuff and pass out a few minutes later.

But all this FUD reminds me of the Untouchables and prohibition in the US. Of course in an underground market people produced the strongest most rancid hooch they could, because shipping bulk tankers of lite beer around the country was just not on. Prohibition didn't work then, so why do we think it should work now? And just like back then, there are other very real dangers - in cultivating the stronger stuff, in making it quickly and covertly, they use hydroponics with all sorts of chemicals that stick around after the plants are harvested. So not only are you consuming artificially strong stuff, but chemically tainted stuff as well. Double bad!

And thinking about strength of drugs they are fighting a losing battle on most of them - did you know, for example, that it is possible to concentrate the active ingredients of heroin to such an extent that you could pass around enough supply for an addict to live off for a month if he knew how to dilute it again properly under a postage stamp? How are you supposed to stop that sort of concentration getting past the authorities?

Conrad Russell suggested that when a law has a significant amount of the population either disregarding it or contemptuous of it, it has become de facto a bad law. The numbers of people that now appear to be involved in cannabis cultivation suggests this is now the case here if it wasn't already.

The best, nay the only way, to deal with this is to legalize and regulate it, and bugger the Temperance League ladies. Make sure that, as with tobacco and alcohol, everyone knows precisely how much of the active ingredient they are taking and then leave it up to individuals to decide whether they want a quick snifter of the strong stuff, or an evening's socializing with the old tongue loosener.

Technorati Tags: prohibition, liberty, drugs laws

Have a look at the artist's impression below as reproduced in the Oxford Mail story on tonight's planning debate at Oxford City Council over the proposals to extend the Westgate shopping centre:

See how the road, Queen Street, has people milling around in safety and nice surroundings? There's not a bus in sight, is there? That's because we have been led to believe for the last six years and more that any redevelopment of the Westgate Centre would be contingent on finding a route for eastbound buses through the new centre that would finally get them out of this cluttered and frankly downright dangerous street.

Well guess what. The plan, approved tonight, has welched on that. Buses will continue there after all. What is the point of spending thousands of pounds doing up Bonn Square if you can't stand back and marvel it without a No 7 knocking you down - and I don't mean a lady hawking Boots' makeup.

Whilst the original plan which Prescott refused on call-in and the city got through on appeal to the High Court did have its flaws, there are two distinct problems that to my mind make this application inestimably worse. Failure to get the buses out of Queen Street (which the original did) and expansion across Norfolk Street resulting in the demolition of a community of flats and houses built only a couple of decades ago primarily for disabled residents (which the original plan did not).

This latter is a particularly pernicious piece of corporate greed on the part of the Westgate Partnership and the City Council which stands to gain millions from the development, most of which is on their land. I hope the residents are well advised about their rights in holding out for the best price - it seems to me that they have effectively a ransom on this development.

Yes, we all want to see a John Lewis in Oxford I'm sure, but I wonder how that workers' partnership would view the idea of kicking a bunch of vulnerable people out of their homes? If any understand the benefits of personal ownership of capital assets it should be them.

The City Council should look to its other assets. The jewel in its crown is the Covered Market, and although it will remain a unique feature of Oxford's city centre it is now effectively marginalized on the eastern fringe of the main shopping area, together with other vulnerable sites in areas like Broad Street. One might expect that whole area east of Cornmarket to become merely a tourist curiosity, with trinket shops and eateries.

In turn, those businesses, predominantly small local independent shops, that currently just about cling on there and who will, let's face it, be unable to compete for space in and around the new Westgate, will face an uncertain future as our new primary shopping area becomes even more blanded by brands.

I've not been too much involved with this application - I was on the Planning Committee when the last one happened and voted against that one too for all sorts of reasons - but my gut feeling is that this one is wrong on so many levels. I find myself in the extremely odd and slightly uncomfortable position of hoping that Ruth Kelly won't like it either. I normally hate the idea of central government taking local decisions away from local people. But in this case I think the local people have made a mistake, and one that will change significantly the Oxford millions know and love for many years to come. If such can't be dealt with by a local referendum, then someone else has got to be able to take a view outside the obvious conflict of interest involved in a council granting planning permission for its land in which it stands to make a small fortune.

Sorry chaps. But I had to say it! There's one way you can make up for this, since you're in the game of rearranging your significant property assets - let's set up a Community Land Partnership, pooling the freeholds of the area to the east of Cornmarket and St Aldate's and including the Town Hall and the Covered Market, creating a body that can act as one with the financial muscle to counter the effect of the inevitable westward shift of the city centre.

PS - come to think of it, if you really want to do away with Oxford's most brutal piece of architecture (pace Jeremy Dixon's new blot on the mound which I fear is there for a good while yet) the whole thing should wait until we discover whether Oxford will become a Unitary Authority (God forbid!) and knock County Hall down instead of peoples' homes.

Way back when, when I was once a city councillor, I did take quite an interest in the development of the Town Hall. It's a great building, built by public subscription in the late nineteenth century to be the civic centerpiece of the city to match the grandeur of the university's buildings all around it. I imagine it was a vibrant place, all lit up most evenings with balls and dinners. It has housed the main courthouse in its time and the main city library. It was the drill hall presumably for the locally raised militia. All sorts of things have gone on there.

There are all sorts of unused spaces, and it has become a little frayed at the edges and no longer truly responsive to the city's needs for modern twenty-first century entertainments. It's a dark blot on the city's main central crossroads. A site probably worth much more than it is on the books for. A fantastic opportunity. And I've kept in touch with the progress of various schemes to redevelop it over the years with interest.

I took a proposal to them from a shopping centre developer who was interested in developing the unused lower floors to sympathetically produce retail space that might help draw people in. And I took part in a consultation exercise back at about Christmas time 2005. And the one additional comment I made on my response was that in Open Capital Partnerships I believed I had a mechanism that would allow the City Council to carry out their redevelopment proposals without handouts and that I was very willing to help explain the idea to people.

So to say that I was pissed off when I saw this last week in the Oxford Mail/Times...

Council abandons plans for £9m Town Hall revamp

...was something of an understatement. Now I am sure people think that many of my financial ideas are completely barking mad. But when a citizen offers a positive possibility, surely the state and its representatives ought to at least hear them out. As it is, what was going to be an all singing redevelopment costing £9m is now going to be a lick of paint and a few new doors costing £1-2m. And that is still somewhat dependent on getting a handout from a lottery or heritage fund.

I was talking about a scheme that would not rely on subsidy and rent seeking, but bring money into the Town Hall as a viable investment for people, for the partners in the development. So I still reckon I could find a way of financing significantly more than what's been proposed this morning. But do they ask? Do they heck. A triumph of bureaucracy. There are so many ways according to the book of doing something and nothing else.

And of course councillors, being amateurs, in the best sense of the word - lay people - do not necessarily know to look elsewhere. When you see a report you assume, most of the time, that all avenues have been explored, and by people paid more than you to do just that. Six years ago one of the favourite meeting bingo phrases was "out of the box thinking". When the box is drawn by official experts who are not rewarded for taking the risk of innovation, and robustly built, it's very difficult to think outside of it.

Yet councillors are probably the only people who could get through. Unless they are actually invited, other experts and the general public seem viewed with suspicion - after all, most of the time when you consult, you only get responses from people with objections. I suppose I should just accept that however I put my suggestion over it didn't reach the right people. But I hope the possibility of resurrecting it is not now closed.

Technorati Tags: community land trusts, localism, monetary reform, oxford

A week or so ago Mike Killingworth challenged us on Liberal Conspiracy to show what "Lovable Banking" might look like in response to the daily emerging news that we've been shafted regularly by the banking system since, oh, at least 1695. Some of you will know that I have long taken an interest in things like local currencies and mutual finance and perhaps also that I've been looking into the use of the Limited Liability Partnership structure as a way of building multi-stakeholder less toxic alternatives to purist shareholder capitalism.

Well a couple of weeks ago I was contacted out of the blue by a chap, Frank Churchill, also in Oxfordshire, who has been looking at similar structures. In his case originally I think as a less toxic alternative to developing world microcredit systems (did you know that the effective interest rate including all charges and so on on Grameen or Kiva micro loans can get as high as 80%!) and as a way of monetizing voluntary work - mainly involving carers. We've both been steadily battling along on our own on this, trying to understand the structures and build solutions to common issues around them - in my case, mostly things like affordable housing and supporting local businesses.

And so we've got together and are, hopefully, on the verge of setting up a "think and do tank" (to coin a strap line from another - less popular amongst liberal economics followers - organization, the New Economics Foundation; but don't let that put you off - some of the issues are the same but we believe the responses are more mutual and liberals than theirs) in the form of a "Community Finance Partnership".

The Limited Liability Partnership structure was created, ironically perhaps, to get the professional firms such as accountants and lawyers out of being personally liable for the debts of their partnerships - the vast accountancy partnerships in particular were worried about the sort of "Enron scenario" of being held liable for multi-million pound lawsuits and were threatening to move their registered offices away from the UK if we didn't give them limited liability. But inadvertently they have created a beautifully simple mechanism for bringing all the parties to an enterprise - the providers of capital, landlords, customers, workers and suppliers and so on - in, if they wish, to share in the risks and the rewards of pooling their contributions to the success of that business as partners.

A partnership agreement can involve different classes of partner receiving different shares of the profits depending on the worth of their input to it - just as a co-operative structure does. Companies may be partners, or even other LLPs as well as individuals. And the partnership itself is tax transparent so each partner is responsible for accounting for the profit or loss in their own tax affairs. Some of you will be aware that I think limited liability in general is a Bad Thing that takes the personal responsibility away from business owners, but in this case it matters very little since every connection with the business could become a partner and share that responsibility explicitly.

The Community Finance Partnership can we believe fulfill a great number of roles, offering a portfolio of products for consumers and a steady return based on those to investors - the aim is to produce an index-linked rate of return in the form of a "rent payment" for the use of the capital partners' (investors) funds. "Customer partner" products might include interest free mortgages - called Property Investment Partnerships, personal loans such as with Credit Unions and business finance "repaid" through a portion of the successful businesses' turnover.

One "flagship" product we are hoping to develop is the idea of a local complementary currency, probably in the form of a Nectar-like loyalty card system that businesses with a base in the geographical area can buy into and which would be able to monetize currently unpaid work like volunteer carers whose value to the local community and especially health services is enormous. The possibilities are almost limitless. For example another idea would be to finance the equivalent of PFI schemes - for example if Oxfordshire County Council wants to rebuild some schools, but with local investors sharing in the reward. And such a structure could be used to provide the mutual finance system for universities I mentioned earlier today.

Think a cross between a loyalty card system, a credit union (more on the US or Irish style than the British), a mutual building society but with the ability to lend to business and not just on homes, and possibly a friendly society offering local mutual insurance and pension products. It's early days yet, and we're still working up what each product would look like in financial terms and the sort of prospectus we'd be able to offer investors, but I'm very excited about it! We think the time is ripe for a return to more human scale financial institutions that people can become a part of on a local more human scale.