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Oops - see, it's happening already...

Earlier I wrote about an announcement that the Metropolitan police were to get a real time feed from London's congestion charge cameras, but only if they promise faithfully only to use it in the tracking of "car borne terrorists" (does that include those who support terrorism by selling the odd dodgy DVD do you think?. But it appears there's to be legislation to enable all police forces everywhere to use such a feed from their local cameras for any sort of crime fighting:

'Big Brother' plan for police to use new road cameras | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics:

· Home Office leak reveals clash between ministers
· Millions of motorists could be tracked

Alan Travi, home affairs editor
Wednesday July 18, 2007
The Guardian

"Big Brother" plans to automatically hand the police details of the daily journeys of millions of motorists tracked by road pricing cameras across the country were inadvertently disclosed by the Home Office last night.

Leaked Whitehall background papers reveal that Home Office and transport ministers have clashed over plans for legislation this autumn enabling the police to get automatic "real-time" access to the bulk data from the traffic cameras now going into operation. The Home Office says the police need the data from the cameras, which can read and store every passing numberplate, "for all crime fighting purposes".

Nick Clegg's on the case though:

The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, said the "unintended act of open government" had revealed the disingenuous attitude of ministers towards public fears about a creeping surveillance state: "No wonder Douglas Alexander was keen to tone down these proposals, since he must know that public resistance to a road charging scheme will go through the roof if it is based on technology which poses a threat to personal privacy. Bit by bit, vast computer databases are being made inter-operable and yet the government seems to running scared of a full and public debate."

Technorati Tags: surveillance state

Oh dear!

In all the talk about cannabis and the oft repeated but rarely quantified assertions that today's drug is a different thing to that which our national leaders will have encountered in their heady youthful days when they clearly had a disregard for the law ill-befitting people who now want to tell us how to live our lives Matthew Norman in the Independent today relates his experience of having hallucinations on modern "skunk". Well don't believe it, or at least don't take it as definitive proof of the aforementioned unquantified assertion.

In the general spirit of confession that seems to be pervading this issue at the moment, I just want to say that the one and only time I have experienced any kind of hallucinogenic effect off cannabis was 22 years ago when I first tried the drug. After my first joint a friend came to take us to the pub. He was of a pale complexion and very white-blond hair. And in the car, in the dark, with street lights flashing overhead and listening to mid-eighties electro-dance music I became convinced that I was being kidnapped by a silvery skinned robotic alien! I didn't particularly enjoy that night, even once we got to the pub, but like any eighteen year old getting blind drunk I worked my way through it and tried again!

I've only really got back into the occasional spliff over the past couple of years - sometimes, for periods taking it quite a lot (though not, thanks to Thames Valley Police's zealous enforcement actions against local suppliers, at all this year). Yes, some of it feels stronger than others, but what it amounts to is similar to the difference between small beer and spirits in alcohol terms. You "feel" the "buzz" sooner. But I also find that the body has a self-regulating mechanism with cannabis. When the THC receptors are sated, or some such scientific explanation, you literally cannot smoke any more and I have had occasions when I have put out a half smoked reefer when that happens.

It seems to me a false differentiation to make, as Matthew Norman suggests, to attempt to categorize different strains as virtually different drugs. It would be far safer, and far better, to know the strength of what you are buying or taking before you do so, for sure. But just as with alcohol, there are times when you would like to have a quick snifter to take the edge off the stresses of the day, and other times when you would like to share a few lighter spliffs in company as with a few pints in the pub.

But in my experience, the most psycho-active cannabis I ever tried was twenty two years ago. Yes, as David Cameron related his experiences the other day, today's stuff sometimes smells stronger. But I have also noticed that that appears to be when the weed is fresh and slightly damp and as it dries properly that seems to diminish. Of far greater importance in terms of the harm it can do to you is the fact that more recently unscrupulous growers and dealers have been treating their cannabis with other substances, including, most dangerously, some kind of silicon spray to make it heavier and make more money out of a smaller quantity. This is an inevitable function of prohibition, and reclassification can only make this worse, and the effects on everyone involved more unpredictable and dangerous.

Transform has shown that despite reclassification to class C, use of the drug has continued a long term pattern of decline, not the unfettered growth the moral panic brigade would have you believe. Do not fall for it all. This is a politically motivated panic and one that does great discredit to the supposed intelligence of our "leaders".

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, liberty

...but the Tories are possibly in the best position to do it, if they dare.

Much has been made of David Cameron's attempts to persuade us that a vote for the Tories is the real environmental vote for Britain. And whilst I will suspend judgement personally until I see policies defined, because I do fancy that old fashioned small "c" conservatism can be very environmentally sustainable, I have yet to hear him propose any of the sort of change that I believe can only truly create a sustainable world.

And nor am I saying that any of the mainstream political parties, including my own Liberal Democrats and including the Green Party, are actually any better, yet.

For it's no good just going on about whether or not your have a better recycling rate in your councils, or whether to charge more for Chelsea tractors and air travel, or to plant more trees, or whether you cycle to the Commons or not. These are merely addressing the symptoms of an economic system that forces us into a never ending search for economic growth in order primarily to pay off the debt on which our economies rely for financial liquidity - money.

And it is this debt based growth imperative that creates most of the traffic on our roads, the need to get goods around the world in double quick time, goods that are of lower quality and shorter shelf-life time in order that we have to go out and buy another one (and dispose of a previous one).

It goes further, into deeper seated problems that we are also struggling with that are not traditionally seen as "environmental" issues: - it is the reason why we will have to work longer and harder, in an era when more and more work could be done mechanically, just to be able to enjoy a few years of retirement. It creates the need for economic 'warfare' between countries. It gives far too much power to governments, because they can deliberately maintain a shortage of resources and therefore the power to allocate to one group or another depending on political expediency. It keeps poor countries dependent on the largesse of richer ones. And it gives the opportunity for Bono and Bob to make waves with "Drop the Debt" campaigns that will never quite hit the root of the problem!

It is, in short, why despite good economic growth, certainly in the northern, "wealthy" world, we can be financially richer generation on generation and yet not significantly happier.

And to resolve it would be to enable a culture of "sustainable abundance", in which truly "free" trade is better able to disperse a more even distribution of the world's wealth and the benefits that go with participating in that would bring.

We already know some of the factors that we need to manage - we give the Bank of England strict inflation targets, we know we must keep a close eye on the money supply, yet the very way we do the latter leads to the former. We keep "real" money, money created for nothing, pledged only on the credit of the people, at a minimum - there are only £40 billion or so pounds in existence in an economy that uses over thirty times that amount to account for its national product. All the rest is created, entirely privately, with only base rates to moderate how much and how fast, by the commercial banks. And instead of it being created for a single one off cost of producing it as is the case with cash, we pay for it every day it exists, in interest payments.

Look at it this way: if you borrow a million pounds at five percent for a couple of years in order to get a new product off the ground, you'll maybe use that to buy raw materials, to pay wages and so on. But in order just to break even you have to sell your product for at least £1.1 million. In this very simple economy, you can't pay your workforce and those of the raw material suppliers even enough to buy your production. So more money is needed in the system. And guess where that comes from - yes, more debt.

Yet the answer is, as J K Glabraith put it "so simple it repels the mind". Create the money not as debt, but free - even "production" costs of money are minimal when most of it only ever exists as electronic entries in different bank accounts - against the credit of the economy that's producing the goods it needs to buy and sell. You end up, over time, with a truly stable money supply. One in which people and business do not have to produce ever more every year just in order to finance the ability to purchase what is already created.

And for the party that grasps this comes the promise of a manifesto that reads like Monty Python's "Blue Peter" sketch - you know, the ability to cure all known diseases - in this case of the economy. We can lower your tax bill, give you more time to enjoy the benefits of the technological revolutions that have boosted growth over the past couple of centuries and never, it seems, faster than now. A fairer world. A freer world. Sustainable abundance.

Until then, all the "green" policies I've ever heard are merely tinkering around the edges of a problem that is purely of human, intellectual, creation - for that's what economic theories and systems are. They're not fixed, immutable laws as if of nature, but ways of trying to describe how human society works and distributes resources. If one isn't working, it can be tweaked or swapped for another.

The Tories have a history of taking the once crack pot ideas of at the time "dissident" economists like Friedman and Hayek and persuading people and business that they are the next big thing. If they can grasp the solution this time, they could make the running. And as the party traditionally of "big business" they could be in a position to persuade the right people to accept this one. I won't be holding my breath though, but if someone doesn't grasp it, and soon, I reckon we're in for a hard, destructive century that the planet will be hard pressed to survive.

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