Monday morning's headlines after SSY's legalise cannabis march
Every human society since we first evolved has experimented with drugs, pyschoactive substances, and altered states of consciousness.
Many leading psychologists and anthropologists believe that this is a normal part of human life, and experimenting with substances like cannabis or magic mushrooms has actually played a role in the evolution of modern, intelligent humans.
But in the last 200 years human society has changed dramatically. With the arrival of capitalism came the rise of modern states, with their borders, armies and police forces. As the technology to control their own people developed, states have had an ever increasing urge to monitor and discipline their populations.
One of the ways they have done this is implement a worldwide system of prohibition of drugs. While the two biggest drug killers, alcohol and tobacco, remain legal billion pound industries, relatively harmless drugs like cannabis and ecstasy remain the target of expensive police operations, and users are turned into criminals who can face imprisonment for doing nothing but experimenting with their own bodies.
The drugs laws we have in Britain and throughout the developed world have never borne any relation to real medical or scientific information, but instead have been shaped by the prejudices and scapegoats created by elites to divide and control the people. One of the main ways they have done this is to use racism, associating certain substances with foreigners or ethnic minorities.
Now, in the 21st century, many countries around the world are finally beginning to wake up to the fact that prohibition has been a costly disaster that has caused untold misery across the planet. The time has at last come to begin treating drugs as a health and social issue, not a criminal one, and base our drugs policies on real scientific evidence, not prejudice and racism.
If you want to free the weed clap your hands.. CLAP CLAP.
Yesterday saw the SSY organised Legalise Cannabis – End the War on Drugs demo take to the streets of the west end of Glasgow, with between 300-350 mostly young people turning out for the biggest march of its kind Scotland has seen for a number of years.
The demo left University Avenue in the west end of the city at around 1pm with a small police escort, before marching via Byres Road and Dumbarton Road to Kelvingrove Park. Indeed, the marchers then proceeded to er, legalise cannabis, with the police adopting a very welcome non-interference approach to anyone lighting up in the park!
Across the world, the tide is beginning to turn against blanket drugs prohibition. An ever increasing number of countries are opting to decriminalise possession and start treating drugs as a social and health issue, rather than a criminal one, with harm reduction at the fore. This couldn’t be further from the truth in the UK, however. None of the big four parties are willing to go anywhere near a policy of relaxing our backwards drugs laws – displayed all too recently in the rush to ban mephedrone, or m-cat, flying against the advice of top scientists and even the government’s own drugs advisory board, several of whom resigned in protest, but happily going along with the agenda of right-wing tabloids.
This is why we felt it especially important to take the message to the streets again this summer that there is a real alternative to the madness of drugs prohibition – to legalise, regulate and control drug use, rather than pushing the whole industry underground and into the arms global crime syndicates.
Saturday’s demo got a great reception from passers-by – afternoon shoppers on Byres Road applauded the march as it passed, while groups of young people charged over the street to join it as it went by. The fact is, most people know that cannabis is not a dangerous drug, and if the reception SSY have got on the streets over the past few weeks is anything to by, most people know it should legalised too.
For as long as the UK government continues on their ridiculous and, ultimately, flawed approach of criminalising young people who smoke the occasional joint, forcing heroin addicts into a life of crime and prostitution, and wasting vast amounts of police time and resources on a pointless “war on drugs” that fuels conflict across the world, SSY will continue to campaign for sweeping reform to the drugs laws. See youse all next year.
M-CAT NOT FAT CATS! The march sets off from Uni Avenue
When I say LEGALISE, you say.. CANNABIS!
The PA system that totally worked the whole time and that there was absolutely no problems with. Uhuh
Carmen Marie Moulton from Penrith died in April just after the government imposed a ban on mephedrone, due to media scare stories with no scientific basis. These stories, as we all now know, revolved around picking up on the death of virtually any young person around the country and pinning the blame on mephedrone. Many of these false stories have now been exposed as bollocks, but long after the fact.
Papers said police were probing whether Carmen had taken the “deadly party drug”, but yet again toxicology reports have pronounced her’s a non-mephedrone related death. While there’s little news as of yet as to what did cause her tragic death, expect to see more and more of these so-called M-Cat casualties turning out to actually have died of other drugs or natural causes.
As the Daily Mail picks up another story of mephedrone madness – this time the death of a daughter of a premiership footballer. Her tragic death is being used opportunistically by the tabloids to support their unscientific banning of mephedrone. In reality Sibylle Siberski tragically committed suicide, and the drugs she took are being used as a stick to attack them with. The fact that she killed herself after breaking up with a five month long relationship with her boyfriend is ignored – as is the fact she was taking another harmful drug, which acts as a depressant – champagne.
This dangerous champagne drug is associated with some of the worst criminals in the world – Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, George Bush, Tony Blair, Maggie Thatcher and Tim Westwood are all known to have taken champagne at various times in their life. The effects of this drug have been disastrous – many former Eton pupils are known to have taken champagne regularly throughout their schooldays and then moved on to erratic and destructive behaviour resulting in millions of British people being made unemployed, in the coal and steel industries.
Alan Duncan gets high before launcing a vicious attack on the poor.
Champagne also inspired hostile, aggressive and unreasonable behaviour towards the people of Scotland, as many regular champagne users in the Tory cabinet continually denied the right for Scotland to have it’s own Parliament. This violent behaviour reached it’s worst when the Tories champagne induced madness led them to inflict the poll tax in Scotland. Regular champagne junkie Maggie Thatcher was so poisoned by the drug that she had to be dragged kicking and screaming from power by her own party members, desperate to put the clean living moderate John Major in her place.
SSY thinks if the tabloids are going to blame mephedrone baselessly for the tragic suicide of a young girl then we should take action against champagne, whose drug fuelled madness has allowed Tories to cause massive harm to some of the poorest communities in the UK.
“OH GOD OH GOD STOP I CAN SEE SATAN HE’S LOOKING RIGHT AT ME!” -- this is not a common response to listening to most music, with the exception of Green Day or Daniel O’Donnell. However the world’s finest newspaper has found another TERRIFYING threat to your children -- noiseodrugs. Just when you thought your weans were safe from mephedrone -- or “meow meow” as no-one under 40 calls it -- sick bastards have concocted a new method to terrify your kids, and this time all they need is a pair of headphones and (surprise surprise) the internet to overdose.
The “drug” is called idoser and works by playing a series of binaural beats which affect certain parts of the brain to simulate being high. Some users claim to experience a high similar to being on cannabis or ecstasy, depending on what they listen to. Other tunes -- called “Idoses” -- are designed to be more extreme, almost like a bad trip and are called scary names like “Gates of Hades”. One user allegedly clawed his own eyes out with his fingers so he could jam a pencil into his brains whilst listening to “Gates of Hades” -- it later was revealed he was in fact listening to S-Club 7 “Ain’t no party like an S-Club Party”, which is still legal and unregulated.
It remains to be seen if the Government will try and ban idoses. Right now it seems very unlikely -- no one has died or been seriously harmed from idoses, and the nature of the internet makes it almost impossible to ban someone from listening to a piece of music. There’s also understandable disbelief about someone being able to get high off of listening to something (though amazingly binaural beats can affect brain waves).
Listening to this man is 23% more dangerous than crack.
I wouldn’t underestimate the power of media hysteria combined with Government opportunism though -- the fact people won’t understand how you can get high off of sounds may disturb and scare them more than getting high off of something you can understand like pills or grass. And under the ridiculous and draconian Criminal Justice Act “repetitive beats” which may be associated with drug use are technically illegal -- someone tell the Orange Order ASAP. Thankfully the tuneful symphony of most Irish rebel songs keeps them clearly on the side of British law.
With mephedrone banned after a wave of hysteria and media exaggeration in the face of scientific evidence, it’s not impossible idoses could be banned if newspapers decide to run with it. All it would take is a couple of savvy editors picking up stories of folk dying within a couple of hours/same evening as listening to an idose to start a frenzy, regardless of how they actually died - the same way they did with mephedrone. The reality is stuff like idoses -- like all things humans do to get high -- has been around for hundreds of years, it’s just been called something different. Instead of listening through headphones to get high tribes used to listen to repetitive drumming beats. Fortunately it took British imperialism a few hundred years before they banned that kind of thing in the Criminal Justice Act.
SSY has already risked life and limb to bring you a few examples of terrifying idoses which we have outlined below. Listen at your own peril,
Behavioural psychology tells us that in the morning you’ll be 17.8% safer after listening to this Idose
Call the polis, I can hear repetitive beats
OH GOD IT’S CALLED GATES OF HADES BAN THIS SICK FILTH NOW
It’s the start of the summer holidays, and in Scotland, that can mean only one thing: rain, and lots of it.
Okay, two things actually, and as the holidays arrive in a (literal) hailstorm of erm, rain and rain, SSY is pleased to make an announcement which will more than make up for any dreich weather the past couple of days: it’s the return of our annual Legalise Cannabis march!
The next two months are shaping up to be a bumper summer for SSY, with the long-awaited return of Camp Secret Squirrel at the beginning of August, and various other shenanigans before then, including our World Cup party, tomorrow’s conference, as well as all the usual stuff. Well you can now add more event to your diary… pencil in Saturday 24 July for the annual Legalise Cannabis demo!
This year, it’s been decided to take a more broad approach to the demo, given the full-blown, hysterical media-driven moral panic we saw earlier in the year over ‘psycho-killer-drug’ mephedrone and it’s subsequent kneejerk banning. What this proved once and for all is that when it comes to drug policy in the UK, the agenda isn’t being driven by scientific evidence or experts on the matter, but by right-wing tabloid newspapers acting on self-appointed moral crusades.
It’s easy in the current climate to view the ‘war on drugs’ as something that’s unworthy of attention. But what needs to be realised is that the disastrous consequences of the ‘War on Drugs’ are implicated in numerous deep-seated problems within our society, from crime to prostitution to poverty, and are central to conflicts being played out across the globe, from Mexico to Afghanistan. It’s an issue that isn’t going to disappear; only last week it was revealed that Scotland has among the highest proportion of heroin and cocaine users on the planet.
Legalise Cannabis marches take place in hundreds of towns and cities across the world every year, and SSY is proud to organise one of very few such events which take place in the UK. The movement in favour of legalisation is one with a growing sense of momentum, particularly with ongoing developments in the US. Earlier this year, huge rallies in favour of marijuana legalisation took place across North America, in part due to the Proposition 19 referendum which is taking place in California this November. If passed, this would decriminalise cannabis possession for those aged over 21, and control and tax its production and sale. This could be a pivotal moment in the movement to legalise cannabis globally, and the outcome will be watched with interest across the world. The sudden move towards this has in no small part been prompted by the deep financial crisis that the state California has found itself in – the idea now being that it can recoup at least some of this debt from taxing marijuana!
So listen up Cameron, Clegg and Osborne – if you’re all so desperate to cut down on the deficit, how about following the example of California?
LEGALISE CANNABIS – END THE WAR ON DRUGS NOW!
March assembles 12.30pm, University Avenue (at Glasgow Uni main gate), Glasgow
followed by music, DJs, speakers & more at Kelvingrove Park
15,000 attend a Legalise Cannabis demo in Colorado, April 2010
On the left Louis Wainwright and on the right Nicolas Smith
The case for the mephedrone ban rushed in by the last government was again undermined today, after it was revealed two teenagers from Scunthorpe did NOT die as a result of the drug.
Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19, died in March. At the time Humberside Police helped contribute to the climate of drugs panic by holding a press conference that claimed that they had information that “the deaths were linked to M-Cat” and that anyone that had taken the drug should “attend a hospital as a matter of urgency.”
This was then taken up by tabloids like The Sun as part of a hysterical campaign which successfully got mephedrone banned. As we argued at the time, this was based on straight up misinformation, which claimed that the drug had been responsible for scores of deaths.
In fact, Professor Roumen Sedefov, a leading scientist who monitors new drugs for the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), said this week he was aware of only one fatality in the world – that of a woman in Sweden – where the drug had been definitively identified as the cause of death.
In the case of the two guys from Scunthorpe, toxicology reports have revealed there were no traces of Mephedrone in their blood. Tests are ongoing to see if there were any other drugs present.
Professor David Nutt, the scientific adviser that Labour sacked for giving honest scientific opinions, has now called for an inquiry into the role of Humberside Police in stoking panic.
“The temperature was rising a bit, but the deaths got it boiling over,” he said. “You can argue if that hadn’t happened the previous government wouldn’t have been bounced into this response. If these reports are true, the government’s rush to ban mephedrone never had any serious scientific credibility – it looks much more like a decision based on a short-term electoral calculation.”
He added: “This news demonstrates why it’s so important to base drug classification on the evidence, not fear and why the police, media and politicians, should only make public pronouncements once the facts are clear.”
This news once again vindicates the stance taken by SSY as the only political group that stood by the scientific evidence and campaigned against the banning of Mephedrone. We didn’t do that because we think it’s a good thing or that people should take it, but because we’re against politics being hijacked by a bizarre media crusade that aimed at selling papers through fear and lies. After months of this thousands of young people who would never have heard of the drug otherwise are now interested in it – just in time for the government to put the trade exclusively in the hands of illegal drug dealers. Good job, corporate media/mainstream politicians.
The head of the Royal College of Nursing has backed the idea of clean pharmaceutical heroin being made available on prescription to addicts, an idea the SSP has campaigned in favour of for years.
Peter Carter was speaking as the RCN discussed the results of pilot studies conducted last year in London, Darlington and Brighton. The schemes allowed heroin users to inject under supervision in special consumption rooms. The studies found, as several previous schemes have already, that heroin on prescription means users can break away from using illegal dealers, and cut the huge cost of their problem. This in turn cuts crime in the local area massively, as people with drug problems are no longer forced to steal to feed their problem. The amount of crime committed by addicts in the areas being studied was cut by two thirds. Participants in the study were found to have cut the amount they were spending on heroin from £300 a week to £50.
The provision of consumption rooms also reduces the risk of overdoses, and of transmission of diseases like hepatitis or HIV, as their is always access to clean needles. Once users are are taking part in a medical programme their prescription can be gradually reduced to help break their addictions.
Dr. Carter said:
“Addicts can take the drugs there [in consumption rooms] rather than go to school playgrounds or the stairwells of flats. Critics say that you are encouraging drug addiction but the reality is that these people are addicts and they are going to do it anyway. I do believe in heroin prescribing. The fact is heroin is very addictive. People who are addicted so often resort to crime, to steal to buy the heroin. This obviates the need for them to steal.
It might take a few years but I think people will understand. If you are going to get people off heroin then in the initial stages we have to have proper heroin prescribing services.”
A consumption room, where addicts can inject with medical supervision
The idea has traditionally been opposed by those who object to addicts being given heroin at public expense, however, these studies are just the latest that show heroin on prescription can play a major role in ending the huge problems caused by addiction. It’s time to recognise that heroin users are people with serious health problems, and usually have reached addiction as a result of abuse, poverty and hopelessness. Drug addiction is a problem of society, and the war on drugs approach of pretending that it is just an individual choice has clearly failed. Putting the blame on individuals for their own problems simply fails to understand how they have come about, and what can be done to help end them. Treating people with health problems as criminals just makes the situation worse. Heroin on prescription on the other hand is a real step towards helping people end the nightmare of addiction.
The SSP has always stood for what will actually help reduce the harm caused by drugs, rather than blaming individuals for what are social problems. Yet again, study has shown that heroin on prescription will protect health and reduce crime. Reducing the huge profits made from the international heroin trade will also go a huge way to helping undermine the basis of warlords’ power in Afghanistan. It’s time that this SSP policy was implemented in Scotland and beyond.
Doctors, psychotherapists, pharmacologists and others came together to discuss the use of psychedelic, or mind enhancing/altering drugs, and their potential applications in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress, addiction to harmful drugs and severe depression.
In recent years a number of scientists have finally won the right from the US government to research the effects of psychedelics. This follows years of official prohibition of scientific research, following the drug scares of the 60s. The 60s counterculture that threatened the US establishment was in large part fueled by the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and so a massive moral panic helped to drive them underground, preventing scientists from looking at their potential applications in mental health.
Our society uses more drugs than almost any other in history, when we take into account daily stimulants used by millions like coffee, and all the prescription drugs necessary to cope with the unhealthy workload of capitalist society. So the question we have to ask ourselves is, why are some drugs ruled out of bounds by the state? Some illegal drugs, like crack or heroin, clearly have severe impacts on people’s health and lives, whatever you think of the current government policy. But there is no evidence of anyone having died of overdosing on psychedelics, and they have been used societies from every continent for thousands of years.
Drugs prohibition policy has always been driven by anything other than scientific facts about the impacts of different drugs. Drugs are made illegal, and users persecuted, often following media scares, known as moral panics, which are about creating scapegoats for society’s problems. They also serve the agenda of states very well, as they provide a perfect excuse to create huge regimes of high tech police monitoring the population, in theory to stamp out drugs, but in practice very useful for containing dissent. In the case of psychedelics, governments in the 60s were also very concerned about the fact that users who had mind altering experiences began to seriously question the fundamental basis of the racist, capitalist, imperialist societies they lived in. This led to heavy suppression of their use.
The result of this is that for decades scientists have been unable to properly investigate their potential therapeutic uses. But now that is beginning to change, as researchers who can demonstrate they are using rigorously scientific, and safe, procedures are being given limited approval to look once again at psychedelics. Some of their initial findings are fascinating.
Experiments have proved particularly fruitful in treating people with terminal illnesses or undergoing chemotherapy. Patients suffering from end-of-life anxiety are unable to enjoy their last months of life due to severe depression and gruelling impact of some cancer treatments. However, many now credit their participation in experimental trials of psyilocybin, a substance found in over 100 mushrooms around the world, with helping them overcome their depression, and transforming their relationships with family and friends.
As Dr Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist at UCLA puts it: “Under the influences of hallucinogens, individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”
Art from 2000 BC shows how long mushrooms have been used by different cultures
Or as one patient, Clark Martin, himself a retired clinical psychologist coping with kidney cancer, says: “It was a whole personality shift for me. I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”
Other studies have been looking again at the potential for MDMA, the chemical compound used for making ecstasy, to be used in treating post traumatic stress disorder. This has taken on particular relevance after the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have traumatised thousands of young people who turned to the military for a job in the US and UK.
One of the leading researchers in this field, Dr. Roland Griffiths, has argued his research could have profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and human history. He argues that the fact the experience of altered states is so widespread throughout history and across the world, as well as in his own experiments, points to the possibility that they are evolutionarily normal. That is, these experiences have been a normal part of human life for the whole of our history, and may have given us an evolutionary advantage. The controlled use of psychedelics by many societies may have promoted altruism, a lack of selfishness and commitment to supporting others. These are all things that would have helped groups of humans survive in the past, even if capitalist society does not find them to be useful traits, and represses drugs that promote them.
What all this underlines is that humans as a species have always used drugs, and always will. In the 20th century, as new technologies and more advanced societies enhanced the power of states to control their people, a new phase opened up in the relationship between people and drugs, in which governments and the mass media took on the arbitrary power to ban some drugs and promote others, persecuting some users and allowing the manufacturers of others to become fantastically wealthy global corporations. What we urgently need to do is to try and talk openly, honestly, and scientifically about our societies’ use of drugs, and examine which ones can be used beneficially, which do not cause real problems, and how collectively we can reduce harm. Indeed, much current research into psychedelics has focused on how they can be used to help break users’ dependence on much more harmful drugs like heroin.
But progress can only happen when governments accept that the irrational, unscientific “war on drugs” has been a failure. Sadly, in the UK there’s no sign of this happening, especially after the mephedrone scare, the first full on drugs moral panic of our generation. Less well known is that until 2005, whilst dried and prepared magic mushrooms were illegal, it was not against the law to harvest and distribute fresh ones. But then, the government classified them as a Class A substance, officially claiming they were as dangerous as crack or heroin. Good one, chumps.
Bonus: In a TED talk, Dr. Roland Griffiths discusses his work
Entries (RSS)