Choose Your Poison Carefully

Three arguments against the decriminalisation
of the possession of cannabis:-

1-Manufacturers will stamp their culture on something
that has a two generation old business model that works
in it's own terms of supply and demand. If supplier and user
pay no tax because they trade in contraband it should be seen
as part of the historic conservatism of a low tax economy,
which does not need tax law because it taxes very little.

Do we want cannabis cigarettes manufactured en masse
when that will increase the prospect of further corporate tax law
/corporate tax avoidance? I would rather lawyers and accountants
and the various governments departments who pay themselves well
to regulate everything did less, or found more urgent jobs to do.

2-Before the government permitted the corporatisation
of the image of cannabis, it would be medicalised for the few,
rendered safe for prescription, and controlled for the many
by it remaining pathologised. The public will always seek
the chemical contraband of their choice to combat the stress
of trying to be sociable. The problem of self medication,
and transgressive values, like alcohol itself, would remain.

3-Even if cannabis were permitted in liminal social spaces,
lightly policed for self medication, it will still be weighed down
by the instruction that nearly all medicine is supplied with
which every adult I know ignores, 'Do Not Take With Alcohol'.
I would rather my poison were tax free and outside the law
than misruled by government for the benefit of corporations.

Cannabis use among 15-64 yr olds by country

A Man Died Today

(one of many), he lived with locked-in syndrome.
After a court refused him an agreeably
mutual and personal way to end his life
he starved himself and died of pneumonia.

For thirty years I had a friend and mentor
whom I knew only through phone calls
and letters. She did not do e-mail.
For having the urge to share
I wrote much more than her,
and I was happy to give away
my ideas. Even now, so soon after she has gone,
I forget how the stories poured out of me.
I was told after she died how she took her life
by self starvation and pneumonia.
Her closest friend (not her husband)
told me how on her last night she was taken
to hospital, was almost ritually bathed,
and had her final rest in the comfort
of crisp clean hospital sheets.

She too was locked-in, by marriage
and family, not considered to be a person.
More used as property without respect.

The quieter the sense of loss, the less recognised it is,
the more courage we need to exit on our own terms.