Wang Chung – Orchesography + Remixes (CD Rip)
29 minutes ago
Monday, 18 January 2010
US doctors beg their government to admit critically injured children from Haiti
American doctors are begging their Government to accept critically injured Haitian children after one baby girl was airlifted to hospital in Florida.
Meanwhile, in an exercise dubbed Operation Pierre Pan, the Catholic Church in Miami is drawing up plans to rescue thousands of Haitian orphans, mirroring the Operation Pedro Pan airlift of 1960 in which 14,000 Cuban children were taken to the city.
US immigration officials had been refusing to allow children into the country until next weekend. However, as Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, arrived to assure Haitians that America stood ready to help “in any way we can”, doctors managed to persuade the US authorities to allow in Jean, a four-month-old Haitian girl for treatment. The orphaned child has cut through immigration rules used to bar entry to the US for Haitians even in extreme circumstances.
The charity Medishare had been considering defying US immigration by putting Jean physically in the giant hands of Alonzo Mourning, a basketball star, who has given millions to the charity and spent three days last week clearing rubbish in its tented clinic in Port-au-Prince. “We wanted to have him on the plane and carry the kid through Customs,” Arthur Fournier, a founder of Medishare, said. In the event US officials relented.
However, by Saturday night only 23 Haitians had been admitted to US hospitals.
Jean, as she was named by medics, was pulled from the wreckage of her home on Saturday. She was barely alive after spending 85 hours without water. Her parents are thought to have died in the rubble of their home.
Taken to a tented clinic on the city’s main UN compound, Jean was resuscitated and then flown to Fort Lauderdale. She was recovering yesterday at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami.
“We can’t evacuate any Haitian patients to the US,” John McDonald, from the University of Miami Medical School, said. “Our country treats the Haitians like s***. The people land, they get sent back. When Cubans land, they open restaurants.”
Another doctor at the tented clinic said that she was so desperate at being forced to discharge children still in grave danger of dying from infection that she wanted to “scream and scratch people”. For want of bed space “we are sending wounded children back on to the streets of Port-au-Prince with no plan even for how they will be fed,” said Jennifer Furn, from Harvard Medical School.
Dr Furn’s task was complicated by instructions from the UN to vacate the tents by 8am yesterday. “The UN say they need these tents as a staging post for regular personnel,” Dr Furn said. “It’s breaking my heart. How can I send children with wounds and head bandages out into the streets?”
A spokesman for Minustah, the permanent UN operation in Haiti, insisted that alternative premises were being found, but there was no sign of them hours before the deadline.
In Miami, church representatives are lobbying the US Department of Homeland Security to allow Haitian children left homeless or without parents to be given shelter in the US. The archdiocese has been deluged with offers of help from families, including Cubans who came to Miami as youngsters during Pedro Pan — the Spanish name for Peter Pan — 50 years ago.
“We, the former Pedro Pan children, have a solemn duty to help these children benefit from our unique experience, so that one day they have the tools to return to their homeland and help rebuild it,” said Carmen Valdivia, 60, who was sent to Miami by her parents at 12 to save her from communist indoctrination.
The plan, which is still at a preliminary stage, is being spearheaded by Deacon Richard Turcotte, the chief executive officer of the archdiocese’s community aid wing, Catholic Charities. “It could be a tremendous opportunity to stabilise these children and help heal them from this terrible, terrible disaster,” Mr Turcotte said.
Pedro Pan was the largest recorded exodus of unaccompanied children in the western hemisphere. It remained a secret for three decades.
Back in Port-au-Prince, Mr Mourning sat exhausted, inured to the screaming of a boy whose broken leg had been reset without painkillers. “The US is an hour and a half from here,” he said. “The children here have devastating injuries and we can only patch them up. It makes no sense. We can help everybody here if we get our priorities straight.”
In this clinic, as in others, the suffering, the stoicism and the heroism of the doctors are remarkable. It is hard to apportion blame when hundreds are working bravely; it is hard also to avoid the suspicion that bureaucracies within the UN and the US are, at times, behaving as if this earthquake never happened.
Meanwhile, Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, has spoken of the “thin line between medicine and media” after he was left in charge of 20 critically injured patients when a UN team of Belgian doctors left because of security fears. Critics accused CNN of exploiting the situation and blurring reporting after Dr Gupta, 40, a neurosurgeon who turned down an invitation last year to become US Surgeon-General, was shown tending to a 15-day-old baby. He wrote on Twitter: “Yes, I am a reporter, but a doctor first.”
UR
It has been two decades since the most political group in the history of techno set out to change the course of electronic music: Underground Resistance. Time to pay tribute to the heralds of a sonic revolution.
In late 1989, on November 2 to be precise, two individuals from Detroit, Michigan, decided it was time for a change: 'Mad' Mike Banks, formerly a bass player for Parliament and producer for a dance music crew called Members of House, and Jeff 'The Wizard' Mills, at the time a DJ on local radio station WJLB, formed a collective henceforth known as the Underground Resistance. Inspired by radical factions of the civil rights movements, such as the Black Panthers, and political hip-hop groups like Public Enemy, UR desired to take social activism to a musical genre previously deemed incapable of conveying political messages: techno.
Where the genre's founding fathers had set their sights on an imagined future, UR opened their eyes to the dystopia of present day Detroit: Abandoned neighbourhoods, urban desolation, still prevailing racism, and cultural hegemony firmly in the hands of a privileged few.
Where the genre's founding fathers had set their sights on an imagined future, UR opened their eyes to the dystopia of present day Detroit: Abandoned neighbourhoods, urban desolation, still prevailing racism, and cultural hegemony firmly in the hands of a privileged few.
Fuel for the Fire
While UR's initial collaborations with Members Of The House singer Yolanda Reynolds ('Your Time Is Up' and 'Living For The Nite') still clung to the blueprint of piano vocal house, Banks and Mills soon stepped up the intensity. The pair was joined by Robert 'Noise' Hood, who had previously featured as a rapper on the rare UR production 'Dance To The Beat', as a third member, and together the henceforth face- and nameless group entered their most productive phase.
In little over two years Banks, Hood and Mills recorded over a dozen 12"s in various permutations of the line-up, growing harder and more radical in both sound and image with each new release. The 'Sonic' and 'Waveform' EPs were followed by 'Riot' and 'Fuel For The Fire', and 'Punisher's permutation of the eponymous comic book hero's logo became the most iconic and eagerly reproduced symbol for UR's political cause against oppression, discrimination and cultural commercialisation.
Message to the Majors
After Hood and Mills' demise Mike Banks further opened up UR as a platform to feature and promote like-minded local artists. Veteran producer James Pennington (a.k.a. Suburban Knight) joined the ranks of the Resistance as did new artists like Scan-7, Gerald Mitchell and, perhaps most notably, Drexciya, a group long shrouded in mystery, whose brilliant experimental electro productions paved the way for a worldwide resurgence of the genre.
Condition Red
It was one of this new generation of artists who in 1999 suddenly found himself in the middle of UR's biggest success and at the same time biggest controversy. Together with Mad Mike and Gerald Mitchell, 'DJ Rolando' Rocha had recorded the track 'Jaguar'. Its ingenious chord progressions made the track a world-wide club hit, quickly crossing over from underground dance floors to stylish Ibiza discos.
Clever managers at Sony/BMG Germany took note, and, when UR unsurprisingly declined to license the track, decided to have it covered by studio musicians note by note. While to be considered legal by German law, the cover version outraged the group's fans and supporters as a symbol for the commercial exploitation UR have been opposing for so long. Amidst those protests, Sony/BMG eventually withdrew the release from the market and issued a letter of apology to UR - a small victory for the underground.
Transition
When UR's original headquarters had to make way for the new Red Wings Hockey Stadium at the beginning of the new millennium, the UR collective moved into a new building at 3000 E. Grand Blvd., along with related distribution company Submerge. UR once again entered a new phase with the '3000' building, designed and intended as communal hub for techno culture.
New artists once again joined the resistance's ranks, such as legendary Amsterdam techno producer Orlando Voorn, who lived in Detroit between 2003 and 2007, and numerous other artists, such as Santiago 'S2' Salazar and the anonymous Aquanauts. Mad Mike further returned to his live music roots, assembling an all-star band around his Galaxy 2 Galaxy project, which he has been taking on tour to much acclaim.
Besides the most recent UR album, 'Electronic Warfare 2.0', which includes the programmatic hit 'Kill My Radio Station', two compilations give an insight into the activities of Detroit's greatest producer collective over the past decade: 'Interstellar Fugitives' and its follow-up 'Interstellar Fugitives - Destruction of Order'. Besides these two exhaustive compilations, new UR releases might have become fewer and further between, but as long as they reach us via obscure channels from time to time, we can be certain that somewhere in Detroit the resistance is busy at work, plotting war on the programmers, and electrifying the city with sci-fi thoughts and hi-tech dreams.
Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again
Italy cancels Haiti's debt
The Italian government will cancel the debt of 40 million owed to Italy announced Foreign Minister Franco Frattini in Rome today.
"We are ready from now to cancel Haiti's debt to Italy," Frattini said on his arrival at Rome's Ciampino airport after returning from a mission in Africa.
The cancellation, he said, may represent a "first step for the beginning of reconstruction" of the Caribbean island devastated by the earthquake that has claimed tens of thousands dead.
Italy has already announced a shipment of five million euros to aid necessities.
Now for other countries to follow...?
US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs'
After 40 years of defeat and failure, America's "war on drugs" is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America's longest "war" may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.
The "war", declared unilaterally throughout the world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as its strategists start discarding plans that have proved futile over four decades: they are preparing to withdraw their agents from narcotics battlefields from Colombia to Afghanistan and beginning to coach them in the art of trumpeting victory and melting away into anonymous defeat. Not surprisingly, the new strategy is being gingerly aired in the media of the US establishment, from The Wall Street Journal to the Miami Herald.
Prospects in the new decade are thus opening up for vast amounts of useless government expenditure being reassigned to the treatment of addicts instead of their capture and imprisonment. And, no less important, the ever-expanding balloon of corruption that the "war" has brought to heads of government, armies and police forces wherever it has been waged may slowly start to deflate.
Prepare to shed a tear over the loss of revenue that eventual decriminalisation of narcotics could bring to the traffickers, large and small, and to the contractors who have been making good money building and running the new prisons that help to bankrupt governments – in the US in particular, where drug offenders – principally small retailers and seldom the rich and important wholesalers – have helped to push the prison population to 1,600,000; their imprisonment is already straining federal and state budgets. In Mississippi, where drug offenders once had to serve 85 per cent of their sentences, they are now being required to serve less than a quarter. California has been ordered to release 40,000 inmates because its prisons are hugely overcrowded.
At the same time, some in the US are confused and fear that the new commission proposed by Congressman Eliot Engel, a man with a record of hostility to the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, may prove to be a broken reed. As he brought in his bill he added timidly: "Let me be absolutely clear that this bill has not been introduced to support the legalisation of illegal drugs. That is not something that I would like to see."
Part of the reason for the slow US retreat from the "war" is that the strategy of fighting it in foreign lands and not at home has proved valueless. Along the already sensitive frontier with Mexico the effect of US attempts to enforce a hard line by blasting drug dealers away has been bloody. Anxious to keep in check the flood of illegal immigrants into territory that once belonged to Mexico, Washington is building a wall and fence comparable to that which once cut through Berlin and that which is today causing havoc between Israelis and Palestinians.
In the areas of Mexico closest to the US frontier the toll of deaths in drug-related violence exceeded 7,000 people in 2009 (1,000 of them dying in January and February). This takes the death toll over three years to above 16,000, figures far in excess of US fatalities in Afghanistan. The bloodshed has continued despite – or perhaps because of – the intense US pressure on President Felipe Calderon to station a large part of the Mexican army in the region. It is deploying 49,000 men on its own soil in the campaign against drugs, a larger force than the 46,000 Britain sent to take part in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. But still the blood flows.
As in Colombia, where a multibillion-dollar US subsidy maintains that country's armed forces, there are well-founded suspicions that military operations are often rendered futile because the miserably paid local commanders and individual soldiers are easily bought off by drug dealers.
The quiet expiry of the "war" has dawned slowly on a world focused on the US's more palpable conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last month, the US House of Representatives gave unanimous approval to a bill creating an independent commission to reconsider domestic and international drug policies and suggest better ones. Congressman Engel, a Democrat from the Bronx and the sponsor of the bill, declared: "Billions upon billions of US taxpayer dollars have been spent over the years to combat the drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean. In spite of our efforts, the positive results are few and far between."
As far back as last May, Gil Kerlikowske, the former police chief of Seattle who was named head of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy and thus boss of the campaign, announced he would not be using the term "war on drugs" any more. A few weeks earlier, former Latin American presidents of the centre and right – Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia – had told the new US President that the "war" had failed and appealed for greater emphasis on cutting drug consumption and the decriminalisation of cannabis.
For the lives and sanity of millions, the seeing of the light is decidedly late. The conditions of the 1920s, when the US Congress outlawed alcohol and allowed Al Capone and his kin to make massive fortunes, have been re-created up and down Latin America.
Mexico's President has not been afraid to point out to Washington that official corruption is at the root of drug trafficking in the US just as it is in Mexico. "I say we should investigate on both sides. I'm cleaning my house and I hope that on the other side as well the house is being cleaned," he said pointedly last April before President Obama came visiting.
Furthermore, President Calderon says that lax gun control laws in the US caused an influx of firearms into Mexico. He has declared that 90 per cent of the 30,000 weapons that government forces seized from drug dealers in Mexico came from north of the border. For their part, the Latin Americans, under a new generation of more self-confident leaders, are tired of being hectored about their failings by the US, the world's principal source of cannabis whose agents continue the drug dealing they indulged in during the Iran-Contra affair of the Reagan years.
Evidence points to aircraft – familiarly known as "torture taxis" – used by the CIA to move captives seized in its kidnapping or "extraordinary rendition" operations through Gatwick and other airports in the EU being simultaneously used for drug distribution in the Western hemisphere. A Gulfstream II jet aircraft N9875A identified by the British Government and the European Parliament as being involved in this traffic crashed in Mexico in September 2008 while en route from Colombia to the US with a load of more than three tons of cocaine.
In 2004, another torture taxi crashed in a field in Nicaragua with a ton of cocaine aboard. It had been identified by Britain and the European Parliament's temporary committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners as a frequent visitor in 2004 and 2005 to British, Cypriot, Czech, German, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish and other European cities with its cargo of captives for secret imprisonment and torture in Iraq, Jordan and Azerbaijan.
Given the circumstances, it is unremarkable that US strictures are being politely ignored. President Evo Morales of Bolivia – criticised by the US for defending Bolivians' practice of chewing coca leaves to assuage hunger and altitude sickness – wants to allow every Bolivian family around the city of Cochabamba to cultivate coca bushes for their own use. He also wants to export coca leaves to his country's neighbours. Mr Morales's authority, recently reinforced by winning a second presidential term in fair elections and by a strengthening of Bolivia's economy, has no need to worry about US criticism.
Venezuela and Bolivia have expelled US narcotics officers from their territory. At the end of last month, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador ended Washington's lease of a large air base on the Pacific from where US aircraft were engaged in the struggle against the region's increasingly powerful left.
This year should be the year that common sense vanquishes the mailed fist in an unwinnable war against an invisible enemy.
How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon by Johann Hari
Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life.* But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.
Continue reading
Police unleash pepper gas on protesters in Arizona
More than 10,000 demonstrators came out on January 16 to protest against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his repression of unauthorized immigrants. In the latest and largest in a series of protests against Sheriff Joe, demonstrators marched to MCSO's "tent city", an urban concentration camp where inmates, many arrested on immigration charges, are held 24-7 in the open air.
While marchers focused on Arpaio's 287g arrangement with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and his high-profile immigration raids, other participants questioned the focus on immigration alone, given the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's role in forclosure evictions, and also that the Phoenix Police Department turned over more unauthorized migrants to ICE in fiscal year 2009 than did Arpaio's sheriff's department.
Toward the end of the day, police attacked marchers, indiscriminately deploying pepper gas in an area that included a number of young children and families. In addition to street medics, EMTs were called to provide emergency care to at least three individuals, including an infant and young child. Five individuals were singled out for arrest and are being charged with aggravated assault of a police officer. In a news story on the march, the Arizona Republic repeated police statements that demonstrators attacked a police horse with metal poles, despite such allegations contradicting numerous eye-witness accounts, including the following post to Arizona Indymedia:
Toward the end of the day, police attacked marchers, indiscriminately deploying pepper gas in an area that included a number of young children and families. In addition to street medics, EMTs were called to provide emergency care to at least three individuals, including an infant and young child. Five individuals were singled out for arrest and are being charged with aggravated assault of a police officer. In a news story on the march, the Arizona Republic repeated police statements that demonstrators attacked a police horse with metal poles, despite such allegations contradicting numerous eye-witness accounts, including the following post to Arizona Indymedia:
"Unprovoked, a female officer on horseback (who later covered her name on her uniform) charged her horse headlong into the march, colliding with several people and in the process almost running over at least one child in a stroller. After attacking families and protesters, she then whipped out her pepper spray and let loose on the whole crowd, who fled the noxious spew. In the process, children were blasted with pepper spray. After that, other Phoenix PD officers stormed the crowd, violently attacking marchers, dragging several to the ground and further deploying their chemical weapons from all directions in an attempt to justify their their aggression by nabbing a few people. Dozens were so affected that they were soaked in chemicals, having to strip off clothes to stop the burning."
We couldn't agree with Sal Reza more when he says, "There was provocation by some groups who came here for their own purpose to disrupt a peaceful march." We know he isn't talking about us, because he invited members of the Diné, O'odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc on stage to speak at the rally at Falcon Park.
So, who is the outside faction Sal's talking about? In our opinion it must be the Phoenix Police. Unprovoked, a female officer on horseback (who later covered her name on her uniform) charged her horse headlong into the march, colliding with several people and in the process almost running over at least one child in a stroller. After attacking families and protesters, she then whipped out her pepper spray and let loose on the whole crowd, who fled the noxious spew. In the process, children were blasted with pepper spray.
So, who is the outside faction Sal's talking about? In our opinion it must be the Phoenix Police. Unprovoked, a female officer on horseback (who later covered her name on her uniform) charged her horse headlong into the march, colliding with several people and in the process almost running over at least one child in a stroller. After attacking families and protesters, she then whipped out her pepper spray and let loose on the whole crowd, who fled the noxious spew. In the process, children were blasted with pepper spray.
After that, other Phoenix PD officers stormed the crowd, violently attacking marchers, dragging several to the ground and further deploying their chemical weapons from all directions in an attempt to justify their aggression by nabbing a few people. Dozens were so affected that they were soaked in chemicals, having to strip off clothes to stop the burning. Street medics (not Phoenix Fire Department) and other protesters came to each others' aid. At the end of the melee, out of the more than a hundred that marched together, four of our comrades were in chains and countless others stood bleeding, bruised and momentarily stunned.
Still, shaking it off, we rallied, facing down the cops, until eventually they withdrew. We celebrated and took turns speaking out about what it's like to be under attack by a system that values property and power over people.
Indeed, during the entire march the Phoenix police had been provoking marchers. Riding bikes and golf carts into people. Pushing and shoving. For what? To keep one northbound lane open? Rather than assaulting people expressing their legitimate desires to see an end to oppression, why not shut down the street? Cops do traffic control all the time. What's wrong with PPD? Why, for instance, is it somehow possible for Tempe PD to shut down Tempe streets tomorrow for the corporate schlock that is "PF Chang's Rock n' Roll Marathon," but not for PPD to close off a few streets so that people can assemble without threat of attack? Truly a backwards system indeed!
The police have so far put forward several different explanations for what happened, all of which contradict each other. On one channel they say that they were breaking up a fight. On another they say that people were throwing bottles. And on and on. What'll it be in five minutes, we wonder? The contradictory stories ought to be your first clue that what they're claiming happened didn't in fact happen. No surprise that the media swallowed it. But if we know they're lying, we have to wonder why anyone else would defend their actions?
Did people fight back against the police assault. We don't know because our eyes were full of pepper spray, but we wouldn't begrudge them if they did. To be charged into by a twelve hundred pound horse, while attacked by thugs using chemical weapons necessarily evokes the instinct to fight back, especially when your enemy is so vile as to assault children. Police demand the impossible from people. They expect you to allow them to attack you while at the same time demanding that you suppress you gut, human tendency to defend yourself. There is nothing "peaceful" in that relationship. That sort of power relation is one that condemns those who resist while exonerating the violence of those from above. It reflects the current distribution of power -- a distribution we want to change drastically. This is as unnatural as fighting power without taking action. Movements, like people, have a right to self-defense. For us, that has to be in the form of direct action and civil disobedience against the system. It must be made not to work unless our demands are met. No more mediation through shady politicians. No more appealing to power through moral arguments. We can take our futures into our own hands, directly.
Still, we're not surprised that the police attacked. While it seems the leaders of the movement are eager to make excuses for police who attack children, we know that what we saw today is but a glimpse of what the cops do everyday. We see it with our own eyes. They are the outside, alien force that first and foremost defends white supremacy and capitalism. How can someone say they are organizing a "peaceful march" when they work with such sadists? Naturally they were going to attack the march eventually, especially considering the militaristic fashion in which they deployed. Phoenix PD deports more migrants than Sheriff Joe and yet we are told that we ought to give them a pass so that we can focus on that clown Arpaio? We saw today just how foolish that strategy is.
In our eyes, this is but a symptom of the failure of the strategy being pursued by the movement as it is. White supremacy in Arizona goes far beyond one ancient sheriff in one county. Ballot measures attacking people of color will almost certainly pass in Arizona yet again this year with 70 or 80 percent margins. Is this Sheriff Joe's fault? Obviously not. But marches against Joe won't stop that.
We need a broader movement with a critique beyond Joe so that we can challenge the whole problem -- one that stretches from Tohono O'odham land down south to the land of the Diné up north. And everywhere in between. And we need to break from this mode of organizing that can only deliver more oppression and more violence down on our heads. No more politicians. No more working with cops. Look what it brings.
This is why we supported the call for the Diné, O'odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc. For someone to say now when it is inconvenient that we are an outside force is to replicate the marginalization that for centuries has dominated the discourse around land and movement in this region. But PCWC's native comrades didn't come from outside. They were always here. And we stand with them.
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Some cannabis with your main course?
A cannabis laced icecream stand during the "Million Marijuana March", Prague 2009
As of New Year’s Day 2010, Czechs in possession of small quantities of narcotics need no longer fret about trouble with the law. That comes as no surprise in a country in which marijuana is, for many, part of everyday life, remarks Polish journalist Mariusz Szczygiel.
I was surprised, 10 years ago, when I chanced upon a bottle of vodka containing marijuana in the fanciest delicatessen in Prague: there were pot seeds floating in the oily, straw-hued 40% proof spirit. I was surprised to find a recipe book entitled “We Cook With Cannabis” on sale in the bookshop next door. I was surprised to read that, faced with the dilemma “Eat it or smoke it?”, the author’s verdict was “eat it”. Because when inhaled, the effects kick in right away, or within five minutes, but only last for two hours; whereas when ingested in any dish you like, it takes half an hour, or even an hour and a half, for the effects to kick in, but the high lasts for eight whole hours.
I was surprised when the bookseller apprised me that the practice of cooking with cannabis was still quite rudimentary in the Czech Republic. People use it any which way, blending arbitrary quantities thereof with all manner of ingredients, though as a matter of fact it calls for special dishes that are specially conceived for marijuana mixing – which is why the recipe book is indispensable. I was surprised when, at the end of a trial that dragged on for years, the Czech court in Olomouc acquitted the publishers and authorised the sale of the book. I was surprised to hear that the first calls to legalise cannabis in Czechoslovakia were made in a student newspaper called Zverdlo only a few months after the collapse of communism.
Vaclav Havel likes dope too
I was surprised to hear that in 2000 president Havel pardoned a 19-year-old who had proffered some of his weed to two younger boys, for which he had been dealt a suspended four-year sentence. “I wouldn’t have been able to look at myself in the mirror,” declared the president, who was a pot smoker himself. I was surprised when the medical school at Charles University in Prague created an “Addictology” department at its psychiatric hospital, which promptly undertook scientific studies of marijuana consumption. I was surprised to learn that the Czechs lead Europe in cannabis consumption, well ahead of the Dutch. In 2004 one out of ten Europeans, and one out of five Czechs, smoked marijuana. I was surprised to learn that, now that the authorities turn a blind eye to cannabis consumption, the prevalence of hard drugs has plummeted in the Czech Republic. I was surprised that the same goes for beer: the more beer Czechs drink, the less hard liquor they imbibe. I was surprised that a drug that is formally prohibited, as is the case with marijuana, is the subject of two official magazines in the Czech Republic, Konoptikum and Soft Secrets.
I was surprised that the first information about growing marijuana at home under artificial light appeared in the early 1990s in the very serious weekly Reflex: in the form of a guide for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, which can be treated using cannabis. I was surprised that since 2004 the same magazine holds an annual contest, the Reflex Cannabis Cup, for the best photographs of home-grown pot plants, replete with four different prize categories: “Indoor”, “Outdoor”, “Beauty” and “Ikebana”. I was surprised that a thousand pictures are entered every year and that the entrants, including the prize-winners, remain anonymous. The identities of only half the jury members are disclosed to the public: there are celebrities on the jury who don’t know much about pot, and unknowns who know absolutely everything about home-growing.
Czechs have a beautiful culture
I was surprised that the first selection of photographs is personally undertaken by the magazine’s editor-in-chief (who, by the way, after having seen Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn on Czech television, said to me in an e-mail, “The Czechs have a beautiful culture, but the Poles a beautiful soul.”) I was surprised that the magazine prints a special warning that the use of this drug before the age of 16 is harmful, that it can lead to psychosis in adolescents, that it can easily be overdosed in prepared dishes, that smoking it is dangerous and, like any inhaled organic matter, carcinogenic. I was surprised that the editors advise readers “DON’T SMOKE!” and recommend use of a marijuana inhaler, which is supposed to protect against the very harmful effects of tarry substances. When I learned that, as of 1 January, growing cannabis for personal use (up to five plants) and possession of small amounts (e.g. up to 15 grams of cannabis) are no longer penalised under Czech law, I was not surprised.
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