Safe Injecting Room Hysteria Hits Victoria
(...again!)
Dobet Gnahoré • Na Drê ℗ 2014
2 hours ago
Monday 23 May 2011
Firing Line - The Hippies: William F. Buckley w/ Jack Kerouac, Ed Sanders & Lewis Yablonsky
Taped on Sept 3, 1968
BONUS
Ginsberg on 'Firing Line' after the jump
(The Zone) Getting it right - Nick Crofts says criminalising the use of certain drugs is doing more harm than good and a new approach to regulation is needed
It is tempting to feel sympathy for the people we elect to make enlightened laws. We demand they be morally and intellectually unimpeachable, yet we simultaneously demand they embrace our ''collective wisdom'', virtually ensuring the triumph of populism over courage.
We shackle our political leaders with the views revealed weekly by polling organisations. Opinion polls tell us what is popular, not what might be right or good.
Legislators know this, and even as they espouse conviction politics, they know they are going to buckle as the ballot looms. This perennial tension, and the knowledge they will mostly opt for pragmatism over principle, must be dispiriting for those seeking to make the world a better place through parliamentary politics.
The cost of this shortcoming of our democratic system is high and not limited to wasting scarce financial and other resources. In the case of drugs policy, it is costing lives. The politicians know it. And drug policy experts know the politicians know it. It is said that those at the highest levels of politics understand the so-called war on drugs has failed, that prohibition does not achieve its stated aims and that we ought to be experimenting with better regulation. But political leadership has been lacking, so the people who should be commissioning the experiments refuse even to publicly acknowledge the need for change.
Professor Nick Crofts of The Nossal Institute for Global Health and Melbourne University's Centre for International Mental Health is one of the world's leaders in drug policy. He is here in The Zone to help people understand why prohibition does not work, and how we might minimise harm caused by drug use. In so doing he is not here to encourage the use of illicit drugs. He is driven by harm minimisation - and human rights.
When Jeff Kennett was premier and Victoria was one of the world's heroin capitals, he commissioned Crofts to examine the relationship between various ethnic groups and the heroin market. The real aim was to look at the link between the Vietnamese community and the trade in drugs. The report was handed to the new government that replaced Kennett, and was buried, Crofts says.
''One part of the research was that we interviewed something like 50 senior police, senior magistrates, senior politicians, senior public servants. Every one of them, unanimously, said, 'You are absolutely right and we totally agree with you, we need to move away from prohibition, we need another social policy, and you will never catch me saying that in public'.'' Another world leader on drug policy reform is former Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso. In a recent opinion article in The Age, he said: ''Prohibition has failed and we must redirect our efforts to the harm caused by drugs, and to reducing consumption. The war on drugs is a lost war, and 2011 is the time to move away from a punitive approach in order to pursue a new set of policies based on public health, human rights and commonsense.''
Drugs, legal and illicit, are widely used and effectively regulated in many cases. Crofts and many researchers the world over advocate moving the regulation of currently illicit drugs from the criminal justice system to the health system.
Portugal has just done this, and here in Australia we have moved some of the way by introducing a system where people can be diverted from the justice system into the health system.
''The longer I look at drugs, the more I see people. Show me somebody who has problematic drug use and I'll show you somebody with underlying problems in their lives. That is not to say there is no place for regulation.
''We're extremely skilled at regulating a whole range of different substances, from the ones that are available off the shelf at the convenience store, through to ones that are purchasable only in certain locations by certain people, in which I would include alcohol, and then through to another form of regulation, a very common form of regulation, which is prescription.''
Croft's concern about prohibition is not only does it not work, it actually makes things worse.
''Where there is demand [for a substance], prohibition is an excellent way of creating a blackmarket and all the things that go along with it, including corruption, lack of quality control, high prices. It is not a successful public policy mechanism in decreasing harm to individuals or society. In fact, if you look at where the heroin epidemic came from in the United States, it traces back to alcohol prohibition.
''As in many of these things, the irony is that the attempt at a social policy to decrease harm has actually instigated the social policy that increased harm.''
One of the greatest harms associated with failed, misguided drug policies is the relationship between injecting drugs and the AIDS epidemic. It is something Crofts has encountered through his work all over the world. ''Criminalising opium has led to the rise of heroin. The rise in heroin has led to a rise in injecting. The rise of injecting has led to a rise in HIV. And that's a big part of my work, dealing with epidemics of HIV driven by injecting drug use, driven by criminalisation of these drugs, driven by foreign policy imperatives from, particularly, the United States.''
Crofts believes injecting drug users are among the most marginalised people in the world. The full transcript of our interview is available at theage.com.au/opinion/the-zone. In it, Crofts sets out his views in great detail.
''My issue is about people. I am a public health practitioner with an aspiration to understand human rights. And if a person's drug use is causing harm to themselves and/or to other people, then, yes, there's a problem there.
''And it behoves us to offer what assistance we can to those people. But if an individual chooses to use a drug, fully knowledgeable and in control of their faculties and all those things, I actually don't think it's our place to interfere with that … I'm not pushing, advocating, condoning anything in relation to drugs. I'm saying what we're currently doing with some drugs is creating an enormous amount of harm that is not associated with the drugs themselves, but is associated with the way we try to regulate them.''
Alcohol is a far greater danger to young people than ecstasy, evidence suggests. The people who make laws, though, like alcohol - and the taxes they place on its consumption.
Evidently, a key question is what we ought to be doing with drug policy. Crofts does not have a pat answer, because what's needed is data and experimentation.
When he was prime minister, John Howard killed a heroin prescription trial of great promise that had been scoped by Australian National University's Gabriele Bammer. After two attempts, it had cleared ministerial hurdles. But the prime minister killed it on live radio when Sydney entertainer John Laws scorned the project. Perhaps a good place to move next would be for our politicians to have the courage and decency to do the trial.
''My heart goes out to the people who have lost kids to heroin. When the heroin flood was going on in the late '90s, there was a group that used to meet up at the Brosnan Centre, parents who lost kids to heroin. I met with them and talked with them and listened to their stories …
''My compassion is 100 per cent for people in that circumstance. I also know that if heroin had been available, in a regulated environment, the chances are the majority of those kids would not have died.''
It is to these families and those who will join them if change does not come that we owe the most care and sympathy, not politicians who fail to grasp the difference between being right and being popular.
Rebellion and Authority - An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (1970)
Economic reasoning applied to an analysis of rebellion and authority yields some new conclusions about both. Fundamentally, the struggle for popular support is not exclusively or primarily a "political" contest as these terms are usually understood. People act rationally, calculate costs and benefits, and choose sides accordingly. Successful rebels act on this assumption, applying discriminate force, coercing the populace into cooperation or compliance, and "proving" authority to be not merely unjust, but a certain loser. Rebellion is a system and an organizational technique. It can be countered, but not with rhetoric aimed at winning hearts and minds, and not necessarily with economic pump-priming. What is needed is organizational techniques to match the rebel drive -- effective intelligence coupled with a discriminating use of force capable of obtaining compliance from the population. One major caveat: authorities are not invariably worthy of support from within or without, and careful calculation of ultimate interests should guide U.S. policy on this point.
@'RAND'
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@'RAND'
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The Musalman - Preservation of a Dream
The 'Musalman' is probably the last handwritten newspaper in the world. It has been published and read every day in South India's Chennai since 1927 in almost the same form. In the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque in Chennai, a team of six die hard workers still put out this hand-penned paper. Four of them are katibs -- writers dedicated to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy. It's tough for the die-hard artists of Urdu calligraphy.
Low: Tiny Desk Concert
Download (Audio)
It's been fascinating to watch the evolution of the Duluth, Minn., band Low in the 17 years since the release of its wonderful debut album, I Could Live in Hope. Renowned for being one of the slowest and quietest acts in indie-rock, Low has nevertheless found ways to experiment with new ways to sound alternately (and even simultaneously) swoony and unnerving.
Still, in spite of its members' detours into more jagged terrain — 2007's prickly Drums and Guns, singer Alan Sparhawk's rock 'n' roll side project Retribution Gospel Choir — Low returns to sweet-voiced gentility on its recent C'mon. That album's opening track, "Try to Sleep," opens this short set at the NPR Music offices, and damned if it isn't one of the best songs of the group's career; a perfect mixture of sunny charm and lyrical portent. ("Don't look at the camera," Sparhawk sings with wife and drummer Mimi Parker, adding, "Try to sleep.")
With just Sparhawk, Parker and an acoustic guitar at its disposal — many bassists have come and gone over the years, and none made this trip — Low still kept its core ingredients intact at the Tiny Desk. Clearly awake earlier than usual for an 11 a.m. set time, the pair nevertheless blended the way they always do, with Parker's pristine voice hovering over Sparhawk's froggy croon. They seem worn and a little weary throughout these three songs from C'mon, but the beauty persists
Stephen Thompson @'npr'
It's been fascinating to watch the evolution of the Duluth, Minn., band Low in the 17 years since the release of its wonderful debut album, I Could Live in Hope. Renowned for being one of the slowest and quietest acts in indie-rock, Low has nevertheless found ways to experiment with new ways to sound alternately (and even simultaneously) swoony and unnerving.
Still, in spite of its members' detours into more jagged terrain — 2007's prickly Drums and Guns, singer Alan Sparhawk's rock 'n' roll side project Retribution Gospel Choir — Low returns to sweet-voiced gentility on its recent C'mon. That album's opening track, "Try to Sleep," opens this short set at the NPR Music offices, and damned if it isn't one of the best songs of the group's career; a perfect mixture of sunny charm and lyrical portent. ("Don't look at the camera," Sparhawk sings with wife and drummer Mimi Parker, adding, "Try to sleep.")
With just Sparhawk, Parker and an acoustic guitar at its disposal — many bassists have come and gone over the years, and none made this trip — Low still kept its core ingredients intact at the Tiny Desk. Clearly awake earlier than usual for an 11 a.m. set time, the pair nevertheless blended the way they always do, with Parker's pristine voice hovering over Sparhawk's froggy croon. They seem worn and a little weary throughout these three songs from C'mon, but the beauty persists
Stephen Thompson @'npr'
William Burroughs' colour walks
(From “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” William S. Burroughs in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1985)
“For example, I was taking a color walk around Paris the other day…doing something I picked up from your pictures in which the colors shoot out all through the canvas like they do in the street. I was walking town the boulevard when I suddenly felt this cool wind on a warm day and when I looked out all through the canvas like they do in the street. I was walking down the boulevard when I looked out I was seeing all the blues in the street in front of me, blue on a foulard…blue on a young workman’s ass…his blue jeans…a girl’s blue sweater…blue neon…the sky…all the blues. When I looked again I saw nothing but all the reds of traffic lights…car lights…a café sign…a man’s nose. Your paintings make me see the streets of Paris in a different way. And then there are all the deserts and the Mayan masks and the fantastic aerial architecture of your bridges and catwalks and Ferris wheels.”
(Burroughs, from an interview with Brion Gysin in 1960)
@'Word Object'
The Elephant in the Green Room
“Let’s make a deal,” Ailes told Beck flatly.
During a 45-minute conversation, the two men agreed on the terms: Beck would give up his daily 5 p.m. program and appear in occasional network “specials”—but even that didn’t solve their problem. Tensions flared over how many specials he would appear in. Fox wanted six, Beck’s advisers wanted four. At another meeting, Beck choked up; he and Ailes had always had a bond. And when Ailes thought Beck’s advisers were jerking him around, he threatened to blow up the talks. “I’m just going to fire him and issue a press release,” he later snapped to a Fox executive.
On April 6, Fox and Beck announced he would be leaving the network. Both were careful to squelch the anonymous backbiting that had been going on for weeks in the press. Ailes knew that a public meltdown would alienate Beck’s legions of fans who had become loyal Fox viewers. Most of all, he didn’t want Beck’s departure to be seen as a victory for the liberal media; that would ruin the most important story line of all...
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The stupidity of our copyright laws is finally laid bare
Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys' representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron's first party conference as leader. Given that, it's only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on.
Cameron's worship of Google did, however, have one tangible result. Mortified by the Google Guys' assertion that the UK's intellectual property regime would have made it impossible to launch their company in the UK, he decided to commission an inquiry into said regime under the chairmanship of Professor Ian Hargreaves. This was a mite puzzling, because the previous government had in 2005 commissioned a similar inquiry under the former FT editor Andrew Gowers. His report had concluded that the UK's intellectual property was fundamentally sound but made 54 specific recommendations about possible improvements. Most interestingly, though, Gowers also concluded that copyright on music recordings should not be extended from its current limit of 50 years after the date of recording, a finding that reawakened Cliff Richard's fears that his heirs and descendants would be reduced to penury. For the copyright industries, therefore, Gowers had clearly reached the wrong conclusion, a fact that their representatives lost no opportunity of pressing upon Lord Mandelson on various luxury yachts moored off the coast of Greece.
Some of us feared, therefore, that Hargreaves would be pressured into being more sensitive to the needs of hard-pressed pop stars and their agents. His report, published this week, suggests that we seriously underestimated him. What he has produced is a tough, intelligent and radical analysis of our current IP regime. "Could it be true," he asks, "that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators' rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth? The short answer is: yes."
Hallelujah! At last we are getting somewhere. The notion that laws framed in an era when copying was difficult, imperfect and expensive could work in an era when copying was effortless, perfect and cheap was a proposition that only imbeciles and industry lobbyists could entertain. But up to now, our politicians subscribed to it.
Hargreaves usefully explains why this ludicrous state of affairs has persisted for so long. "Lobbying," he writes, "is a feature of all political systems and as a way of informing and organising debate it brings many benefits. In the case of IP policy and specifically copyright policy, however, there is no doubt that the persuasive powers of celebrities and important UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes. Further distortion arises from the fact (not unique to this sector) that there is a striking asymmetry of interest between rights holders, for whom IP issues are of paramount importance, and consumers for whom they have been of passing interest only until the emergence of the internet as a focus for competing technological, economic, business and cultural concerns."
It's a measure of the ludicrousness of our intellectual property regime that some of the most mundane, commonsensical recommendations in the Hargreaves report read like great leaps forward. Take, for example, for example, the idea that henceforth none of us – or at any rate, none of us who use an iPod – should be criminals. Eh? Well, under current arrangements, if you copy music from a legally purchased CD and transfer it to your iPod, then you are, technically, breaking the law.
Then there's Hargreaves's proposal that, in future, British lawmaking on intellectual property should be "evidence-based". As opposed to what, asks the legal scholar James Boyle: "Astrology-based?" But our lawmaking in this area has been so weird that the idea that we might try rationality for a change seems genuinely radical.
Hargreaves is also very good on the thorny problem of "orphan" works – works still technically in copyright but for which no rights-holder can be traced. He wants the government to legislate to enable the licensing of these works – a commonsensical idea but one that in the insane world of IP lawyers sounds like revolutionary talk.
No doubt there will be lots of expert cavilling about this report. But overall it's a refreshingly intelligent and welcome document. I've a good mind to start a Facebook page for it – and invite Ed Miliband to click on "Like".
John Naughton @'The Guardian'
Cameron's worship of Google did, however, have one tangible result. Mortified by the Google Guys' assertion that the UK's intellectual property regime would have made it impossible to launch their company in the UK, he decided to commission an inquiry into said regime under the chairmanship of Professor Ian Hargreaves. This was a mite puzzling, because the previous government had in 2005 commissioned a similar inquiry under the former FT editor Andrew Gowers. His report had concluded that the UK's intellectual property was fundamentally sound but made 54 specific recommendations about possible improvements. Most interestingly, though, Gowers also concluded that copyright on music recordings should not be extended from its current limit of 50 years after the date of recording, a finding that reawakened Cliff Richard's fears that his heirs and descendants would be reduced to penury. For the copyright industries, therefore, Gowers had clearly reached the wrong conclusion, a fact that their representatives lost no opportunity of pressing upon Lord Mandelson on various luxury yachts moored off the coast of Greece.
Some of us feared, therefore, that Hargreaves would be pressured into being more sensitive to the needs of hard-pressed pop stars and their agents. His report, published this week, suggests that we seriously underestimated him. What he has produced is a tough, intelligent and radical analysis of our current IP regime. "Could it be true," he asks, "that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators' rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth? The short answer is: yes."
Hallelujah! At last we are getting somewhere. The notion that laws framed in an era when copying was difficult, imperfect and expensive could work in an era when copying was effortless, perfect and cheap was a proposition that only imbeciles and industry lobbyists could entertain. But up to now, our politicians subscribed to it.
Hargreaves usefully explains why this ludicrous state of affairs has persisted for so long. "Lobbying," he writes, "is a feature of all political systems and as a way of informing and organising debate it brings many benefits. In the case of IP policy and specifically copyright policy, however, there is no doubt that the persuasive powers of celebrities and important UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes. Further distortion arises from the fact (not unique to this sector) that there is a striking asymmetry of interest between rights holders, for whom IP issues are of paramount importance, and consumers for whom they have been of passing interest only until the emergence of the internet as a focus for competing technological, economic, business and cultural concerns."
It's a measure of the ludicrousness of our intellectual property regime that some of the most mundane, commonsensical recommendations in the Hargreaves report read like great leaps forward. Take, for example, for example, the idea that henceforth none of us – or at any rate, none of us who use an iPod – should be criminals. Eh? Well, under current arrangements, if you copy music from a legally purchased CD and transfer it to your iPod, then you are, technically, breaking the law.
Then there's Hargreaves's proposal that, in future, British lawmaking on intellectual property should be "evidence-based". As opposed to what, asks the legal scholar James Boyle: "Astrology-based?" But our lawmaking in this area has been so weird that the idea that we might try rationality for a change seems genuinely radical.
Hargreaves is also very good on the thorny problem of "orphan" works – works still technically in copyright but for which no rights-holder can be traced. He wants the government to legislate to enable the licensing of these works – a commonsensical idea but one that in the insane world of IP lawyers sounds like revolutionary talk.
No doubt there will be lots of expert cavilling about this report. But overall it's a refreshingly intelligent and welcome document. I've a good mind to start a Facebook page for it – and invite Ed Miliband to click on "Like".
John Naughton @'The Guardian'
Sunday 22 May 2011
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense (1984)
1. Psycho Killer 2. Heaven 3. Thank You For Sending Me An Angel 4. Found A Job 5. Slippery People 6. Burning Down The House 7. Life During Wartime 8. Making Flippy Floppy 9. Swamp 10. What A Day That Was
11. Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place) 12. Once In A Lifetime 13. Genius Of Love 14. Girlfriend Is Better 15. Take Me To The River 16. Cross-Eyed And Painless
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