Friday 25 February 2011
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Who's right, The Catholics, The Shia Muslims, The Ancient Greeks or The Pagans?
Just a brief conundrum for the believer, mainly fueled by the fact that in recent debates we very often see a non-believer on one side having to debate against, say, a rabbi and a priest. What always pickles me a bit is that the believing side can unite to give their point that "there must be a god because..." yet they're both talking about different gods. So, even if they convince the audience that there is a god, only one of them can be praying to the right god, with the other being deluded and praying to a figment of his imagination. It seems quite arrogant to be confident that your view is correct when some one with an equally passionate unfounded, non-evidenced belief, held just as deeply as yours, is definitely wrong and deluded. The priest thinks the rabbi is going to hell and vice versa, there's no way around that.Quite often when I voice my view that there isn't a god, people respond by saying "so you think X million people worldwide who believe in a god are wrong". Well firstly, yes, but secondly, if the Muslims have got it right, then X millions Jews, Christians, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Sikhs, Taoists, Aboriginals, Shaminists and Jedis are wrong and the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Vikings and Romans were also wrong, and all of them praying to a god that doesn't exist, yet your god is the right one? To quote Dawkins "You're an atheist to every other god, I'm just taking it one god further".
Or to put it a little more bluntly, a follower of the Catholic faith can say that they know they are right as they have spoken to god and they have felt god etc and there's nothing that can be said to sway that. We call this the Bill O'Reilly response. Somehow this feeling is so strong that it is definitely more legitimate than the feelings of a Shia Muslim, who has also spoken to god and felt god so deeply that he's willing to strap himself to a bomb and blow himself and others up. If that man's delusions can be so deeply held that he's willing to go through that, can you really be sure your god isn't the delusion, or maybe that they're all delusions?
Sunday 20 February 2011
Why Alcohol Is Legal and Cannabis Still Isn't
Beings I'll be preaching to the converted here, I won't go into the historical details of the war on marijuana started in the 20s in the states, but I'll discuss peoples opinions on the matter at the moment.
The general public, for the most part, are rather indifferent to the cannabis situation as it doesn't affect their lives at all, or so they think. They get told it makes people go crazy, may have used cannabis or at least tried it at some point and found it made them feel a little strange, possibly paranoid and it seems logical to them that continued use could lead them to go bananas, just like the Daily Mail said. So, keeping the drug illegal seems to make sense as they have no emotional drive to legalise it and are slightly concerned that increased use would lead to higher incidents of schizophrenia and psychosis. Better to be safe than sorry. One point worth bringing up here is that the psychological debate only arose relatively recently, in comparison to the 70+ years since the drug was made illegal. The obvious question being "well, what reason did they give in the first place then?". Suffice to say, the reasons given were completely fictitious and the movement for prohibition was fueled by money and racism. This is already very well documented, so I won't go into it here. Most politicians will fall into the description above.
With regard to the psychosis/schizophrenia debate, a very simple point needs to be made: In the last 30years, cannabis use has increased dramatically, as has the strength and availability of the plant. Over the same period of time, incidences of psychotic illness have remained static. If there was a causal link between the two, then surely as cannabis use dramatically increases, we'd see an noticeable increase in incidences of psychotic illness. According to the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs report, 1 in 15,000 cannabis users could develop a psychotic illness (although already having being predisposed) triggered by cannabis use. This basically means that if the entire population smoked cannabis, then during a lifetime there would possibly be 4,000 more people in the UK suffering from a psychotic illness. Based on current usage, it implies that cannabis may trigger the onset of psychotic illness in less than 400 people in the UK in a lifetime or 5 people each year. And it is very important to note that we've had to use the terms "may", "possibly" and "could". We also need to bear in mind that we are talking about triggering these conditions in those already predisposed, so even if cannabis can trigger these conditions, when removed it is likely that something else will trigger the condition during a lifetime.
I have only chosen to address the alleged mental health issues of cannabis here because, quite frankly, it is the only anti-cannabis argument that holds the even the slightest weight. Effects on fertility are acute and short term, in that a person is only affected whilst cannabis is in their blood stream. Essentially it's as if sperm are stoned and they don't do their job properly. As far as cancer is concerned, cannabis is one of the few substances known to man that can cause a tumor to regress. All studies which compare non-smokers, tobacco + cannabis smokers and cannabis alone smokers, show that smokers of tobacco have 20x the chance of developing lung cancer than non-smokers. Smokers of only cannabis have a very slightly, but non statistically reliable, less chance of developing lung cancer. Studies where THC is injected into animal tumors have had a very positive effect on either reversing, halting or slowing the reproduction of cancerous cells. I'm not even going to address the point that cannabis users often smoke with tobacco because if you don't see the irony in that statement, you truly are a lost cause.
Now to alcohol. The public are generally aware of the risks involved with alcohol use. Not the risks that are unproven and still debated, but the very real, understood risk of harm caused by chemical addiction, sclerosis, heart & liver problems etc. 5,000 to 10,000 people die in this country each year directly due to alcohol consumption. That's not to mention the impact it has on casual and domestic violence, accidents, depression, suicide attempts etc.
So, to conclude, the known and very real deaths caused from the use of alcohol each year, by far outweigh the number of predisposed schizophrenics or psychotics whose condition could be triggered early by cannabis use even if EVERY MEMBER OF THE POPULATION SMOKED CANNABIS. Baring in mind, it hasn't been firmly proven that cannabis will trigger either condition - there just appears to be a casual, currently considered non-causal link. There is no comparison between 5,000 deaths and 5 incidences of an onset of psychotic illness. So we're left in a position where the advocate for cannabis prohibition needs to justify why the entire population above the age of 18 should be allowed to use alcohol but no one should be allowed to use cannabis, even though the former is much more dangerous on a case by case basis and also appeals to a wider audience. My basis for the statement on higher demand for alcohol is simply that everyone I know who doesn't smoke marijuana does so because they don't enjoy the feeling, not because of it's legal status. I can think of very few people I know that doen't drink, other than for religious reasons. Also, if you look at the use of cannabis in countries such as the Netherlands where it is declassified for personal use and widely available, the prevalence of use is dramatically lower than that of alcohol. This seems like a logical place to point out that alcohol use was already massively higher than cannabis use when the legalisation "debate" began. It's not as if we started prohibiting the use of certain drugs and suddenly there was a boom in usage of the remaining legal ones. More to the point, tobacco and alcohol were in wide use already, presumably also amongst politicians, so prohibiting them was a non-starter.
So how does the prohibitionist justify the current state of affairs? As far as I can tell it goes back to the same point - that they simply don't enjoy the use of cannabis. Cannabis users are in a minority of around 5-15% of the UK population, depending on where you get your stats from. I haven't looked up alcohol use but I'm going to assume it's somewhere in the 80-90% bracket of the adult population. I can't really work out how the internal thought process would go, possibly something like this:
"Cannabis is bad, make it illegal."
"What about alcohol?"
"um, I like alcohol, keep it legal."
"but it's really dangerous, people are going to die!"
"yeah, but I like it and it's my right to take it."
"but other people like cannabis, don't they have rights?"
"fuck 'em!"
This is why in every public statement from the government, when asked will you discuss or debate the legaslation surrounding cannabis use, usually given with a huge list of reasons for legalisation and comparisons drawn between alcohol use and cannabis use, they can't even respond with a structured point or answer questions directly. The answer is always the same. "Cannabis is a harmful drug and we have no intention of legalising it". No mention of why continued alcohol use is fine, nor any reference to solid evidence showing the harms of cannabis. Gordon Brown springs to mind with his ludicrous statement about "this lethal version of it [cannabis], skunk". From other politicians we sometimes get one of the most ironic statements of all time, which usually goes something like this "We already have enough of a problem with alcohol and tobacco, we don't want to legalise another harmful drug and add to the problem".
Bottom line is, we're left with a bunch of lawmakers who don't enjoy the effects of cannabis, yet know absolutely nothing about it and when given the chance completely discard any evidence, making the decision that the minority of the population who do enjoy the effects of cannabis should not be allowed to use it, because they don't happen to like it. That, my friends, is known as discrimination and would not be tolerated against any other minority.
alcohol information: http://www.avon.nhs.uk/alcohol/the_facts.htm
ACMD report: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-cannabis-report-2008?view=Binary
One example of a study on the link between cannabis use and cancer: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
*Incidently, this is the first link that comes up if you google "cannabis cancer study"
The general public, for the most part, are rather indifferent to the cannabis situation as it doesn't affect their lives at all, or so they think. They get told it makes people go crazy, may have used cannabis or at least tried it at some point and found it made them feel a little strange, possibly paranoid and it seems logical to them that continued use could lead them to go bananas, just like the Daily Mail said. So, keeping the drug illegal seems to make sense as they have no emotional drive to legalise it and are slightly concerned that increased use would lead to higher incidents of schizophrenia and psychosis. Better to be safe than sorry. One point worth bringing up here is that the psychological debate only arose relatively recently, in comparison to the 70+ years since the drug was made illegal. The obvious question being "well, what reason did they give in the first place then?". Suffice to say, the reasons given were completely fictitious and the movement for prohibition was fueled by money and racism. This is already very well documented, so I won't go into it here. Most politicians will fall into the description above.With regard to the psychosis/schizophrenia debate, a very simple point needs to be made: In the last 30years, cannabis use has increased dramatically, as has the strength and availability of the plant. Over the same period of time, incidences of psychotic illness have remained static. If there was a causal link between the two, then surely as cannabis use dramatically increases, we'd see an noticeable increase in incidences of psychotic illness. According to the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs report, 1 in 15,000 cannabis users could develop a psychotic illness (although already having being predisposed) triggered by cannabis use. This basically means that if the entire population smoked cannabis, then during a lifetime there would possibly be 4,000 more people in the UK suffering from a psychotic illness. Based on current usage, it implies that cannabis may trigger the onset of psychotic illness in less than 400 people in the UK in a lifetime or 5 people each year. And it is very important to note that we've had to use the terms "may", "possibly" and "could". We also need to bear in mind that we are talking about triggering these conditions in those already predisposed, so even if cannabis can trigger these conditions, when removed it is likely that something else will trigger the condition during a lifetime.
I have only chosen to address the alleged mental health issues of cannabis here because, quite frankly, it is the only anti-cannabis argument that holds the even the slightest weight. Effects on fertility are acute and short term, in that a person is only affected whilst cannabis is in their blood stream. Essentially it's as if sperm are stoned and they don't do their job properly. As far as cancer is concerned, cannabis is one of the few substances known to man that can cause a tumor to regress. All studies which compare non-smokers, tobacco + cannabis smokers and cannabis alone smokers, show that smokers of tobacco have 20x the chance of developing lung cancer than non-smokers. Smokers of only cannabis have a very slightly, but non statistically reliable, less chance of developing lung cancer. Studies where THC is injected into animal tumors have had a very positive effect on either reversing, halting or slowing the reproduction of cancerous cells. I'm not even going to address the point that cannabis users often smoke with tobacco because if you don't see the irony in that statement, you truly are a lost cause.
Now to alcohol. The public are generally aware of the risks involved with alcohol use. Not the risks that are unproven and still debated, but the very real, understood risk of harm caused by chemical addiction, sclerosis, heart & liver problems etc. 5,000 to 10,000 people die in this country each year directly due to alcohol consumption. That's not to mention the impact it has on casual and domestic violence, accidents, depression, suicide attempts etc.
So, to conclude, the known and very real deaths caused from the use of alcohol each year, by far outweigh the number of predisposed schizophrenics or psychotics whose condition could be triggered early by cannabis use even if EVERY MEMBER OF THE POPULATION SMOKED CANNABIS. Baring in mind, it hasn't been firmly proven that cannabis will trigger either condition - there just appears to be a casual, currently considered non-causal link. There is no comparison between 5,000 deaths and 5 incidences of an onset of psychotic illness. So we're left in a position where the advocate for cannabis prohibition needs to justify why the entire population above the age of 18 should be allowed to use alcohol but no one should be allowed to use cannabis, even though the former is much more dangerous on a case by case basis and also appeals to a wider audience. My basis for the statement on higher demand for alcohol is simply that everyone I know who doesn't smoke marijuana does so because they don't enjoy the feeling, not because of it's legal status. I can think of very few people I know that doen't drink, other than for religious reasons. Also, if you look at the use of cannabis in countries such as the Netherlands where it is declassified for personal use and widely available, the prevalence of use is dramatically lower than that of alcohol. This seems like a logical place to point out that alcohol use was already massively higher than cannabis use when the legalisation "debate" began. It's not as if we started prohibiting the use of certain drugs and suddenly there was a boom in usage of the remaining legal ones. More to the point, tobacco and alcohol were in wide use already, presumably also amongst politicians, so prohibiting them was a non-starter.
So how does the prohibitionist justify the current state of affairs? As far as I can tell it goes back to the same point - that they simply don't enjoy the use of cannabis. Cannabis users are in a minority of around 5-15% of the UK population, depending on where you get your stats from. I haven't looked up alcohol use but I'm going to assume it's somewhere in the 80-90% bracket of the adult population. I can't really work out how the internal thought process would go, possibly something like this:
"Cannabis is bad, make it illegal."
"What about alcohol?"
"um, I like alcohol, keep it legal."
"but it's really dangerous, people are going to die!"
"yeah, but I like it and it's my right to take it."
"but other people like cannabis, don't they have rights?"
"fuck 'em!"
This is why in every public statement from the government, when asked will you discuss or debate the legaslation surrounding cannabis use, usually given with a huge list of reasons for legalisation and comparisons drawn between alcohol use and cannabis use, they can't even respond with a structured point or answer questions directly. The answer is always the same. "Cannabis is a harmful drug and we have no intention of legalising it". No mention of why continued alcohol use is fine, nor any reference to solid evidence showing the harms of cannabis. Gordon Brown springs to mind with his ludicrous statement about "this lethal version of it [cannabis], skunk". From other politicians we sometimes get one of the most ironic statements of all time, which usually goes something like this "We already have enough of a problem with alcohol and tobacco, we don't want to legalise another harmful drug and add to the problem".
Bottom line is, we're left with a bunch of lawmakers who don't enjoy the effects of cannabis, yet know absolutely nothing about it and when given the chance completely discard any evidence, making the decision that the minority of the population who do enjoy the effects of cannabis should not be allowed to use it, because they don't happen to like it. That, my friends, is known as discrimination and would not be tolerated against any other minority.
alcohol information: http://www.avon.nhs.uk/alcohol/the_facts.htm
ACMD report: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-cannabis-report-2008?view=Binary
One example of a study on the link between cannabis use and cancer: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
*Incidently, this is the first link that comes up if you google "cannabis cancer study"
Thursday 10 February 2011
US Healthcare Bill
Starting with a bit of a backlog of my gripes, but still a relevant and hot issue where the debate continues over the Atlantic:
I don't really know where to start on the healthcare bill, because I simply do not understand the opposition. Firstly, I can't understand why healthcare was ever a private industry. Making money off curing disease and illness, treating people back to health after accidents and protecting them from future risks doesn't just seem illogical or wrong, it is pure evil. Healthcare, along with local and national security, rescue services and insurance, should be a public industry. Remember it's not simply a situation of "pay for what you need" because there's also a lot of shareholders sat at the top taking a nice cut, and I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a few of those guys were republican senators and almost all of them republican voters.
When the debate kicked off, I saw a Tory MP on Fox News telling the yanks just how bad the NHS is: waiting times, a sub-standard care etc. Now, all of us here in the UK have our gripes with the NHS - I personally have no issue with the standard of care, yes it could be better but it's FREE, so no matter what ailment I have or accident I get into, the burden of cost is shared by the rest of the nation. If you're not happy to chip in for the cost of treating someone for a condition which is particularly costly, then I'm afraid you are indeed evil. The more important point being the comparison between the NHS waiting times and HAVING NO HEALTHCARE. It seems very strange for someone to say to the 10 - 47 million* Americans that don't have healthcare that they'd be better off without state funded healthcare because it would involve long waiting times. In short, longer waiting times > no healthcare, on an infinite scale. Surely if you're looking at the greater gain to the USA (greatest country in the world apparently), which is the role of congress as far as I understand it, then you need to take the opportunity to maximise the overall health of your population?
The states also spend around twice as much as most other western countries on healthcare, yet according to the World Health Organisations list of countries by healthcare http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html, last updated in 2000, they ranked 37th in the world. That's below France, The UK, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Costa Rica to name just a few. Now I understand that the amount actually spent on healthcare is probably the same as everyone else because of the vast amount of profit earned by the shareholders for the healthcare care and insurance companies, but really, 37th!?
So Obama had to buckle to compromise with the republican majority, but at least things are now moving forward so that a vast number of Americans now have healthcare cover. That's right, for the greatest country in the world it's a massive step forward when everyone has healthcare. I wish they understood quite how crazy that sounds to the rest of the western world.
*The number without healthcare is largely debatable, as many of the usually quoted 47 million are citizens and many can afford it but opt out. However "can afford but opt out" is an interesting phrase as a lot of people may have theoretically been able to afford healthcare but had to endure a much lower standard of living.
I don't really know where to start on the healthcare bill, because I simply do not understand the opposition. Firstly, I can't understand why healthcare was ever a private industry. Making money off curing disease and illness, treating people back to health after accidents and protecting them from future risks doesn't just seem illogical or wrong, it is pure evil. Healthcare, along with local and national security, rescue services and insurance, should be a public industry. Remember it's not simply a situation of "pay for what you need" because there's also a lot of shareholders sat at the top taking a nice cut, and I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a few of those guys were republican senators and almost all of them republican voters.
When the debate kicked off, I saw a Tory MP on Fox News telling the yanks just how bad the NHS is: waiting times, a sub-standard care etc. Now, all of us here in the UK have our gripes with the NHS - I personally have no issue with the standard of care, yes it could be better but it's FREE, so no matter what ailment I have or accident I get into, the burden of cost is shared by the rest of the nation. If you're not happy to chip in for the cost of treating someone for a condition which is particularly costly, then I'm afraid you are indeed evil. The more important point being the comparison between the NHS waiting times and HAVING NO HEALTHCARE. It seems very strange for someone to say to the 10 - 47 million* Americans that don't have healthcare that they'd be better off without state funded healthcare because it would involve long waiting times. In short, longer waiting times > no healthcare, on an infinite scale. Surely if you're looking at the greater gain to the USA (greatest country in the world apparently), which is the role of congress as far as I understand it, then you need to take the opportunity to maximise the overall health of your population?
The states also spend around twice as much as most other western countries on healthcare, yet according to the World Health Organisations list of countries by healthcare http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html, last updated in 2000, they ranked 37th in the world. That's below France, The UK, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Costa Rica to name just a few. Now I understand that the amount actually spent on healthcare is probably the same as everyone else because of the vast amount of profit earned by the shareholders for the healthcare care and insurance companies, but really, 37th!?
So Obama had to buckle to compromise with the republican majority, but at least things are now moving forward so that a vast number of Americans now have healthcare cover. That's right, for the greatest country in the world it's a massive step forward when everyone has healthcare. I wish they understood quite how crazy that sounds to the rest of the western world.
*The number without healthcare is largely debatable, as many of the usually quoted 47 million are citizens and many can afford it but opt out. However "can afford but opt out" is an interesting phrase as a lot of people may have theoretically been able to afford healthcare but had to endure a much lower standard of living.
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