Posts by Dennis Frank
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
You're right. Unusually subtle/clever design from the ad agency they hired. Expect the Nats to hire them for the next election, eh?
-
Reliance on parliamentarians to co-create consensus-based legislation on a common good basis won't suffice. How about the Drug Foundation creates a suitable design and calls for public feedback? That process could crowd-source all the wisdom required to produce an effective synthesis.
-
Hard News: Reassure Me: cannabis,…, in reply to ,
Well, no, but I maybe get your implication. Corporate drug peddlers are unlikely to tell the truth. Sufferers are more likely to trust their doctor for accurate medication. Misplaced trust sometimes, of course!
-
Hard News: Reassure Me: cannabis,…, in reply to BenWilson,
I agree. The medicinal dimension is separate, since sufferers often need precisely-targeted medication. Anyone has a natural right to use natural products in whatever way they want. Social sanctions against misbehaviour that may result is a separate issue due to the propensity of some to mix weed with commercial drugs and/or synthetics. Escape from reality is for many driven by desperation, so the more ways they use to get out of it, the better. Or so it seems at the time.
The grow-your-own ethic also derives from Castaneda (Teachings of Don Juan, 1970). The magic herb is chosen because it is an ally (on the path of gnosis). One toke oft serves to shift consciousness, so why would anyone sensible take more? Depends if you are someone trying to go deeper. More tokes may not get you there, may just derail you. You may need a different ally.
Then there's our personal relation to nature (Gaia), which getting high always seems to bring to the fore. Oneness, epiphanies. Gardeners develop a personal relation to their plants. The ally & its use then become a spiritual thing grounded in praxis.
-
That three-way split in the poll is likely to result in the government framing the referendum to test support for decriminalisation over the status quo, I suspect. As the basis for changing the law, that binary framing would provide the mandate: the third of voters preferring legalisation would vote for decriminalisation if the legalisation option isn't on the voting paper, so the two thirds would defeat the third voting for status quo.
Labour are chronic conservatives, so this framing would give them the public majority for reform that would satisfy their natural caution. I can't see them being brave enough to test the public mood for legalisation yet. They could satisfy progressives via a more sophisticated design: insert a clause that establishes another referendum for legalisation in seven years time. Include text that signals this as a two-step process, to clarify intent. That way Andrew can create consensus on a sound basis.
He should secure the mandate for usage of medical marijuana from the first referendum because polling support for that is already so high it will pass easily (as long as they don't allow the devil entry into the details).
-
Andrew's suggestion is an excellent idea. "A citizens jury is a randomly selected group of civilians who listen to expert perspectives for several days before forming a judgement on an issue."
"Ireland's Citizens' Assembly was a randomly-chosen but demographically representative group of 99 people who gave up their weekends to listen to advocates and experts and, eventually, make recommendations on the shape of a draft reform bill." That seems a suitable model for us to copy. The larger the population sample the more representative of the community it becomes, so I wonder how difficult organising a larger sample would be in practice. For instance, use public meetings in our biggest cities (if sufficient advocates are available) plus Survey Monkey (or equivalent) for subsequent feedback to organisers from those attending.
That could easily generate several hundred or more respondents. The obvious design flaw in such models is that only the non-apathetic participate, and they are out-numbered by the apathetic generally. Yet voters in referenda are similarly skewed so it may not really matter.
-
From a sceptics point of view, such findings do show that there's no universal panacea effect - but there rarely is with medications anyway. Media organisations have to spin a contraversial headline out of a story somehow, so not surprising when we get an over-dramatised & over-generalised summary appearing. It would help if user-groups lobbied on the basis of common ground experience, such as forming a group (if one doesn't yet exist) of all users who feel they have experienced benefits from usage. Then have that group nominate several members who are willing to speak publicly on their behalf.
-
Hard News: Let Canada do our cannabis homework, in reply to nzlemming,
I thought the most interesting bit from the SMH was this: "the results are not straightforward. Most of the cannabis users reported they personally felt it worked well to treat their pain – despite also reporting higher levels of pain."
A paradox, requiring interpretation. Most users got pain relief from their usage, but it was temporary, because the cause of their pain was not removed. If you treat symptoms instead of causes, you fail to solve the problem. Science, when used by the media as a smokescreen, produces disinformation.
Healing ought to be the focus. Merely managing patients institutionalises a high-cost health system. Science applied to medicine via statistics has an unfortunate tendency to lead to banal generalisations, as in this instance. Running regularly makes many people more healthy but we don't force everyone to do it because it doesn't work for many others. The reason people need the law changed is because it produces a better quality of life for many, and that evidence comes from personal testimony, not stats. Dismissing it as hearsay is traditional science and bad public policy!!
Deb Lynch, president of the Medical Cannabis Users Association: “It has given me back my life. Prior to starting on the oil treatments, I was on high doses of multiple opiates. I was in bed wanting to kill myself and my pain wasn’t being addressed. Now I’m running all over the country.”
-
I don't think the Trump crowd want to blow it all up - no capitalist can succeed in a social environment of total chaos. They're now intent on implementing their anti-establishment agenda. Replacing ideologues like the Breitbart guy with pillars of the establishment like the mad-dog military dude is meant to show that they're serious about reforming the establishment.
The target being the global control system. Can't make America great if that octopus keeps throttling it, right? So house & senate republicans who are compliant with the system and signal to voters that they are anti-trump risk getting dumped at the mid-terms later this year. Nationalists vs globalists is simplistic, but seems to explain the behaviour we see.
The cleverest thing the Bilderbergers can do to retaliate is to televise part of their conferences: adopt a public profile to demonstrate that they are operating on a common-interest basis. Just televise the output of their collaboration, I mean, as a pr exercise. Continuing to operate in secrecy is a recipe for impotence now.
Readers keen to point out that the Bilderbergers are just working for the 1% plus a bit of trickle-down are missing the point. In geopolitics, as in politics and warfare, perception is often more influential than reality.
-
Hard News: Let Canada do our cannabis homework, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Girls just wanna have fun. She went on to author four books, was actress, photographer, tv talkshow hostess, got awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from a university in Ontario. Tours giving talks on bipolar - wonder if she opines on the tendency of certain drugs to escalate that predisposition...