Whereas the stillborn weasel who walks among us usually presents in drag as Margaret Thatcher (that dear old friend of Augusto Pinochet), he is currently enjoying a makeover as Nancy "Just say no" Reagan. He wants you to abstain from smoking dope because it's bad for business and if you don't he's going to confiscate your stash. But wait, that's not all. If you refuse to do his bidding, he and those who do do his bidding, the Laboral premiers, will reopen those concentration camps and stash you there until Jesus Christ (with Bill Heffernan's help) comes to redeem your worthless, heathen soul.
With his conservative fraidy-cat agenda to stop everyone from doing anything he doesn't like, dope is next, on the pretext that it causes mental illness. Who is more mentally ill than a conservative preaching abstinence in the 21st century?
Marijuana has always been smoked by people for whom getting high and perceiving multiple realities is far more interesting than getting stuck in the littlest reality of all, the one where you waste your entire life shifting beads on an abacus.
Huffing and puffing as they try to catch up are the prohibitors who, following the historical evolution/regression curve, inevitably wind up in power after a brief interlude of life-affirming discovery made possible by the dreamers. Their return is as inevitable as a cancer defying remission. And everything gets shut down all over again.
Enter John Howard, who should have exited years ago. After a decade in which he has successfully revoked Australian democracy, he's now looking around for new restrictions on the progress of the local species.
In the 1980s Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" campaign was a convenient front for the CIA's importing of crack cocaine (under the supervision of Vice President George Bush, aka Moron The Elder). In California during the 1960s you could go to prison for three years for possession of a single joint. Oddly enough Ronald Reagan was governor then. In the 17th century you got burned at the stake for having sexy eyes or a wart on your nose or a heretical idea. And so bloody forth.
So here we go again. Abstinence is the new core value being preached from the hypocrite's parliamentary pulpit. Of course if the polls were to show that people -- even Howard supporters -- would rather be toking adulterers, then ridding the nation of the devil's work would become just another non-core promise. Meanwhile, it's abstain from everything but shopping.
Will prostitution be next? They never tire of going after the prostitutes.
There is one area our sanctimonious lot of religious hucksters won't be touching. The only place in Australia where you can buy hardcore pornography is Canberra. After a hard day of retributive policy making while using God's name in vain every time he utters it, your pious conservative likes nothing better than wanking in a taxpayer-funded expensive latex vagina sleeve while slavering over multi-penetrated maidens on the taxpayer-funded plasma widescreen.
Link:
Bill Bush: Cracking down on cannabis
Update: I have been reminded that in the last few decades the THC levels of specially grown varieties of marijuana have risen to the point where some users minds are being blown into an outer space they are incapable of returning from. Veteran dope smokers tell me the stuff is too strong even for them. While I have yet to try these souped up varieties, I have smoked some pretty strong hash; such that, moments after the last toke, I had no idea where I was. Such is life. Some of us come back; some of us don't. The same certainly applies to the drug of choice for conservatives, alcohol. What then is the proportion of those driven to schizophrenia from high-powered pot to those who go bananas from booze, killing themselves, their families and strangers?
