The "War On Drugs" ... Lets face it, it's lost, corrupt, old, and hasn't worked since day one. It's time to get real and realize that prohibition didn't work in the 20's, and its not working now-a-days either.
Here are some facts that the public doesn't usually hear about, because there is just to much money to be made in keeping things as they have been. "Just build more jails, and treating hardcore drug addicts with legal solutions instead of medical ones, that actually work.
I'll bet you think that heroin addiction is a horrible addiction, and that here in America we have a cure for it, it's called, "Methadone Maintenance".
Do you know that Methadone lasts 2 times longer in the soft tissues of the human body? Making it 2 times harder to kick (break away from the horrible withdrawl symptoms) ?
Do You know that to date NOBODY has ever died from heroin withdrawl? Oh yes it makes the person going threw withdrawls feel like they want to die, it is that agonizing, and painful to make a person actually perfer death to life with such feelings. But truth is heroin withdrawl does NOT cause death. Methadone withdrawl on the other hand does cause death if the supply from a person taking large doeses suddenly is made to stop taking it.
Yet in prisons, and jails all across America, if you're legally taking your perscribed dose from a professional Dr. on the day you're incarcerated, you can no longer be given the medication you need to feel, act,function and think normally on a day to day basis. Causing the patient sever withdrawl symptoms, of agonizing involuntary leg spasms, night sweats,& freezing / goosebumps at the same time. Along with lost emotional control, Months of insomnia, running nose, cramps, diharea, inability to keep food down, lowering of blood sugar, and iron. Tearing of the eyes, feeling flu-like symptoms, which causes simple day to day activities to be painful, where just walking is a chore, all of these things happening together, and that can last for months contrary to what most Dr.s will tell people that it's out of your system within 72 hours, the patient still goes through withdrawls for months and months aftward. It's inhuman
Yes, in USA today they take you off a drug, and put thousands of people on a much more (2x's)addictive and dangerouse drug, but it's legal because of the money that can be made by Lily the main company that puts out Methadone, and it's loby in Washington, and the Dr.s that worked for Lily that got that law passed in the 70's.
Decriminizing Drugs Does Not Mean We Think Taking Drugs IS OK, and That Our Children Will Be Able To Buy Drugs Any Easier, and at Any Place, or Time they Want.
Things like Detoxs, and rehabs, and needle exchanges have overwhelming proof that dollar for dollar they work better than "locking them up" ever has. It's just a matter of getting politicians to finally get real and say, "It's time to decriminalize drugs" because once thats done, the drugs will be taken out of the hands of criminals, where every teenager can buy them, and be put into the hands of professionals that need prescriptions to give out such drugs. (Please Read the Article about Heroin On the Right side of this Column) Thats the reason you're kids can't get Valiums, Quaaludes, Klonapins, Zanax, Dilaudid, but why they CAN get heroin, pot and cocaine. This "Build More Prisons" mentality has to come to a stop. Most prisons are filled with otherwise law abiding citizens, that basically just wanted to get high. So lets treat them all like criminals, lock them up, make it harder for them to precure legitimate jobs, loans, and homes in the future. Yea thats a great way to make America Stronger, and better in the future. By mixing young adults that wanted to experiment with pot, or cocaine in with rapists, murderers, theives, and other professional criminals, so they can learn other better ways to abuse society, and to further enforce their hatred of the legitimate establishment. Good thinking huh? Nevermind that studies show that between 75%-90% of the people that expreiment with recreational drugs in their teens & early 20s give it up by their 30's.
Below I have other peoples writings, and ideas on the subject as well as mine. Please read on then decide for yourself.
Don't forget that since 1970 with this "War-On-Drugs" going on everyday since then, and whats being called "successful" by various politicians. That the amounts of drugs comming into America and Europe have grown 200-500%, the quality has risen over 100%, and the prices on the streets have dropped close to 100%. In the 70's a gram of 50% pure cocaine street value was about $100. Today the cost is between $50-$25 a gram, and the potency has risen in the past 20 years alone, about 80%. Yea those stats really show that they're winning this War-On-Drugs, huh? NOT!!!
In Europe they said that they confiscated about 10% of the heroin on the street, and that by this time next year with adding millions to pay for more enforcement they think they'll be able to stop about 16% of it getting to the street. There is only 2 things wrong with that statement.
1)- They have no idea how much is actually comming into Europe so knowing that they've gotten or are getting 10 or 16% is impossible to know. 2)- Even if promising to get 16% of a number they have no idea about in the 1st place, lets say they get that much. That leaves what 84% still out there? How do you call that "winning the war on drugs" by any streatch of the imagination? Would you be "winning" if you only breathed air for 16% of the time? I don't think so.
James Gray US Judge, and running for Senate says about drug war:
How is actor Robert Downey Jr.'s problem with drug abuse any different than Betty Ford's problem with alcohol abuse? Why is it appropriate to send Robert Downey Jr. to jail but send Betty Ford to treatment? Shouldn't drug users who cause harm to others raise different questions, and answers, than users such as Downey who do not harm anyone but themselves? What about the guy that goes to work everyday of his life but likes to come home and smoke a joint before a night in front of the TV? Does someone like that really need to be locked up if a cop finds a 1/2 a joint in his ashtray of his pickup truck? What good does that do anyone? He pays his taxes, doesn't tell his kids drugs are OK, is otherwise a good moral hardworking man that loves his wife and kids like the rest of us, pays all his bills on time,is in his mid 40's and has been doing this for over 25 years now, and basically is a good citizen. In Manhattan the cops know enough to let this guy go on with his life, but not the small town cops of the Jersey Shore. Whats more he has to now loose his license, which in turn may make him loose his job/livelyhood, then his home, wife, kids etc... Is that what we really want to do to a guy thats basically a good person? Why don't we make distinctions between people who use drugs and people who abuse them? We automatically conclude that everyone who uses marijuana, for example, needs drug treatment. I agree that marijuana can have some harmful effects on the user, but, obviously, so can alcohol. I drink a glass of wine almost every night with dinner. Does that mean that I need an alcohol-treatment program? Without making allowances for any of these distinctions, we have attempted to incarcerate our way out of our drug-use problems. That reminds me of the old saying, "If all you have is a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail."
That would leave the needs of the nonproblem users, like Downey, to be met in the same way we are addressing the users of tobacco, which is education, controlled regulation of the market, treatment and societal pressure. Let's face it, tobacco is a killer and is at least as addictive as cocaine. But virtually everyone agrees that we would only be compounding our problems by making tobacco illegal. If we did prohibit tobacco, we immediately would begin to receive the same results we have obtained with our drug prohibition laws: increased crime from artificially expensive cigarettes; the shooting of police officers and innocent bystanders by "tobacco dealers" and more corruption of our people, public officials and governments worldwide because of the influx of tobacco money and increased tobacco selling and because of the quick and obscene profits to be made by selling it. Accompanying these are the decreased health of people smoking because of the absence of information about the quality and strength of cigarettes, a loss of civil liberties unmatched by anything in our nation's history and increased taxes to pay for all of these severe but unnecessary problems. Why have we experienced all of these problems with drugs? Because there has been a complete collapse of the rule of law with regard to the manufacture, sale, transfer, use and possession of these sometimes dangerous and addicting drugs. At least with alcohol, we have things like licensing, age restrictions and quality control. And the sales are taxed. But there are absolutely no controls with regard to drugs. Why? Because alcohol is regulated by the government, and the other drugs are controlled by the mob.
Like Alcohol Prohibition before it, our laws of Drug Prohibition may sound good from a moral standpoint, but they simply don't work. We are unable to repeal the law of supply and demand. Once Alcohol Prohibition was repealed, crime went down in our country by 60 percent after only one year, and it continued to decline each year thereafter until the beginning of World War II. And problems with regard to corruption, contaminated "bathtub gin" and loss of respect for the law were decreased materially, as well. Instead, let's go with what works.
In June of 1994, the RAND Corporation released a study that said that we get seven times more value for our tax money by drug-treatment programs than by the incarceration of even heavy users of drugs. So let's get the nonproblem users, like Ford and Downey, out of the criminal justice system and focus our scarce resources, like Proposition 36 programs and drug courts, on the problem users.
These criminal offenders can be sentenced to short periods of incarceration in order to get their attention, and then combine that with court-mandated, strictly-enforced drug treatment. Those offenders, who are violent, furnish drugs to children or do not take their recovery seriously can be removed from society by putting and keeping them in prison. This would reduce materially death, disease, crime, taxes, drug usage and access of these drugs to children. Why not go with what works? And in the meantime, what if we based prison wardens' promotions and bonuses on their ability to reduce the recidivism rates of inmates who have been released back into society from their custody? Do you think the wardens immediately would implement drug-treatment programs in their prisons? Now that might work.
- Tip of the Iceberg: Police Perjury Goes Far Beyond Tom Coleman
One of the final chapters in the Tulia scandal was written two weeks ago when undercover police officer Tom Coleman was convicted of perjury after a sting that sent more than three dozen black residents of the small Texas panhandle town to prison. In a case that became a national example of police misconduct, 46 people, most of them black, were arrested on drug sales charges solely on the basis of Coleman's uncorroborated testimony. Of Coleman's victims, 38 were either convicted or pled guilty and were sentenced to prison.
- While the usual suspects were quick to crow that Coleman's conviction showed that "the system works," members of the defense bar, judges, former prosecutors, and academics argue persuasively that Coleman's lying was not an aberration. Instead, they say, it is but one particularly egregious example of perjury by police, a practice so widespread it has even developed a cutesy nickname, "testilying." But the reality is anything but cute, with an unknown number of innocent people sent to prison because the police lied under oath.
- But according to conservative US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, police perjury and prosecutorial misconduct to gain convictions is "an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges." Kozinski's remarks, published in the Los Angeles Times, came during a discussion of another highly-publicized police perjury scandal, the Los Angeles Police Department's Ramparts debacle. In that case, police at the Ramparts precinct drug squad planted drugs on suspects, stole drugs, and even shot one man, then threw down a gun and testified he had attacked them. The man, who was paralyzed in the wanton attack, was sentenced to 23 years in prison based on the false testimony of LAPD officers.
- Veteran police observer Jerome Skolnick called police perjury of this sort "systematic." Even prosecutors -- or at least former prosecutors -- Slobogin noted, use terms like "routine," "commonplace," and "prevalent" to describe the scope of the practice. "Few knowledgeable persons are willing to say that police perjury about investigative matters is sporadic or rare, except perhaps the police," Slobogin concluded, "and even many of them believe it is common enough to merit a label all its own."
The Mollen Commission, established in New York City in the early 1990s in the wake of police scandals there, reached a similar conclusion. "Officers reported a litany of manufactured tales," its report noted. "For example, when officers unlawfully stop and search a vehicle because they believe it contains drugs or guns, officers will falsely claim in police reports and under oath that the car ran a red light (or committed some other traffic violation) and that they subsequently saw contraband in the car in plain view. To conceal an unlawful search of an individual who officers believe is carrying drugs or a gun, they will falsely assert that they saw a bulge in the person's pocket or saw drugs and money changing hands. To justify unlawfully entering an apartment where officers believe narcotics or cash can be found, they pretend to have information from an unidentified civilian informant or claim they saw the drugs in plain view after responding to the premises on a radio run. To arrest people they suspect are guilty of dealing drugs, they falsely assert that the defendants had drugs in their possession when, in fact, the drugs were found elsewhere where the officers had no lawful right to be."
In yet another study cited by Slobogin, one conducted in Chicago by criminologist Myron Orfield and notable because it relied on the views of prosecutors and judges as well as defense attorneys, Orfield found that 52% believed that "the prosecutor knows or has reason to know" that police lied at evidence suppression hearings "at least half of the time." Among prosecutors alone, 89% said prosecutors had knowledge of such perjury "at least some of the time."
- "It happens, and it happens at all stages in the process," said former Cook County, IL, prosecutor Jim Gierach. "To give just one example, when police would come to get a warrant on a drug case, assistant DAs would review those warrants to ensure no necessary facts were missing, particularly about the reliability of informants and what cops had seen with their own eyes. If the warrant application was lacking, they would tell the officer what information was needed, but it was all boilerplate, it was pulled out of the thin air," he told DRCNet.
Gierach has since become a defense attorney and, driven by disgust with the war on drugs, a member of Law Enforcment Against Prohibition (). "As a defense lawyer, I would see it all the time. In one case, I had a client who went inside a drug house and bought drugs while police were surveilling its exterior. My guy left, but was pulled over and searched, and they found the drugs. But when the police wrote up their report, they wrote that my guy bought the drugs outside in plain view in full daylight. They had to do that because otherwise they would have had no probable cause to stop my guy. These coppers lie in order to try to get the guys they 'know' are guilty."
- Today in America there is an estimated 200 Million people currently incarcerated. Due to false testomony, over zelous Prosocuters, biased judges, and other known breakdowns in our justice system the Federation of Prisons and Jails itself estimates that at any given time that at least 10% of all inmates are innocent. Even using their statistics that means that right now in America we have jailed 200,000 innocent people. What would you say if you heard that was happening in some other 3rd world country? You'd probably say they're barbarians that are corrupt,and that we should go in there and help those poor people. Well its right here under your own noses in the good old US of A. These are our brothers, fathers and sons and daughters that our own broken justice system has wrecklessly done wrong to. Don't we owe ourselves better than that, in the richest best country on the face of the planet?
While somewhere out there must be prosecutors or police officers who deny that police perjury exists, the consensus, not only of defense attorneys and anti-prohibitionist ex-cops, but also, as noted above, of prosecutors, judges, and legal scholars, is that the practice is so widespread that Drug War Chronicle was unable to find any by press time. Observers also find the practice reprehensible, corrosive of the criminal justice system, and probably unstoppable in the current political climate.
"Every single time a police officer witness lies under oath, it is a blow to the criminal justice system," said King. "The process is supposed to be a search for the truth -- not a shortcut to a conviction -- and the burden of proof is on the state. You can't have a search for the truth when the state puts on witnesses who lie for the state. And what makes it even worse is that prosecutors always allow police caught in the act to plead to a lesser offense, like making a false statement to an investigator. When it's one of their own, prosecutors suddenly grow softhearted. But they have no problem sending plenty of questionably guilty people to prison."
"Prosecutors very rarely castigate a police officer for testimony that has apparent falsehoods in it," agreed Miller. "These days, we have less judicial scrutiny of prosecutors and police than at any time for decades. We have gone back to the bad old days. And it will be difficult to change, he said. "It is a culture of lying. That was the case with the Ramparts scandal in Los Angeles; they sent innocent people to prison for years until that broke open. It was the same thing with the El Rukn scandal in Chicago. The cops there got caught, but it wasn't because of judicial or prosecutorial scrutiny," he said.
"It's basically your word against the cops," Miller continued. "We are supposed to have a system of checks and balances, but the system is out of balance. We do not have the type of criminal justice system we pretend to. It is neither impartial nor balanced. And the biggest problem is the war on drugs. Harsh sentences don't work. Mandatory minimums don't work. We need to take a fresh look at what we're doing and try to find out what really works and what doesn't. What is the best way to deal with drugs? We have never tried that. If you say anything but harsher sentences and more enforcement, you're accused of being soft on crime."
"It is the money of prohibition that corrupts these police officers and prosecutors and judges and people at every level of the system," said Gierach. "The penalties are so severe. We have kids who get arrested and the cops tell them they'll go away forever unless they rat on someone. They're telling these kids to forget about the Golden Rule, to sacrifice their neighbor to save themselves, to forget what we think about as morality. And then they wonder why these kids have no values, no human decency. Whether it's a scared kid or a drug cop or judge or prosecutor, this drug war strips them all of values and morality. It's the biggest corrupting influence in this country, and I'm just talking about the moral corruption -- we don't even need to get into the financial corruption here."
Part of the problem is a judiciary either disinterested in the truth or cowed by conservative politicians, said Miller. But there are also institutional interests involved. "Police and prosecutors have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Look at the long struggle over racial profiling in New Jersey. They fought tooth and nail to deny it was occurring for years. And it wasn't just police, but prosecutors, politicians, the entire system. It's the same thing with prosecutors who don't want to do a DNA test to prove or disprove somebody's innocence. They are more interesting in maintaining their turf than in justice."
Perhaps "the system worked" with the conviction of Tom Coleman. But it didn't work until dozens of innocent people had been arrested, jailed, and sent to prison for years and a major national campaign had aired the issue in every major media outlet in the country. And it didn't work because of judicial, prosecutorial, or political oversight over cops run amok. And, the available evidence suggests, it is not working across the land, where people who vow to uphold their oath of office routinely violate it, primarily in the name of prosecuting the drug war. How many innocents are behind bars because of lying cops? And why does nobody care?
This story is from:
www.stopthedrugwar.org or www.mtv.com
What the former head of Interpol is saying echoes the excellent new report by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, setting out a step-by-step route map towards controlled legalisation. There is now a free market in the most dangerous drugs - absurdly known as "controlled drugs" when the opposite is the case. Their availability is in the hands of the worst people on any street corner on the globe. A rational, evidence-based policy would seek to kill the market, put dealers out of business and put control of these drugs into the safe hands of pharmacists.
Raymond Kendall calls for Europe to "medicalise" drugs, instead of criminalising them. He cites British research that finds every £1 spent on treatment saves £3 in the criminal justice system. By prescribing pharmaceutical opiates, he says there is an 80% cut in addict deaths, a drop in the spread of disease and, above all, a "sharp cut in the delinquency rates of drug addicts".
He has spent his working life trying to cut off supply, only to see it soar, prices drop and the number of addicts rise. Now he comes to the only sensible conclusion: the war on drugs doesn't work. Give all addicts a prescription, and they can lead reasonably normal lives, with no need to commit crime. The $300bn global market would grind to a stop with an end to its violence, corruption, fraud, money laundering and financing of terrorism.
In Britain, and in America, drugs are cheaper than ever. The lowest estimate suggests half of all prisoners are jailed for offences related to their need to sustain a habit of, on average, $50 a day. The government spends far more on enforcement than on treatment. But treatment is not the whole answer: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For many addicts, maintenance is the best option. Most citizens only care about stopping addicts committing crimes and rescuing inner-city zones that have become battlegrounds for drug gangs and pimps running drug-addicted prostitutes. No one is suggesting selling the stuff in corner shops, but destroying the market by making it easy to register for controlled drug use is the only hope left.
You got your 2nd shot Georgie, and this time around you don't have to worry about what people think because you don't have to worry about being re-elected next term. So do the unpopular things, that Americans want you to do. Do Something for Christs Sake!!!
EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT, ITS AMERICA THATS PUTTING MORE PEOPLE BEHIND BARS, THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY EXCEPT ONE.
America, with less than 5 percent of the world population, has a quarter of the world's prisoners. There are six times as many Americans behind bars as are imprisoned in the 12 countries that make up the entire European Union, even though those countries have 100 million more citizens than the United States. Our jails and prisons have become the 51st state, with a greater combined population than Alaska, North Dakota and South Dakota. — Editorial, San Jose Mercury News, 1999-12-31.
In August [2000], the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that the number of men and women behind bars in the U.S. at the end of 1999 exceeded two million (don't forget that the stats given by the American Prisons, and Jails itself says that at any given time, 10% of the inmate population is innocent people, meaning that in America today we're incarcerating over 200,000 innocent people, what would you say if you heard that statistic comming from Iran or Iraq? ... You'd call them barbarians, animals, idiots, and feel you have to do something to those morons to help free all those innocent people... What about now that you know it's your own country thats doing it? It's ashame that we act, think and pretend we're one way, when we're really another.) and the rate of incarceration had reached 690 inmates per 100,000 residents — a rate Human Rights Watch believed to be the highest in the world (with the exception of Rwanda). ... The unrelenting war on drugs continued to pull hundreds of thousands of drug offenders into the criminal justice system: 1,559,100 people were arrested on drug charges in 1998; approximately 450,000 drug offenders were confined in jails and prisons. According to the Department of Justice, 107,000 people were sent to state prison on drug charges in 1998, representing 30.8 percent of all new state admissions. Drug offenders constituted 57.8 percent of all federal inmates. — Human Rights Watch World Report 2001: United States
Prohibition (1920-1933 R.I.P.) was known as The Noble Experiment. The results of the experiment are clear: innocent people suffered; organized crime grew into an empire; the police, courts, and politicians became corrupt; disrespect for the law grew; and the per capita consumption of the prohibited substance — alcohol — increased dramatically, year by year, for the next thirteen years of this Noble Experiment, never to return to the pre-1920 levels.
You would think that an experiment with such clear results would not need to be repeated; but the experiment is being repeated; it's going on today. Only the prohibited substances have changed. The results remain the same. They are clearer now than they were then. — Peter McWilliams, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, p.61.
If you've been reading and paying attention, the only good that the war on drugs has done so far is to get the purity of illigal addictive narcotics up, and the prices down. Not to mention given the USA the largest prison population on the face of the planet. Yea those are great outcomes so far huh?
If you hit your finger with a hammer,and then watched it swell up, turn purple, and felt intense pain, do you think hitting it again, only with a larger hammmer would help it?
If so try it, and then get back to me, and tell me the outcome. Thats what we've done with prohibition. We've learned once that it didn't help anything, so now we're going through it again only this time on a much larger and longer scale.
When are we going to wake up, and come to the realization that we've got to give something else a try?
Here is another great website to learn more... Serendipity
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Make heroin legal...
Before you laugh at the thought, read this, then think about it honestly. As well as doing some homework on "The War On Drugs". Because then you'll really have reason to laugh, at a huge failed experiment, thats still going on, and costing us lives, and billions of dollars.
In the first of a two-part series, Nick Davies argues that the disease and moral collapse associated with class A drugs is due to criminalisation, not the drugs themselves
Special report: drugs in Britain
Nick Davies
Thursday June 14, 2001
On April 3 1924, a group of American congressmen held an official hearing to consider the future of heroin. They took sworn evidence from experts, including the US surgeon general, Rupert Blue, who appeared in person to tell their committee that heroin was poisonous and caused insanity and that it was particularly likely to kill since its toxic dose was only slightly greater than its therapeutic dose.
They heard, too, from specialist doctors, such as Alexander Lambert of New York's Bellevue hospital, who explained that "the herd instinct is obliterated by heroin, and the herd instincts are the ones which control the moral sense ... Heroin makes much quicker the muscular reaction and therefore is used by criminals to inflate them, because they are not only more daring, but their muscular reflexes are quicker." Senior police, a prison governor and health officials all added their voices. Dr S Dana Hubbard, of the New York City health department, captured the heart of the evidence: "Heroin addicts spring from sin and crime ... Society in general must protect itself from the influence of evil, and there is no greater peril than heroin."
The congressmen had heard much of this before and now they acted decisively. They resolved to stop the manufacture and use of heroin for any purpose in the United States and to launch a worldwide campaign of prohibition to try to prevent its manufacture or use anywhere in the world. Within two months, their proposal had been passed into law with the unanimous backing of both houses of the US Congress. The war against drugs was born.
To understand this war and to understand the problems of heroin in particular, you need to grasp one core fact. In the words of Professor Arnold Trebach, the veteran specialist in the study of illicit drugs: "Virtually every 'fact' testified to under oath by the medical and criminological experts in 1924 ... was unsupported by any sound evidence." Indeed, nearly all of it is now directly and entirely contradicted by plentiful research from all over the world. The first casualty of this war was truth and yet, 77 years later, the war continues, more vigorous than ever, arguably the longest-running conflict on earth.
Drugs and fear go hand in hand. The war against drugs is frightening - but not, in reality, for the reasons which are claimed by its generals. The untold truth about this war, which has now sucked in every country in the developed world, is that it creates the very problem which it claims to solve. The entire strategy is a hoax, with the same effect as an air force which bombs its own cities instead of its enemy's. You have to go back to the trenches of Flanders to find generals who have been so incompetent, so dishonest, so awesomely destructive towards those for whom they claim to care.
The core point is that the death and sickness and moral collapse which are associated with class A drugs are, in truth, generally the result not of the drugs themselves but of the black market on which they are sold as a result of our strategy of prohibition. In comparison, the drugs themselves are safe, and we could turn around the epidemic of illness and death and crime if only we legalised them. However, it is a contemporary heresy to say this, and so the overwhelming evidence of this war's self-destructive futility is exiled from almost all public debate now, just as it was when those congressmen met.
Take heroin as a single example. And it's a tough example. In medical terms, it is simply an opiate, technically known as diamorphine, which metabolises into morphine once it enters its user's body. But, in terms of the war against drugs, it is the most frightening of all enemies. Remember all that those congressmen were told about "the great peril". Remember the Thatcher government's multimillion pound campaign under the slogan "Heroin screws you up". Think of Tony Blair at the 1999 Labour party conference fulminating about the "drug menace" or of William Hague last year calling for "a stronger, firmer, harder attack on drugs than we have ever seen before". And now look at the evidence.
Start with the allegation that heroin damages the minds and bodies of those who use it, and consider the biggest study of opiate use ever conducted, on 861 patients at Philadelphia General hospital in the 20s. It concluded that they suffered no physical harm of any kind. Their weight, skin condition and dental health were all unaffected. "There is no evidence of change in the circulatory, hepatic, renal or endocrine functions. When it is considered that some of these subjects had been addicted for at least five years, some of them for as long as 20 years, these negative observations are highly significant."
Check with Martindale, the standard medical reference book, which records that heroin is used for the control of severe pain in children and adults, including the frail, the elderly and women in labour. It is even injected into premature babies who are recovering from operations. Martindale records no sign of these patients being damaged or morally degraded or becoming criminally deviant or simply insane. It records instead that, so far as harm is concerned, there can be problems with nausea and constipation.
Or go back to the history of "therapeutic addicts" who became addicted to morphine after operations and who were given a clean supply for as long as their addiction lasted. Enid Bagnold, for example, who wrote the delightful children's novel, National Velvet, was what our politicians now would call "a junkie", who was prescribed morphine after a hip operation and then spent 12 years injecting up to 350mg a day. Enid never - as far as history records - mugged a single person or lost her "herd instinct", but died quietly in bed at the age of 91. Opiate addiction was once so common among soldiers in Europe and the United States who had undergone battlefield surgery that it was known as "the soldiers' disease". They spent years on a legal supply of the drug - and it did them no damage.
We cannot find any medical research from any source which will support the international governmental contention that heroin harms the body or mind of its users. Nor can we find any trace of our government or the American government or any other ever presenting or referring to any credible version of any such research. On the contrary, all of the available research agrees that, so far as harm is concerned, heroin is likely to cause some nausea and possibly severe constipation and that is all. In the words of a 1965 New York study by Dr Richard Brotman: "Medical knowledge has long since laid to rest the myth that opiates observably harm the body." Peanut butter, cream and sugar, for example, are all far more likely to damage the health of their users.
Now, move on to the allegation that heroin kills its users. The evidence is clear: you can fatally overdose on heroin. But the evidence is equally clear, that - contrary to the claims of politicians - it is not particularly easy to do so. Opiates tend to suppress breathing, and doctors who prescribe them for pain relief take advantage of this to help patients with lung problems. But the surprising truth is that, in order to use opiates to suppress breathing to the point of death, you have to exceed the normal dose to an extreme degree. Heroin is unusually safe, because - contrary to what those US congressmen were told in 1924 - the gap between a therapeutic dose and a fatal dose is unusually wide.
Listen, for example, to Dr Teresa Tate, who has prescribed heroin and morphine for 25 years, first as a cancer doctor and now as medical adviser to Marie Curie Cancer Care. We asked her to compare heroin with paracetamol, legally available without prescription. She told us: "I think that most doctors would tell you that paracetamol is actually quite a dangerous drug when used in overdose; it has a fixed upper limit for its total dose in 24 hours and if you exceed that, perhaps doubling it, you can certainly put yourself at great risk of liver failure and of death, whereas with diamorphine, should you double the dose that you normally were taking, I think the consequence would be to be sleepy for a while and quite possibly not much more than that and certainly no permanent damage as a result." Contrary to the loudly expressed view of so many politicians, this specialist of 25 years' experience told us that when heroin is properly used by doctors, it is "a very safe drug".
Until the American prohibitionists closed him down in the 20s, Dr Willis Butler ran a famous clinic in Shreveport, Louisiana, for old soldiers and others who had become addicted to morphine after operations. Among his patients, he included four doctors, two church ministers, two retired judges, an attorney, an architect, a newspaper editor, a musician from the symphony orchestra, a printer, two glass blowers and the mother of the commissioner of police. None of them showed any ill effect from the years which they spent on Dr Butler's morphine. None of them died as a result of his prescriptions. And, as Dr Butler later recalled: "I never found one we could give an overdose to, even if we had wanted to. I saw one man take 12 grains intravenously at one time. He stood up and said: 'There, that's just fine,' and went on about his business."
Heroin can be highly addictive - which is a very good reason not to start taking it. In extreme doses, it can kill. But the truth which has been trampled under the cavalry of the drug warriors is that, properly prescribed, pure heroin is a benign drug. The late Professor Norman Zinberg, who for years led the study of drug addiction at Harvard Medical School, saw the lies beneath the rhetoric: "To buttress our current programme, official agencies, led originally by the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, have constructed myth after myth. When pushers in schoolyards, 'drug progression', drugs turning brains to jelly, and other tales of horror are not supported by facts, they postulate and publicise others: 'drugs affect chromosomes'; 'drugs are a contagious disease'. Officials go on manufacturing myths such as the chromosome scare long after they are disproved on the self-righteous assumption that if they have scared one kid off using drugs, it was worth the lie."
Take away the lies and the real danger becomes clear - not the drugs, but the black market which has been created directly by the policy of prohibition. If ever there is a war crimes trial to punish the generals who have gloried in this slaughter of the innocent, the culprits should be made to carve out in stone: "There is no drug known to man which becomes safer when its production and distribution are handed over to criminals."
Heroin, so benign in the hands of doctors, becomes highly dangerous when it is cut by black-market dealers - with paracetamol, drain cleaner, sand, sugar, starch, powdered milk, talcum powder, coffee, brick dust, cement dust, gravy powder, face powder or curry powder. None of these adulterants was ever intended to be injected into human veins. Some of them, such as drain cleaner, are simply toxic and poison their users. Others - sand or brick dust - are carried into tiny capillaries and digital blood vessels where they form clots, cutting off the supply of blood to fingers or toes. Very rapidly, venous gangrene sets in, the tissue starts to die, the fingers or toes go black and then have only one destiny: amputation. Needless suffering - inflicted not by heroin, but by its black-market adulterants.
Street buyers cannot afford to waste any heroin - and for that reason, they start to inject it, because smoking or snorting it is inefficient. The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine records that a large proportion of the illness experienced by black-market heroin addicts is caused by wound infection, septicaemia, and infective endocarditis, all due to unhygienic injection technique. Street users invariably suffer abscesses, some of them of quite terrifying size, from injecting with infected needles or drugs. Those who inject repeatedly into the same veins or arteries will suffer aneurisms - the walls of the artery will weaken and bulge; sometimes they will start to leak blood under the skin; sometimes, these weakened arteries will become infected by a dirty needle and rupture the skin, leaving the user to bleed to death.
In the mid 90s, the World Health Organisation estimated that 40% of recent Aids cases internationally had been caused by drug users sharing injecting equipment. The British record on Aids is better because in the late 80s the government quietly broke with its prohibition philosophy and started to provide clean needles. Nevertheless, by June last year, 1,000 black-market drug users in this country had died of Aids which was believed to have been contracted from dirty needles. More needless misery and death.
Far worse, however, is the spread of hepatitis C, which can kill by causing cirrhosis and sometimes cancer in the liver. The official estimate is that 300,000 people in this country are now infected. Dr Tom Waller, who chairs Action on Hepatitis C, says the truth is likely to be much worse. And almost all of these victims are black-market drug users who contracted the disease by sharing dirty injecting equipment. Dr Waller says there is now a "major epidemic", threatening the lives of "a great many people". Needlessly.
Street buyers buy blind and so they will overdose accidentally: they have no way of telling how much heroin there is in their deal. Dr Russell Newcombe, senior lecturer in addiction studies at John Moores University in Liverpool, has found the purity of street heroin varying from 20% to 90%. "Users can accidentally take three or four times as much as they are planning to," he says. It is peculiarly ironic that governments set out to protect their people from a drug which they claim is dangerous by denying them any of the safeguards and information which they insist must apply to the consumption of drugs which they know to be harmless. (Compare, for example, the mandatory information on the side of a bottle of vitamin C tablets with the information available to a black-market heroin user.)
Street buyers often run short of supplies - and so they mix their drug with anything else they can get their hands on, particularly alcohol. Heroin may be benign, but if you mix it with a bottle of vodka or a handful of sedatives, your breathing is likely to become extremely depressed. Or it may just stop. In any event, whether it is poisonous adulterants or injected infection; whether it is death by accidental overdose or death by polydrug use: it is the black market which lies at the root of the danger. The healthiest route, of course, is not to take the drug at all: but for those who are addicted, prohibition inflicts danger and death. Needlessly. Water would become dangerous if it were banned and handed over to a criminal black market.
The same logic applies to drugs which, unlike heroin, are inherently harmful - such as alcohol, which is implicated in organic damage (liver) and social problems (violence, dangerous driving). American bootleggers brewed their moonshine with adulterants such as methylated spirits, which can cause blindness. (Hence the proliferation of blind blues singers.) And there are documented cases of drinkers during prohibition injecting alcohol, with all of the attendant dangers. (It is instructive to look back on the prohibitionists' efforts to justify their war against alcohol with hugely inflated statements of its danger. In his book on the history of drugs, Emperors of Dreams, Mike Jay records the claims that alcohol was an "environmental poison" which generated cretinism and several otherwise unrecognised syndromes including "blastophoric degeneration" and "alcoholic diathesis".)
The risks of consuming LSD and ecstasy are increased enormously by their illegal and unsupervised manufacture. Nobody knows what they are swallowing. Yet, when a Brighton company developed a test to check the purity of ecstasy, the government's drugs adviser, Keith Hellawell (whose contract has just been suspended), condemned it and warned that the company risked prosecution. It is the same with black-market amphetamines: speed alone may not kill, but speed with a blindfold is highly likely to finish you off.
In the same way, the classic signs of social exclusion among addicts are the product not of their drug but of the illegality of the drug. If addicts fail to work, it is not because heroin has made them work-shy, but because they spend every waking minute of the day hustling. If addicts break the law, it is not because the drug has corrupted their morality, but because they are forced to steal to pay black-market prices. If addicts are thin, it is not because the drug has stripped away their flesh, but because they spend every last cent on their habit and have nothing left for food. Over and over again, it is the black market, which has been created by the politicians, which does the damage.
Keith Hellawell, the man to whom the government turned for advice on drugs, appeared to know none of this. When we interviewed him for a television programme, he insisted that heroin itself was dangerous and then repeatedly dodged requests to come up with any evidence at all to justify his claim. Subsequently, when we offered his department as much time as it would like to find any evidence, it failed to come up with anything at all and passed the question to the Department of Health, which also failed. It is fair to conclude that the government's former drugs adviser did not know the first thing about heroin.
The confusion between the effect of the drug and the effect of the black market is exacerbated not only because of government policy but also because government statistics completely ignore this distinction, with the result that teams of researchers study drug policy, use compromised statistics and simply recycle the confusion, thus providing politicians with yet more false fuel for their fire. Home Office figures on drug deaths, for example, are hopelessly compromised. Eighteen months ago, the Department of Health, which might have been expected to know better, produced new guidelines for doctors dealing with drug users and recorded the following: "Generally there is a greater prevalence of certain illnesses among the drug misusing population, including viral hepatitis, bacterial endocarditis, HIV, tuberculosis, septicaemia, pneumonia, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary emboli, abscesses and dental disease." All of it true of the black market. None of it true of the drug. No attempt to make the distinction.
The black market damages not only drug users but the whole community. Britain looks back at the American prohibition of alcohol in the 20s and shudders at the stupidity of a policy which generated such a catastrophic crimewave. Yet in this country, now, the prohibition of drugs has generated a crime boom of staggering proportions. Research suggests that in England and Wales, a hard core of black-market users is responsible for some £1.5bn worth of burglary, theft and shoplifting each year - they are stealing £3.5m worth of property a day. As a single example, Brighton police told us they estimate that 75% of their property crime is committed by black-market drug users trying to fund their habit. And yet governments refuse to be tough on the cause of this crime: their own prohibition policy.
The global version of this damage was put succinctly by Senator Gomez Hurtado, former Colombian ambassador to France and a high court judge, who told a 1993 conference: "Forget about drug deaths and acquisitive crime, about addiction and Aids. All this pales into insignificance before the prospect facing the liberal societies of the west, like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming car. The income of the drug barons is an annual $500,000m, greater than the American defence budget. With this financial muscle they can suborn all the institutions of the state and, if the state resists, with this fortune they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the dark ages of rule by the gang. If the west relishes the yoke of the tyrant and the bully, current drug policies promote that end."
Having attacked and maimed and killed the very people they claimed to be protecting; having inflicted a crime wave on the same communities which they said they were defending; having run up a bill which now costs us some £1.7bn a year in this country alone: this war's generals might yet have some claim to respect if they were able to show that they had succeeded in their original objective of stopping or, at least, of cutting the supply of prohibited drugs. They cannot.
In December 1999, the chief constable of Cleveland police, Barry Shaw, produced a progress report on the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which marked the final arrival of US drugs prohibition in this country: "There is overwhelming evidence to show that the prohibition-based policy in this country since 1971 has not been effective in controlling the availability or use of proscribed drugs. If there is indeed a war against drugs, it is not being won ... Illegal drugs are freely available, their price is dropping and their use is growing. It seems fair to say that violation of the law is endemic, and the problem seems to be getting worse despite our best efforts."
Mr Shaw was able to point to a cascade of evidence to support his view: between 1987 and 1997, there had been a tenfold increase in the seizure of illicit drugs, and yet the supply on the streets was so strong that the price of these drugs had kept dropping; in 1970, only 15% of people had used an illegal drug, but by 1995, 45% had; in 1970, 9,000 people were convicted of a drugs offence but in 1995 94,000 were. The Home Office responded to the chief constable's report with complete silence: they refused even to acknowledge receiving it. Internal reports from the American Drugs Enforcement Agency confirm the chief constable's conclusion. (They say Britain now produces so much cannabis that we actually export it to Holland.)
Prohibition has not merely failed to cut the supply of illicit drugs: it has actively spread drug use. The easiest way for new users to fund their habit is to sell drugs and consume the profit; so they go out and find new users to sell to; so it is that when one child in the classroom starts using, others soon join in; one user in the street and neighbours soon follow. Black-market drug use spreads geometrically. The Health Education Authority in 1995 found that 70% of people aged between 11 and 35 had been offered drugs at some time. Pushers push. When Britain began to impose prohibition of heroin, in 1968, there were fewer then 500 heroin addicts in Britain - a few jazz musicians, some poets, some Soho Chinese. Now, the Home Office says there may be as many as 500,000. This is pyramid selling at its most brilliantly effective.
In private, the Home Office's best defence is that it is so short of reliable intelligence on drugs that nobody can finally prove that the war is lost: we simply don't know how much heroin or cocaine is imported, or how many people are using it.
Keith Hellawell argued that the 30 years since the Misuse of Drugs Act do not really count, because, until he took over, British governments did not have a real strategy. He told us he was supporting new international tactics (which he could not divulge) and was now seeing figures (which he could not give us) to suggest finally they were going to succeed. This recalls earlier declarations that "We have turned the corner on drug addiction" (President Nixon, 1973), or "Heroin availability continues to shrink" (DEA, 1978). In the meantime, world heroin production has tripled in the past decade, cocaine production has doubled and, in the foreign secretary's Blackburn constituency, police say drug use in the Asian community has soared by 300% in four years.
But the underlying point is even more worrying: once you understand that the real danger comes from the black market and not from the drug, you can see that even if, with some magic formula, the generals started to cut the supply of these drugs, the result would be disastrous. The price of heroin, for example, would start to rise and, since there is no evidence at all that heroin addicts cut their consumption to fit their wallets, they would have to commit more crime to fund their habits. And if the dealers also responded like good entrepreneurs, they would try to keep their prices down by adding even more pollutants to the heroin, thus increasing the health risks to users.
This government has not begun to consider legalisation. No matter the truth about the danger and the death, no matter the truth about the cause of crime, the position is, as Jack Straw put it to the 1997 Labour conference: "We will not decriminalise, legalise or legitimise the use of drugs." Why? The obvious answer was offered to us by Paul Flynn, Labour backbencher and staunch opponent of prohibition: "It is being fuelled by politicians who are vote gluttons, who believe that there is popularity and votes to be gained by appearing to be tough on drugs."
While Keith Hellawell and other prohibitionists are embarrassed by their screaming lack of success, those who want to legalise can point to clear evidence that providing a clean supply of drugs will help with the physical and mental health of users, will cut crime in the community and drain the life out of the black market.
The Swiss, for example, in 1997 reported on a three-year experiment in which they had prescribed heroin to 1,146 addicts in 18 locations. They found: "Individual health and social circumstances improved drastically ... The improvements in physical health which occurred during treatment with heroin proved to be stable over the course of one and a half years and in some cases continued to increase (in physical terms, this relates especially to general and nutritional status and injection- related skin diseases) ... In the psychiatric area, depressive states in particular continued to regress, as well as anxiety states and delusional disorders ... The mortality of untreated patients is markedly higher." They also reported dramatic improvements in the social stability of the addicts, including a steep fall in crime.
There are equally impressive results from similar projects in Holland and Luxembourg and Naples and, also, in Britain. In Liverpool, during the early 1990s, Dr John Marks used a special Home Office licence to prescribe heroin to addicts. Police reported a 96% reduction in acquisitive crime among a group of addict patients. Deaths from locally acquired HIV infection and drug-related overdoses fell to zero. But, under intense pressure from the government, the project was closed down. In its 10 years' work, not one of its patients had died. In the first two years after it was closed, 41 died.
There is room for debate about detail. Should we supply legalised drugs through GPs or specialist clinics or pharmacists? Should we continue to supply opiate substitutes, such as methadone, as well as heroin? Should the supply be entirely free of charge to guarantee the extinction of the black market? How would we use the hundreds of millions of pounds which would be released by the "peace dividend"? But, if we have any compassion for our drug users, if we have any intention of tackling the causes of crime, if we have any honesty left in our body politic, there is no longer any room for debate about the principle. Continue the war against drugs? Just say no.
I got this article from:
The Guardian.co.uk
1/25/05
I saw a womans naked Breast before I was 18! and I never killed or raped anyone. Can you believe that?
(Evidently some people can't).
Stop all these silly fights and getting "outraged" by seeing a female breast. I want to know just who it is thats actually getting outraged by seeing a womans breast? Just exactly what harm do you people think seeing a breast is going to do? Is it going to ruin your young childs mind? Make him a sicko pervert? All from seeing a breast? From allt the shows I see, people are always shouting and wanting to see breasts. I mean have you watched Jerry Springer Lately? When it's the audiences turn to ask questions of the people up there on the stage, more than half of them are woman, just lifting their tops, jumping up and down, and saying, "I'm just here to get my Jerry Beads", and thereby getting a huge round of applause. It seems to me that there isn't anyone in the world thats really against seeing a womans breast no matter what race or age woman they hang from. No from what I can see nobody is "outraged" by seeing a tittie. Back when I was a boy, (and this was way before the internet, or boobs in TV, or Jerry Springer or any of that). Every boy I ever knew had already snuck their Fathers Playboys out of the trash at one point somewhere between 6 & 13 years of age, and saw female breasts. Can you Imagine that not one of us grew up, to murder or even rape anyone? Nobody to day that I know of personally is outraged by seeing a breast. How the hell could you be, they're soft, round, harmless and beautiful, they feed babies for Christs sake!!So now let me get this straight, we can stick then in babies mouths, and mens faces but when youre between 6 + 18 you can't see one? Is that it? What are those some kind of "magic years" when, if a male sees a breast, it's going to warp his mind? I want to meet the parent that says they don't want their kids to see the female breast, because the 1st question I'm going to have for them is "why"?. Do you really think it's going to cause some kind of damage to your sons or daughters mind to see a womans breast, but they can sit in front of the TV, and watch Itchy and Scratchy dismember each other? Are you nuts or what? C'mon, grow up, get real, and get your mentality out of the gutter, and the middle ages will ya please? I thought that we've grown past this victorian age mentality, and learned about the sicknesses that come from sexual repression? What, are we now forgetting all that?
I'll have to go on with this story at a later date, it's getting late andI have other work to do, I'll be back. See ya later on. |
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"Whats Your Feelings About Using "Borrowed" Software? "
There are some people out there that as in most subjects, well, I'll just say, they tend to take themselves a little bit to seriously. Unless you work for this particular software giant, or are a major stockholder, I really don't see any reason to get so worked up about the whole issue.
There was this one time though, that I went onto a Bulliten Board, and mentioned that I was using "borrowed" software, and boy, you just wouldn't believe the hate that spewed out at me in the next few reply's in that particular Thread. One guy was wishing he knew where I lived because he wanted to come over and kick my ass or maybe even kill me". Yep, I swear, truth is stranger than fiction. He was so pissed off that I hadn't paid for my particular 3D application, and that he had, he just wanted to reach through the computer screen and have violent anal sex with me in a humliating manor. Judging by some of the other comments too, he wasn't the only one that had strong feelings about using pirated Software.
Now I was a student at the time, just learning about this software, and not working either because I was, well in school and studying all the time. So as with most students I didn't have the extra $3,000 that it would have cost me for this particular app. and neither did any of my fellow students. Their parents were tapped as well after paying tuition, rent, books, and a new computer, they weren't about to dish out another $3,000 for that app, $450, + $600 + $500 + $900 for the other various software titles that Visual Communications Majors will be using in their 1st semester, and thats only about 1/2 the titles we'll be using during the whole program.
My point is that "borrowed" or "pirated" software has it's place, and it's needed place in todays marketplace. Companies think they're doing something magnanimous for you by letting you use it for 14, 30 or 45 then charging you all that money for 20 year old technology. To me it even makes less sense with the huge monopoly-like companies, that service the whole planet, like Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia, Autodesk, and others that are the world main titles in some areas. For instance if your in the Desktop Publishing business, and don't use either Photoshop, QuarkXPress, you're not in the desktop publishing business. Oh sure you can TRY to be different and use Paint Shop Pro, and Pagemaker for a while but I give double odds that you won't be able to make it through your 1st whole year with trying to be your own island in that business. After the 1st 10 times you have to share files with someones company other than your own, you'll soon see that being different is just a huge pain the butt, and takes more time and energy than its worth to try to not use the 2 biggest names in that buisness.
Just the learning curve alone on programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPres, Lightwave, 3DStudio Max, Flash, Dreamweaver, Director, After Effects, Premier, and all their look alikes, do & sound alikes, dictates that their little "try us free for 30 days" is far short of being able to tell anything by using them for such a short time period. So when a classmate of mine came in and spoke a word that us being new to the whole computer software thing sounded new and foriegn to us, "WAREZ" we were like whats "WAREZ"? He explained that there are these groups of people out there that hack, crack, and that are basically big puzzle solvers, that they like to try to figure out the security codes that the softare companies use to protect their products with. Well they like to crack them and then give out "free software" to all that need, and want it. It's a confusing, and ugly world at time the whole "WAREZ" world what with, pop-ups, rating sites, porno-popups and the whole outlaw thing that goes along with them. But once you learn your way around, and the lingo, and learn the "cooler" websites, that aren't all that hardcore, and that treat you like the intelligent adults that we are, and not some rebellious 14 year old thats still fasinated by the "F-word", and calling people "Cocksuckers" and so on. Then it gets to actually start to make some sense.
You see as long as you're a single person, using it at home to learn and not using them on a daily basis to make yourself a profit, they usually don't and won't come after you, and if you ask me thats the way that it should be. Now I for one love using cracked free software, but the day that the time comes to where I might actually make some money from using these software titles, then I really do actually go out and buy myself a legit copy. I personally think it's dispicable that one of my old schools that I went to to learn about "Computer Graphics" actually was closed down for using pirated software. I mean, after charging me and hundreds, if not thousands of my fellow classmates premium prices to work on what we were told was legitamate software, hence that being the reason for some of the high costs of the tuition to these schools, to be lying to us, and in the name of the almighty dollar rip off Adobe, Microsoft, Macromedia, and Autodesk hundreds of thousands of dollars is just plain wrong, and to me criminal.
I've been lucky I seem to always get good, fully workning versions of the software that I'm trying to teach myself about, and I can say with a totally clean conscience that I've never made dime one off of any pirtated software. If I got it for free, I gave it to fellow classmates for free too. Not unlike some of my less honorable classmates that used to chage $20 an application to sell it to their fellow classmates.
So hopefully you'll see my point when I say that for those people on that Bulliten Board that day to gang up on me, and curse me out, and want to find out where I lived to come and kick my ass and or kill me seems to me to be a little bit over the top to say the least. I think you people need to either get a life, or a friend thats a hacker and stop paying for your software yourself. (As long as you're not going to make a profit with it that is). It might have been some personal jeoulousy on their part when they got so red-in-the-face at me that time, but on the other hand, I think it was just that they seem to think that because they made the sacrifice of $3,000 for 3D application, that then everyone should. I can understand that. I don't think it makes sense, but I can understand it. Unless you have stock in that software company or work for them, I'm not taking money directly from you, then all you people need to lighten up a bit. Don't you know about others that can't afford to by such over priced software, but if they learn it, they might be able to get better paying jobs. I mean sometimes when I'm in between jobs, (and being a writer, a graphic designer and a carpenter that happens quite regularly) $20 is alot of money to me. There are other times when I give out $200 tips in NYC when times are good too, so for most people we have our ups and down times. I for one have never known what it's like to work everyday for years straight. I've always worked for 6 months off for 2, worked for 9 month's off for 3,worked a year then off for 6 months, and so on. It's just the nature of my businesses. I wish that I could work for years without months off but unfortunatly I've never been that lucky. and there are lots of others that don't even have it as good as I do. At least with me its either feast or famine, but I've seen it with some people where it's famine alot more than it's feast, or never feast. So you have to sometimes walk a mile in other peoples shoes before you can judge them, but that didn't seem to bother these morons that were cursing me out, and wanted to kill me, that one day.
(To be continued) |
Remember when the "The World Was Flat" Well here is a new theory to think about..."The world is Hollow" It's true, it really might just be according to some theories.
I ran across this website with an interesting theory. It seems to have started actually some years ago with a book by a man by the name of Raymond Bernard, he wrote a book called "The Hollow Earth" and it seems that there just might be some other prominent thinkers that also think this theory could hold water.
Whatever happened to Atlantis, and the enlightened civilization that lived there? They were supposedly years ahead of their time, were a peacful people, with excellent art, a wonderful society, and then all of a sudden, boom, they were gone. Well they could have moved to the center of the earth. It seems that there never really are any good pictures of the North or the South poles either, and thats not an accident according to some people that believe in this theory. It seems that the earth is large enough to have a 900 mile crust, and holes at both poles that are between 800 to 1,200 miles wide. Large enough so taht you wouldn't even know you were going into a hole, because you can't see 1,000 miles. It's a very interesting theory the more you read up about it. I'm even starting to think it might be possible. It seems that even Admiral Byrd the great Arctic explorer himself wrote about this. If this is all starting to sound interesting to you, you can read up more about it on a website at: http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/holearth.html
Bill Cosby's Speeches About African American Family Values, and their Responsibilty to themselves to Stop Being "Victims".
I am a white male, that for the greater part of my life, I have lived, and grown up in predomenently minority communities. I grew up in Queens, during the height of the "intergrated bussing" of the 1970's. Then moved to The Lower East Side, ("Alphabet City") of Manhattan. So I've know 1st hand what living in minority communities is like. I know about drug dealers running neighborhoods, and racially motivated gang violence. So this is why I keep an ear open to such subjects, and why they mean alot to me. I know that in every lower-middle-class-community, there are white families there as well. I was one of them for the greater part of my life, and I thank God I grew up in that way. I think that white people that grew up in all white communiites are missing a huge amount of experiences, that they just don't get to understand by growing up in all white communities. Luckily the communities I grew up in, and around were heavily mixed. Hispanics, Blacks, Jewish, Oriental, Middle Eastern, and white people. Then in the "white" communities there are seperations when you live there too. There are "the Jewish sections, the Italian sections, the Irish, and Polish, and Russian sections". Only growing up in a place like Manhattan, do you get to have such a diverse experience of people while growing up. It gives me a unique insight to the communites of these people today. I feel sorry for all you white people that say things like "I hate Niggers" when you've never even met one! You have one poor black kid in your whole High School, and you call him a "nigger". Yea I went to Manasquan High School, and thats just what I saw and heard when I was there. One Black Family in the whole school, and yet I'd still hear that phrase, "I hate niggers" comming from other whites. It amazed me comming from the kind of background I had come from in Queens, where we used to have to be bussed into black neighborhoods, and blacks had to be bussed into our neighborhoods, in this huge racial upbringing experiment called "integrated bussing". The JHS I went to was 10% white, 5% oriental, 10% hispanic and Indian, and 75% Black. I couldn't understand why all the shows on TV had so many white people on it, when I would see a totally different type world when I went to school.
Bill Cosby's recent Speeches in Jersey City or Newark (I forget right now) to the media, and black majority audiences, where he says things like, "We have to weigh our communities outrage against the police when they shoot and kill one of our people, against our outrage when a drug dealer shoots and kills one of our community.
We have to weigh the amount of times when one of our community is killed by a police officer against the amount of times when one of our community is killed by a neighborhood drug dealer, and then voice our outrage accordingly.
We must stop being outraged as to why did the police shoot and kill one of our community when he was being chased while commiting a crime, and start being outraged as to why he was commiting the crime in the 1st place.
We have to start asking why are we the ONLY community, that takes actions like stealing, using illegal firearms, commiting crimes, beating and disrespecting our women, selling drugs and so on. Then we take those actions,put them to music and dance to them? When no other community does that.
We have to start paying attention to our leaders, and stop re-electing them just because their black. We have people that are so called "Black Community leaders" that get convicted of crimes, go to prison, and then we re-elect those same people. We have to start to understand that just because someone is black doesn't mean they have our best interest as their number one priority. We must start holding our leaders accountable for their actions,chose leaders according to character and not skin color, then vote accordingly.
If yo ask me he's (Bill Cosby) finally a black person thats actually talking to his community in a realistic, pull-no-punches manor. If the younger black males that are born and raised here in America would listen to and take his outrage, and questions as theirs, then there would be some positive changes starting to be made in the black community.
Cosby went on to talk about black men denying their children, and black women giving birth at ages when they themselves are still children is at epidemic perportions, in their communities, and they have to change this way of thinking. (Yeaaaaaa!!!) Finally someone talking sense.
I heard a comidian of color once say something to same effect. He was saying, "If you think there isn't a difference between black and white communities, youre crazy.
If you drive down a steet in a white community, nobody comes running up to your car trying to sell you drugs, but they do that in the black communities. White people keep it behind closed doors. Then you all wonder why there are so many more blacks in jail than whites?". Damn at least throw some shade on your shit. Right?
Chris Rock, in his comedy routine about "Niggers -VS- Blacks" isn't anything new to me. I can remember my Father saying that to me as a child. "Bruce, there are Black people, and there are Niggers" he used to say. "There is nothing wrong with black people, but its the niggers you have to watch out for". Now Chris Rock made an old cliche famous. He said, "When I'm at an ATM, and I'm looking over my shoulder, I'm looking for niggers, not for the media, you all say to me, "Its the media that perpetuates things like that" but no it isn't", I'm not affraid of the media running up behind me and taking my money, it's niggers that do that, not the media".
Any comments about such things? Please E-mail Me. and I'll post it, or you can write in my guest book.
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