Entries tagged with drugs

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Party Party party

Yesterday, hacker-turned-Tantric-priest-turned-global-resilience-guru Vinay Gupta went on one of his better rants on Twitter. I've Storified it for your pleasure here. The gist was roughly

We don't have enough resources to give everyone a Western lifestyle.
Said lifestyle isn't actually very good at giving us the things which really make us happy.
We do, on the other hand, have the resources to throw a truly massive party and invite everyone in the world. Drugs - especially psychedelics - require very little to produce, and sex is basically free.

My favourite tweet of the stream was "Hello, I'm the Government Minister for Dancing, Getting High and Fucking. We're going to be extending opening hours and improving quality."

It strikes me that this is a fun thought experiment. Imagine: the Party Party has just swept to power on a platform of gettin' down and boogying. You have been put in charge of the newly-created Department of Dancing, Getting High and Fucking (hereinafter DDGHF)¹. Your remit is to ensure that people who want to dance, get high and/or have sex can do so as safely as possible and with minimal impact on others. What do you do, hotshot? What policies do you implement? What targets do you set? How do you measure your department's effectiveness? How do you recruit and train new DDGHF staff, and what kind of organisational culture do you try to create?

Use more than one sheet of paper if you need.

You have a reasonable amount of freedom here: in particular, I'm not going to require that you immediately legalise all drugs. You might even want to ban some that are currently legal, though if so, please explain why your version of Prohibition won't be a disaster like all the others. However, I think we can take it as read that the Party Party's manifesto commits to at least scaling back the War on Drugs.

Bonus points: how does the new broom affect other departments? How do we manage diplomatic relations with states that are less hedonically inclined? What are the Party Party's policies on poverty, the economy, defence and climate change?

I guess I should give ( my answer )

Edit: LJ seems to silently fail to post comments that are above a certain length, which is very irritating of it. Sorry about that! If your answer is too long, perhaps you could post it on your own blog and post a link to it here? Or split it up into multiple comments, of course.

¹ Only one Cabinet post for all three? I hear you ask. That's joined-up government for you. Feel free to create as many junior ministers as you think are merited.

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Mother Gin

A while back I read a book called Gin: the Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, from which I learned all kinds of interesting things about the Gin Craze (and parallel Gin Panic) in eighteenth-century London. I can't whole-heartedly recommend the book - it would have been better with fewer rhetorical flourishes and more serious analysis - but it should be required reading for anyone proposing measures aimed at cutting "binge drinking", or any other kind of drug abuse. Short version: whatever your idea is, they tried it in the eighteenth century, and it either didn't work or made the problem worse. Concentrate on fixing poverty instead.

One titbit that particularly surprised me was that it used to be common for workplaces to provide gin to their workers, with the cost of the gin being deducted from wages. No risk of being sacked for showing up drunk to work! However, I wonder if our descendants will feel the same about workplaces today which provide unfiltered Internet access to employees...

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NEDS Kru ft. the Wee Man

Do I like this because of my time in Glasgow, or because of my unexamined class privilege?

Ah, the hell with it, it's still funny.

NB: Real neds are harder to understand.

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(no subject)

I found a used syringe in the street today.

It presented me with an ethical dilemma: on the one hand, I didn't like the thought of some kid playing with it and getting hepatitis C or worse, but on the other, what was I supposed to do about it? I couldn't see any bins or anything nearby, and even if I could, what about the guys who empty the bins? Leaving it alone would have ensured that I was in no danger myself, but if we only ever did the right thing when it was easy or convenient then it would be a pretty poor world. In terms that occurred to me later, the First Law trumps the Third. No doubt this situation is covered in detail in Situations You're Expected to Know How to Deal With Now That You're a Grown-up ("Nothing under 'heroin' - try under 'needles'"), but my copy must have gone missing in the post on my eighteenth birthday because I never received it¹. In the end, I picked the syringe up carefully by the plunger end through a convenient newspaper (probably the first and only time I'll be grateful to litterers), wrapped it in a bit more newspaper, then carried it down to a nearby doctor's surgery and asked them to put it in their sharps bin for proper disposal. Then I washed my hands very thoroughly, even though I hadn't actually touched it at any point :-) The nurse suggested that in future I should leave it there or call the police, who'd have the correct protective gear. Seems like a waste of police time to me, I dunno.

What would you have done?

¹ Wouldn't that be a fantastic book, though? Section headings like "My friend's just come out to me", "It sounds like my neighbour's beating his/her spouse", "Someone's having an epileptic fit in front of me", "Someone I know is feeling suicidal", "I've just been arrested", "I've just got a threatening letter from the council demanding money for x", "My kitchen's crawling with ants", things like that. Obviously it couldn't cover every situation or give step-by-step instructions in all cases - being able to deal with situations as they arise is, as far as I can tell, the point of being an adult - but you could provide helpful advice and facts. The trouble is, who'd be qualified to write it?