Nigel Farage on Drug Prohibition

Any Questions, 2^nd April 2010:

“I have a feeling that prohibition in this whole area simply isn’t working. Every year we say that we are going to fight the war on drugs harder than we have fought it the year before. And I think this is one of those areas of life, and, whilst people may find this distasteful, I think we need a proper full Royal Commission on this whole area of drugs to investigate whether perhaps life might be better for millions of people living on council estates that are dominated by the drugs dealers, that are dominated by the crime that surrounds, the money that people raise, to get these drugs, let’s find out through a Royal Commission whether perhaps we should decriminalise drugs, whether we should license them, license the users, and sell them at Boots – because frankly if you add up the costs of drugs to society the big problem is the fact that they’re criminal and everything that goes with that. And I think there is an argument that says if we decriminalised it we would make the lives of millions of people far better than they are today.”

No comment needed!

Fifteen Benefits of the War on Drugs

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/content/17612
Fifteen Benefits of the War on Drugs

With American drug use levels essentially the same as — and levels of drug-related violence either the same as or lower than — those in countries like the Netherlands with liberal drug laws, public support for the War on Drugs appears to be faltering. This was most recently evidenced in the victory of major drug decriminalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington. Some misguided commentators go so far as to say the Drug War is “a failure.” Here, to set the record straight, are fifteen ways in which it is a resounding success:

The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom

by Norman Horn
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thelibertarianstandard/~3/HGo3edYIeTA/
The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom

Book review of The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom by Laurence Vance. Vance Publications, 2012. Orlando, FL. $9.95 at Amazon.com. Cross-posted from LibertarianChristians.com.

To many newcomers to libertarian ideas – especially Christians – it is not always perfectly clear why libertarians oppose the War on Drugs so strenuously. Some Christians even think that the only reason libertarians oppose government prohibition is so that they can get high legally. Nothing could be further from the truth. Simply put, we despise government prohibition because it is a power no government should have. Moreover, the War on Drugs is an incredible example of precisely how a government usurps liberty, destroys lives, and consolidates power unto itself. This short book by Dr. Laurence Vance, writer at LCC, LewRockwell.com, Mises.org, and the Future of Freedom Foundation, explains in great detail why everyone should oppose the War on Drugs .

American Drugs in Egyptian Mummies

Note: This has no obvious connection with the work of the Libertarian Alliance. But it is undeniably interesting. The scale of the findings suggests local sources of the drugs in question. I find it unlikely that that there was a regular trade between the Old World and the New. Occasional contacts are not inconceivable. But the regular trade needed to explain how many bodies are soaked in nicotine and cocaine is neither likely, given the kind of ships available, nor recorded in any of the literature.

Of course, it might have been those Space Gods at work….SIG

American Drugs in Egyptian Mummies
S. A. Wells
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy.htm

Abstract:

       The recent findings of cocaine, nicotine, and hashish in Egyptian mummies by Balabanova et. al. have been  criticized on grounds that: contamination of the mummies may have occurred, improper techniques may have been used, chemical decomposition may have produced the compounds in question, recent mummies of drug users were mistakenly evaluated, that no similar cases are known of such compounds in long-dead bodies, and especially that pre-Columbian transoceanic voyages are highly speculative.  These criticisms are each discussed in turn.  Balabanova et. al. are shown to have used and confirmed their findings with accepted methods.  The possibility of the compounds being byproducts of decomposition is shown to be without precedent and highly unlikely.  The possibility that the researchers made evaluations from  faked mummies of recent drug users is shown to be highly unlikely in almost all cases.  Several additional cases of identified American drugs in mummies are discussed.  Additionally, it is shown that significant evidence exists for contact with the Americas in pre-Columbian times.  It is determined that the original findings are supported by substantial evidence despite the initial criticisms.

The Real Summit of the Americas Scandal

by Thomas Knapp
http://c4ss.org/?p=10160

To call the Summit of the Americas “prostitution scandal,” in which at least 23 US Secret Service and military personnel are now “implicated,” a tempest in a teapot is to vastly over-estimate its impact and importance.

The “War on Drugs” is Really a War on You

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=8757

Hardly a week goes by without me seeing another think piece on the question: “Are we winning the war on drugs?”

Pig Flu and the “Expert Advice”: Plutocracy in Action

 

Conflicts of interest and pandemic flu

WHO must act now to restore its credibility, and Europe should legislate

The world should of course be thankful that the 2009 influenza A/H1N1 pandemic proved such a damp squib. With so many fewer lives lost than had been predicted, it almost seems ungrateful to carp about the cost. But carp we must because the cost has been huge. Some countries—notably Poland—declined to join the panic buying of vaccines and antivirals triggered when the World Health Organization declared the pandemic a year ago this week. However, countries like France and the United Kingdom who have stockpiled drugs and vaccines are now busy unpicking vaccine contracts, selling unused vaccine to other countries, and sitting on huge piles of unused oseltamivir. Meanwhile drug companies have banked vast profits—$7bn (£4.8bn; 5.7bn) to $10bn from vaccines alone according to investment bank JP Morgan.¹ Given the scale of public cost and private profit, it would seem important to know that WHO’s key decisions were free from commercial influence.

An investigation by the BMJ and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, published this week (doi:10.1136/bmj.c2912), finds that this was far from the case.² As reported by Deborah Cohen and Philip Carter, some of the experts advising WHO on the pandemic had declarable financial ties with drug companies that were producing antivirals and influenza vaccines. As an example, WHO’s guidance on the use of antivirals in a pandemic was authored by an influenza expert who at the same time was receiving payments from Roche, the manufacturer of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), for consultancy work and lecturing. Although most of the experts consulted by WHO made no secret of their industry ties in other settings, WHO itself has so far declined to explain to what extent it knew about these conflicts of interest or how it managed them.

This lack of transparency is compounded by the existence of a secret "emergency committee," which advised the director general Margaret Chan on when to declare the pandemic—a decision that triggered costly pre-established vaccine contracts around the world. Curiously, the names of the 16 committee members are known only to people within WHO.

Cohen and Carter’s findings resonate with those of other investigations, most notably an inquiry by the Council of Europe, which reports this week and is extremely critical of WHO.¹ It concludes that decision making around the influenza A/H1N1 crisis has been lacking in transparency.

One of its chief protagonists is Paul Flynn, a UK member of parliament and a member of the council’s Parliamentary Assembly. He and others raised concerns last year about the lack of evidence to justify the scale of the international response to H1N1 (as also covered in the BMJ in December³), and the lack of transparency around the decision making process for declaring the pandemic.¹

WHO’s response to these concerns has been disappointing. Although Margaret Chan has ordered an inquiry and WHO has stressed its commitment to transparency, her office has turned down requests to clear up concerns about potential conflicts of interest.² And at a hearing of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly in January, WHO denied any industry influence on the scientific advice it received.¹ Such a knee jerk defence before the facts were known may come to haunt the organisation.

This response is also disappointing given WHO’s track record of standing up to industry. In the late 1970s WHO sparked two iconic clashes with multinational companies over the marketing of breast milk substitutes in the developing world and the setting up of the Essential Drugs Programme.⁴ Both issues set WHO at loggerheads with the United States where these industries had major holdings. Partly in response to WHO’s position, America withdrew contributions to WHO’s budget.

More recently, in 1999, when the forced disclosure of confidential tobacco industry documents alerted WHO to possible interference in its anti-tobacco activities, its then director general Gro Harlem Brundtland quickly set up an independent inquiry. She then published and press released its shocking findings—of an elaborate industry funded campaign to undermine WHO—without any attempt at interference or spin.⁵ The report recommended that all staff, consultants, temporary advisers, and members of expert committees should be required to declare their conflicts of interest, with well enforced penalties for those who failed to do so.⁶

As Cohen and Carter report, WHO subsequently published in 2003 new rules on managing conflicts of interest. These recommended that people with a conflict of interest should not be involved in the part of the discussion or the piece of work affected by that interest or, in certain circumstances, that they should not participate in the relevant discussion or work at all.⁷ WHO seems not to have followed its own rules for the decision making around the pandemic.

WHO will not be the only body to come under scrutiny for its handling of the pandemic. The coming months will see a spate of reports, from the European Commission, the European Parliament, and from national bodies including the French Senate, and the UK’s Cabinet Office. This soul searching takes place against a backdrop of hardening attitudes to conflicts of interest around the world. Last year’s report from the Institute of Medicine⁸ has been followed by new guidance from groups such as the World Association of Medical Editors⁹ and the American College of Chest Physicians,¹⁰ which stress that declaration alone is no longer enough. To quote the Institute of Medicine report, "Disclosure is the essential though limited first step in identifying and responding to conflicts of interest." The big question is what to do about the conflicts.

On the basis of our own investigation and those of others, the answer is now inescapable. As Barbara Mintzes says in Cohen and Carter’s report, "No one should be on a committee developing guidelines if they have links to companies that either produce a product—vaccine or drug—or a medical device or test for a disease." The same, and more, must apply to committees making major decisions on public health. Where entirely independent experts are hard to find, experts who are involved with industry could be consulted but should be excluded from decision making. The United States has made important progress with its Sunshine Act and other legislation. European legislation on managing conflicts of interest is long overdue.

As for WHO, its credibility has been badly damaged. Recovery will be fastest if it publishes its own report without delay or defensive comment; makes public the membership and conflicts of interest of its emergency committee; and develops, commits to, and monitors stricter rules of engagement with industry that keep commercial influence away from its decision making.

In a briefing at the end of last year, a spokesperson for WHO said, "Given the discrepancy between what was expected [from the pandemic] and what has happened, a search for ulterior motives on the part of WHO and its scientific advisors is understandable, though without justification."¹¹ The implication is that, had there been a huge death toll, the process behind WHO’s decision making would not have been subject to such scrutiny. This is almost certainly true. But it does not mean that we are wrong to ask hard questions. Neither does it make the answers we have found any less troubling. And nor does it remove from WHO the urgent need to restore its credibility and public trust before the next pandemic comes along.

Cite this as: BMJ 2010;340:c2947

Conflicts of interest and pandemic flu — Godlee 340: c2947 — BMJ

Libertarian Alliance Statement on the New British Government

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 193
16th May 2010
Linking url: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc193.htm
Available for debate on LA Blog at  http://wp.me/p29oR-3p4

Two Cheers for the Coalition:
The Libertarian Alliance on the New British Government
By Sean Gabb

I have been asked, as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, to make a response to the forming of a coalition government last week in Britain by the Conservative and Liberal Parties. In making this response, I do not claim to speak in every detail for the other members of the Executive Committee. But what I will say is broadly the opinion of the majority.

Briefly put, we welcome the new Government. However dishonest the individual Ministers may be, however bad may be their ideological motivations, we believe that, in its overall effects, this Government may, by its own compound nature, be compelled to move the country in a more libertarian direction. We understand the dejection of our conservative friends. These regard the Coalition as a disaster. They were hoping for a Conservative Government led by conservatives. Instead, they have a coalition government that will not withdraw from the European Union, will be easily as politically correct as Labour, and that will push forward the Green agenda regardless of cost and regardless of the scientific evidence. This seems a fair assessment of how our new masters at least want to behave. Nevertheless, we believe that the Coalition – assuming it can hold together – is immeasurably an improvement on the Blair and Brown Governments that went before it, and that it may even be rather good. We may find much that is objectionable, and we have no doubt that there will be more. But there is no point in denying that we are quietly pleased.

The worst possible outcome of the general election would have been another Labour majority. The Blair and Brown Governments had created a police state at home, and had involved us abroad in at least three wars of military aggression. They had on their hands the blood of perhaps a million innocents. That had turned the police and most of the administration into arms of the Labour Party. They had doubled, or tripled, or quadrupled, the national debt – no one seems to be quite sure by how much, but the debt has undoubtedly exploded. Though lavishing huge taxpayer subsidies on the Celtic nations, they were far advanced to destroying England as any kind of recognisable nation. Their commitment to the European Union was solely for a procedural device for ruling by decree. They had abolished habeas corpus and the protections against double jeopardy. They were working to abolish trial by jury. It is impossible to find any other government in British – or, before then, in English – history that had destroyed so comprehensively and so deliberately in so short a time. When I saw that Labour had lost its majority, I rejoiced. When I thought it might cling to power in some coalition of the losers, I trembled. When Gordon Brown finally resigned, I opened a bottle of champagne

Nor, however, would we have welcomed a Conservative majority. David Cameron is – unless constrained – an arrogant and untrustworthy creature. Our conservative friends may have expected much of him. Or they may have thought they could extract much from him. But they were always deluding themselves. We knew, from the way he slithered out of his promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, that he had no intention of looking at British Membership of the European Union. We knew that he would never lift a finger against coercive multiculturalism, and that he would drive on the Green agenda. In these respects, a Conservative Government would have been no different in its actions – rhetoric being another matter – than the actual Coalition Government will be.

From our point of view, indeed, a Conservative majority would have been far worse than the Coalition. The Conservatives had promised to roll back much of the Labour police state. They promised to scrap identity cards and the national identity register. They promised to look at the thousands of new criminal offences created since 1997, and to restore many of the procedural rights taken away by Labour. We always regarded these promises as worthless. Conservatives – Thatcherite or Cameronian – have never had much commitment to civil liberties. They know something about economics, and have some regard for the national interest. But they have never been enthusiastic about substantive freedom and its procedural safeguards. If they denounce police states, it is usually because they think the wrong people are in control of them. The Labour police state, after all, was built on foundations laid down by the preceding Conservative Governments. The commitments on civil liberties were simply intended as bargaining counters between Mr Cameron and his traditionalist wing. He would deny his traditionalists any shift in European policy. He would buy them off by shelving the abolition of identity cards, and by cancelling any efforts to bring the police and bureaucracy back under the rule of law.

And an outright Conservative win would have strengthened Mr Cameron’s position within the Party, and the position of all the worthless young men and women who had attached themselves to him. They would have regarded this as a mandate for their own remodelling of the Conservative Party. The purges and centralised control that began when Mr Cameron took over would have been carried ruthlessly forward.

But, thanks to his general dishonesty and to the particular incompetence of his election campaign, Mr Cameron did not get his majority. Instead of being carried in shoulder high, he and his friends were forced to crawl naked on their bellies into Downing Street. He was forced to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. These, to be sure, are not as liberal or democratic as they like to claim. Their belief in liberty is often little more than political correctness. Many of them are state socialists. Their cooperation with the Brown Government to deny us our promised referendum on the European Constitution shows what they think of voting when its result might not go their own way. No one can blame them for threatening Mr Cameron that they would go into coalition with Labour if he did not give them what they wanted. But we can doubt the sanity and goodness of those who continue regretting that there was no “progressive” coalition – a coalition, that is, with tyrants and murderers. Even so, the Coalition Government has now been formed; and there is some chance that it may compel each party to behave better than either might have by itself.

There probably will now be a considerable rolling back of the Labour police state. Identity cards and the national identity register will almost certainly go. We do not believe that the extension of detention without charge will be formally reversed. But we do believe that it will be surrounded with safeguards that effectively reverse it. We hope it will be the same with juryless trials and the DNA database, and with police powers in general. There will be at least a limited return to freedom of speech as it was enjoyed before 1997, and of the right to peaceful protest, and of security of our homes from arbitrary searches and seizures. As said, we never believed any of the Conservative assurances about civil liberties. But the Liberal Democrats will demand their full implementation – plus a little more. They will demand this to settle their own consciences for supporting cuts in government spending.

Turning to the economy, here as well the Coalition may do good work. The Labour Ministers never understood economics. They were fundamentally Marxists in expensive suits. Intellectually, they never appreciated the nexus of individual choices that is market freedom as other than some aggregated box called “The Economy” into which they could dip as they pleased. What they described as their promotion of enterprise never went beyond trading favours with big business.

The Conservatives and many of the Liberal Democrats do seem to understand economics. They know that taxes and government spending are both too high, and that the objects of government spending are often malign. They believe not only that the current nature and scale of government activity is unaffordable, but also that it is immoral. They will deregulate.

Now, economics was always the Conservative strong point, and it may be thought that the Liberal Democrats have nothing of their own to offer. However, we in the Libertarian Alliance have never liked the Conservative approach to economic reform. Their tax cuts favoured the rich. Their deregulations turned those at the bottom into casualised serfs. Their privatisations turned state monopolies into income streams for their friends in big business. They were better in all these respects than Labour. But we are interested to see what the Liberal Democrats will now be able to contribute with their belief in raising tax thresholds for the poor at the expense of the rich, and their belief in mutual institutions to provide public services in place both of the State and of big business.

As for political reform, we hear the complaints of our conservative friends that the Constitution will be overthrown if the electoral system is changed, or if the lifetime of a Parliament is fixed. We are also astonished at these complaints. We are not about to suffer a revolution. We have already had a revolution. Since 1997, Labour has come close to destroying the whole constitutional settlement of this country as it emerged after 1688. However unwise or evil it may have been to do this, it has been done, and there is no going back to the old order. We need a thorough reform of our political institutions to safeguard such liberty as we retain, or such liberty as may be returned to us. We see nothing wrong with any of the changes so far suggested.

Our conservative friends defend the current electoral system as ensuring “strong government”. We know what they really mean. Their fantasy is that they can stage some coup within the Conservative Party and then get a majority in Parliament on about a quarter of the total possible vote. We are still waiting for them to take over the Conservative Party. While waiting, we have endured thirty one years of strong – and usually disastrously bad – government. If neither the Conservative not Labour Parties had got a majority since 1983, it is hard to see how this country would be worse off than it is. It might easily be better.

Another objection we hear to electoral reform is that it would put the Liberal Democrats permanently into government. This claim is based on the assumption that the three main parties would continue in being. In truth, all of these parties are diverse coalitions brought together by history and kept together by the iron logic of the first-past-the-post system. Give us some less random – or perhaps less biased – correlation of seats in Parliament to votes cast, and all these parities will be gradually pulled apart, and their parts may then be recombined into more natural groupings.

We will not comment on the proposed fixed term to the current Parliament, or on the enhanced majority needed to bring down the Coalition. We understand that these proposals extend to this Parliament alone. If they are found to be convenient, they may continue by statute or by convention. If not, they will not continue. But these are not libertarian issues.

In conclusion, the Libertarian Alliance wants more – much more – than all this. We want the full relegalisation of drugs. We want the right to keep and bear arms for self-defence. We want complete freedom of speech and association, and this includes the right of consenting adults to free expression of their sexuality. We want the removal of all corporate privilege from the rich and well-connected. We want the poor to be given free opportunity to make themselves independent of both state welfare and wage labour. We want taxes and government spending cut back to where they stood before the Great War – and that is only a beginning. We believe in freedom in the fullest sense. The Coalition will not come close to giving us what we want.

Nevertheless, we do welcome what we have so far seen of the Coalition. Its nature may force both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to do better than either would have done given complete freedom. The Conservatives may be compelled to deliver on their civil liberties promises. The Liberal Democrats may be forced to think seriously about their mutualist leanings now that their preferred state socialist option is off the table. The British electorate is not a single creature. It is only a singular noun that describes several dozen million individuals and a system that allocates votes to seats almost randomly. But we can understand those who claim that the British people, in all their wisdom, have stood up at last and given themselves the very best government that was on offer.

NB—Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/ya4pzuh

Swine Flu Pandemic is Fake, German Magazine Reports

 

Swine Flu Pandemic is Fake, German Magazine Reports

A Libertarian Perspective on the National Health Service

by Sean Gabb

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 185
18th August 2009
Linking url: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc185.htm
|

The National Health Service:
A Libertarian Perspective
by Sean Gabb

 

 

 

During the past week, much of the English speaking world has been drawn into a debate on the merits of the National Health Service. For those unaware of this debate or its subject matter, I will say that the NHS, established in 1948, provides health care free at the point of use for everyone legally in the United Kingdom. It is paid for by the British State out of general taxation, and no account is taken, in treating patients, of how much they have paid or are likely to pay in taxes. The new American Government has proposed changes in the provision of health care that will move the American system to some extent in the direction of the British. This has been denounced by many Americans as a step towards an inherently sinister and inefficient system.

The debate has been joined by Daniel Hannan, one of the Conservative members of the European Parliament for the region in which I live. Speaking in America, he has said that to copy the British system would lead America towards bankruptcy “where we are now.”. He said further: “We have a system where the most salient facts of it you get huge waiting lists, you have bad survival rates and you would much rather fall ill in the US…. How amazing to me that a free people. . . should be contemplating, in peacetime, burdening themselves with a system like this that puts the power of life and death in a state bureaucracy.” ["Conservatives turn on MEP Daniel Hannan for anti-NHS tour in America”, The Times, London, 14th August 2009]

These comments have, with some mild dissent, united the British political media and political classes in denunciation. The Labour Government of Gordon Brown has leapt to defence of the NHS. The Conservatives have joined in. Mr Hannan finds himself an isolated figure, facing accusations that range from a lack of patriotism to something that approaches blasphemy. Indeed, except no one has yet issued a fatwa, he is almost the secular equivalent of Salman Rusdie in his gleeful sneering at what many in this country regard as an object of veneration. Now, I am sure that he can do without my support. Even so, the scandal that his behaviour has raised in this country gives me the opportunity for speaking, as a libertarian, on the legitimacy and on the merits of the NHS.

At the most fundamental level of analysis, legitimacy and merits have no connection with each other. The NHS is funded by compulsion. I am forced, as a taxpayer, to contribute to a system that provides health care of a kind and at costings that, given any choice in the matter, I would never accept for myself and those who look to me. I am also forced to pay towards the health care of strangers. I have no objection to charity. I try to be generous to those I know. I am prepared to be moderately generous even to those I do not know, and whom I might dislike if I did know them. But so far as I am compelled, paying for the health care of others cannot be described as charitable. It is as much an act of theft as if I were to be robbed in the street. The whole present system, therefore, is illegitimate. If it were, as we are continually assured, the “envy of the world”,my opinion would not alter. It is in itself unjust. I resent its existence in my country. I join with Mr Hannan in warning the Americans not to accept it for themselves.

This, however, is the most fundamental analysis, and no discussion can be regarded as complete without some examination of its merits. And in examining these, I fell an obligation to be as fair as possible. I will begin with the quality of health care provided by the NHS.

Here, I must dissent from much of the American condemnation. There is no doubt that the NHS is inefficient, and that it rations health care by waiting list and by explicit refusal to provide certain kinds of treatment to anyone, or by refusal to provide certain kinds of treatment to those deemed unlikely to benefit from them given their cost. But rationing in one form or another is inevitable to any system of health care. The demand for health care is unlimited. There is almost no one so ill that his life could not be prolonged, or his condition while alive not improved, by some expensive treatment. The problem is always at what cost. In a broadly private system, demand will be rationed by price. In the British system, it must be rationed by cost and benefit analyses undertaken by the doctors. It is easy for American critics to point to how long someone over here must wait to have his haemorrhoids cut out, or that he may be denied some drug that will put off or ease his death from cancer. But their own system is hardly perfect.

In attacking the British system, these critics seem to argue that their own is based on individual choice and free from any taint of collectivism. I am not an expert on the American system, but it does strike me as so heavily regulated and cartellised as to have little connection to a free market. The professional associations have worked to limit the numbers of doctors and nurses, even as they have obtained the exclusion of the unqualified from the provision of medical services. The drug companies benefit from patent laws and trade protections that raise the price of medicines far higher than in neighbouring countries. The insurance companies are regulated in the interests of medical suppliers. I am told that forty million Americans cannot afford health insurance premiums, and that millions more cannot afford what most would regard as appropriate cover. These people, I accept, are not denied all treatment. But the treatment they receive is often rather poor. Even those who can afford to pay as they go find that it can take years for new medicines or medical procedures to be allowed by the authorities. In particular, I am told that many dying of cancer cannot obtain adequate pain relief. It is legal for opiates to be prescribed in America. But the regulatory framework is so ferocious that many doctors are frightened to write out the prescriptions they otherwise would.

If I contrast what I am told about the American system with what I know from personal experience about the British, the NHS is not really that bad. In December 2007, my wife needed an emergency caesarean. This was performed by the NHS. At all times, we were kept informed of our options and our legal rights. I was allowed to stand beside my wife in the operating theatre. I was then allowed to sit with my wife and daughter until gone midnight. My wife spent the next few days in a room of her own, and was left to make as many calls from her mobile telephone as her work and family duties required. While there were visiting hours, I was allowed to come and go as I pleased. The quality of treatment was first class. Apart from the flowers and chocolates and bottles of wine that I chose to lavish on the medical staff when we left, there was no final bill for any of this. About ten years ago, the father of my best friend died of cancer. There may be more effective cancer treatments than the medical establishment prefers to see provided. But within the terms set by the medical establishment, he had excellent treatment. When all else had failed, he was allowed to die in peace under a broad umbrella of opiates. Another of my friends was diagnosed with prostate cancer about seven years ago. He is a university lecturer with a good enough knowledge of statistics to discuss his chances on an equal basis with the doctors. He remains well and has no complaints about the NHS.

Perhaps these cases are exceptional. I am discussing the experience of articulate, middle class people. We know what we should ask for and how to ask for it, and we know how to show gratitude when we get it. Perhaps I should think of the newspaper reports of people suffering needlessly in filthy, open wards. On the other hand, perhaps not. Those who get bad treatment from the NHS are mostly poor and ignorant people. I pity them. But they are the sort of people who would also suffer in the American system. I do not think the American critics are comparing like with like. They are holding up the best aspects of their own system with the worst of ours. They also do not seem to have noticed that increasing numbers of middle class people over here do have private health insurance. This gives us the ability to switch back and forth to the NHS as we find convenient. I am writing this article on a railway train. If there is a crash and I must be cut from the wreckage, I shall be taken to an NHS hospital and be stitched up and reset as well as anywhere in the world. If, on the other hand, there is no crash, but, somewhere between Tonbridge and Charing Cross, I suspect the beginnings of heart disease , I can use my insurance and be looked at by an expert within two days. If it turns out that I need an operation, this can be arranged within a few days more. If, on the other hand, I need continuous medication, I can present myself and my private case notes to my NHS general practitioner, who will then prescribe the relevant drugs at a heavily subsidised price.

I will add that the NHS is probably not unsustainable in the long term. It costs about £90 billion a year to run. But this is about eight per cent of gross domestic product, and is about half the American level. There are more doctors per head of population in Britain than in America. British life expectancy is higher than American. [Facts: "The brutal truth about America's healthcare", The Independent, London, 15th August 2009] And much of this budget is spent in ways that even slightly better management could reduce. I recall attending a speech that Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute gave in 1986. For reasons that I no longer recall, but found convincing at the time, he predicted that the NHS would collapse under its own weight within three years. That was not far off a quarter of a century ago. And the NHS is with us still.

This should not be taken as a defence of the NHS. I am simply pointing out that is is no worse on balance than the American system. They are differently organised and differently funded. Each has specific advantages and disadvantages. neither has much connection with a free market. In both countries, however, the middle classes are able to get very good health care. In both, the poor and ignorant do not. The NHS is not a bad institution relative to the American system. It is bad for other reasons – and these may be bad reasons that apply in some degree to the American system.

What is so fundamentally bad about the British system – its compulsory principle aside – is that it nearly abolishes individual control over health care. Compared with the system with which we entered the twentieth century, all real power is centralised into the hands of the professional bodies. A hundred years ago in this country, the market in medical services was decentralised and diverse. The professions themselves were lightly regulated. Most doctors lived on the fringes of genteel poverty. Many sold their services directly to clients – rather as lawyers and accountants do still. Others worked for charitable institutions. A few worked for the State, looking after the inmates of the workhouses. These were the two extremes of the market. The British population of a hundred years ago was about thirty million. Those who could afford to buy medical services directly numbered a few million. Those who relied on private charity or the workhouse numbered perhaps another few million. Those in between relied on private insurance. This was provided sometimes by employers, but mostly by friendly societies and trade unions. These were strongly working class organisations. They were autonomous of the State, and prized their autonomy. Their elected officials had the job of picking and choosing among doctors and other health professionals, and stating the conditions on which they would do business. By modern standards, it was a very basic system. Most people died in their fifties, and of conditions that are often no longer listed in the medical textbooks. Then again, medicine itself was only just into its really scientific phase, and England was, by our standards, a very poor country. But the system worked and was improving.

The growing state involvement in medicine that began with the National Insurance Act 1911, and culminated in the establishment of the NHS forty seven years later, was largely a power grab by the medical professions. Doctors were relieved of having to do business with ordinary working class people, and could deal instead with officials and politicians of their own class. These officials and politicians had their own status enhanced by the ability to spend vast amounts of the taxpayers’ money. For the rich and for increasing numbers of middle class people, choice remained – if at a cartellised price. For ordinary working people, however, medicine became something that was doled out by their betters. This was attended by a great increase in the quality of health care – though this was improvement felt in all other countries regardless of how it was financed. But the result here was a growing apathy among the working classes. Where health care was concerned, they were no long active clients, able and willing to negotiate for what they wanted. They were passive recipients. They paid through their taxes for what they received. But their only input was to vote for politicians who promised better funding or better management of a system that was now insulated from direct pressure.

This contributed immensely, I think, to the decay of free institutions in England. Freedom owes much to historic evolution and to paper guarantees. It owes far more to a people who are accustomed to take responsibility for their own lives. The main difference between us and our free ancestors is that, unlike them, we find ourselves trapped within a system that provides the amenities of life but over which we have no personal control. If we want light or heat, we must rely on vast networks of energy distribution that interlock with other vast networks of energy extraction and transport. If we want our life and property to be secured, we must rely on agencies that claim a monopoly of force and that are only formally accountable to us. And for most people, it is the same with health care. Whether public or private – and there may be little real difference behind the names – these vast, impersonal networks do encourage passivity in the face of authority. When everything but housing and food shopping is provided in this way for most or all of a population, it is no surprise if these people stop being sturdy, self-sufficient individuals, suspicious of the claims of government.

Add to this the fact that the NHS employs over a million people. It is not the only bureaucratic mass-employer in this country. But it is the largest. These institutions impose values of hierarchy and obedience on those within them that are hostile to liberty. People who are regimented in their working lives – and who do not rebel against this – will tend to accept regimentation in their private lives. They will accept it for themselves. They will vote for politicians who promise it for everyone. They will spread these values directly to others so far as they have contact with the public as providers of services.

Paragraph here deleted. I don’t withdraw from the position advanced, but feel that it is irrelevant to the main point of the essay

Certainly, we are lied to and oppressed in ways that English men and women before about 1940 would have thought unimaginable. Let me return to the NHS. Last month, while in Slovakia, I was called by the BBC to comment on the case of a young man denied a liver transplant on account of his drinking. I was supposed to denounce this as more NHS fascism. When the details were explained to me, I had to give a less forthright response. Apparently, this young man needed a liver transplant if he was to live. However, the doctors had told him that the transplant would have little chance of success unless he could stop drinking for six months. Because he was not able to give satisfactory guarantees, the doctors decided to give the liver to someone else. Undoubtedly, this was not a pleasant choice. Even so, there is a shortage of organs for transplant. And given that the NHS does not ration health care by price, this was the most rational use of resources. For all I know, private insurance companies in America make similar choices by way of setting premiums or authorising treatment.

But this is not the limit of how the NHS is coming to ration health care. Superficially analogous arguments are being used to regulate general lifestyle. For a generation now, the anti-smokers have been arguing that smokers place heavy additional costs on the NHS. The reply has always been easy. Whatever inflated figures are fabricated to show how much smokers cost, they never match the amount of extra taxes paid by smokers. And there is the alleged fact that smokers die younger, and so save on pensions and long term care. But facts never get in the way of an argument for oppression. And what began as an argument for higher taxes on tobacco has insensibly changed into an argument for the creeping prohibition of cigarettes.

Smoking bans are being justified on the grounds of saving money. And assuming the facts are as we are told – they are not, but let us assume they are – the argument may be a valid one, given the system we have in this country. The NHS involves a coerced pooling of risk. Given that the costs of the NHS are high and rising – and assuming that costs cannot be controlled by better management – it makes sense for those who spend our tax money to insist that those most likely to call on large amounts of that money should be required to change their lifestyles. Of course, by the same argument, homosexual acts should be recriminalised to reduce the incidence of AIDS and hepatitis, and all women over the age of forty should be sterilised to save on the costs of treating pregnancy complications. Equally, the athletic should be prevented from taking vigorous exercise, and  Asians should be forced to give up on spicy food. For the moment, political correctness stops these arguments from being put. But lifestyle regulation is a valid secondary principle to be derived from the primary principle of the NHS. Let there be a compulsory pooling of risk, and those who place themselves at higher than average risk become fair targets for oppression. Smokers and drinkers and the obese are current targets. It is only a matter of time before an increasingly degraded political culture allows other targets to be found.

I believe that similar calls for lifestyle regulations are being made in the United States. Many companies that contribute to the insurance premiums of their employees are already insisting on contractual agreements not to smoke or to drink excessively. Given that American political culture is hardly less degraded than our own – if for slightly different reasons and in different ways – this is a consideration for those Americans who oppose the changes currently proposed by their government.

Now, I have said what I, as a libertarian, dislike about the NHS. It should be plain what I am not proposing. But since misrepresentation of opinions is so common in any discussion of health care, let me be explicit. I believe that the NHS should be dismantled and replaced with a more diverse, private system. This does not mean that I want to cut off health care for millions of older people who have made no alternative arrangements. It also does not mean that I want to cut off state funding and leave the current system of cartellised and regulated health care otherwise unchanged. I believe in a radical attack on all state involvement in health care, and this includes an attack on all state-created and state-upheld monopoly in health care.

I believe that all drug patent laws should be repealed. These do nothing to encourage innovation, but are simply a means by which well-connected drug companies extract huge rents from the rest of us. I believe that there should be no controls on who can practise medicine. State regulation does less to weed out medical incompetence and fraud than to guarantee high incomes to middle class graduates who have learnt the approved techniques of medication. The common law of contract and torts is enough to deal with incompetence and fraud. I believe there should be no controls on the development and provision of medical products. The existing laws did not prevent Vioxx and Prozac from coming to market. Again, the common law is enough to ensure some standards of propriety. I believe there should be no controls on the advertising of medical products or services. The present restrictions simply prevent ordinary people from learning what options may be available to them. Again, the common law is all we need to deter inflated and fraudulent claims. I believe that everyone should have the right of self-medication. This means the right of any adult to walk into a pharmacy and, without showing any prescription, to buy whatever medical product he desires. If many people will buy and use recreational drugs, they can do that already if they know the right street corner – and it is not the business of the State to tell us how to live. Most people will have enough common sense to take some advice before swallowing or injecting their medications. The rest should have the right to experiment. If they fail, they will have themselves to blame. If they stumble across some truth so far unknown, they will deserve our thanks.

These reforms would bring down health care costs at once. They would also clear the way for the information technology revolution to transform the market in health care. I will not try to predict how all this will be funded, though it strikes me as reasonable that it will fall into the same pattern of direct payment, charity and voluntary mutual assurance as was common before the State took over. And when I speak of mutual assurance, I mean both for-profit insurers and not-for-profit organisations. The idea that only profit-seeking organisations are consistent with libertarianism is to take a shockingly arid view of the ideology. What libertarians should like about commerce is not its taste for profit but its distaste for compulsion. What legitimises markets, in libertarian terms, is that they are structures of voluntary association. This is what brings the friendly societies and much trade union activity, and so much of what in Victorian times was called “socialism” within the heritage of the modern libertarian movement. Health care reform should not be about providing yet more money-making opportunities for state-licensed professions and state-privileged corporations. It should be about disestablishing statist structures and allowing free people to associate for their mutual benefit. If some people make a lot of money from providing services that others want, good luck to them. But the key objective should be free association. Be assured – it will be the most solid foundation on which medical progress can rest.

I will repeat – cutting off state funding all at once, and leaving in place the present system of monopoly, would be cruelty and folly. It would easily result in a step away from liberty rather than towards it. But reducing this funding over several years, as part of a general attack on monopoly, would be a blessing, the fruits of which were plain even before it was complete.

And this would apply as much to America as to England. As said, the American system is hardly the sort of free market any libertarian would recognise. But if the Americans do follow our example, I agree with Mr Hannan that they would deserve to be pitied. Worse – we adopted our system before its faults had been fully realised. Anyone inclined to copy it now deserves as much contempt as pity.

NB—Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3

 

 

The Smoking Goons, by L. Neil Smith

 

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 523, June 14, 2009
Clearly, no nation with a Bill of Rights that includes
freedom of expression has any place anywhere for
anything even remotely like the FCC.

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The Smoking Goons
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

I haven’t smoked a cigarette since 1993, when I had two mild heart attacks and had to quit. Before then, I had smoked two packs a day for thirty years, having started back when I was a freshman in college.

I had enjoyed smoking and was sorry I had to quit. In my time, starting in 1964, I’d happily consumed Winstons, Salems, Camels, Luckies, Pall Malls, English Ovals, Half & Half, Parliaments, Kools, Malboros, Gaulois, and Gitanes. Mostly it was Marlboros. I was smoking Nate Shermans in an attempt to cut down (because they’re extremely good but very expensive even then), when I experienced the first of my infarctions. I may be the last individual alive ever to smoke Sweet Caporals.

When I first came to CSU in 1964, a pack of Winstons cost 35 cents and there was a little store near campus where you could buy Mexican cigarettes (not that kind of Mexican cigarettes) in pinstriped brown paper for 20 cents. I hadn’t paid attention to prices for a while, so you can imagine my surprise and horror when I was in a liquor store the other day and discovered that the price of a pack of smokes is now $4.76!

Now we hear that the Obama Administration, thanks largely to a round-heeled congress greedily spreading its legs to the proposition, and like the sanctimonious, hypocritical, power-hungry, dogwhistles that they truly are, will call upon the federal Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products as if they were narcotics, when the fact is that the FDA shouldn’t be regulating narcotics—and shouldn’t really exist at all, under the United States Constitution as written.

So much for the Democrats’ sympathy for the working poor who do most of the smoking in this culture. You union guys, remember this day.

Another day will come, sooner than you believe, when you will have to go to a government store, stand in a line, and when you finally reach the window, surrender your money, signature, and Social Security number to some slovenly-dressed bureaucrat smelling of sour, unwashed clothing, in exchange for a ten-pack of horrible-tasting generic cigarettes manufactured under the close supervision of the federal government.

As time goes on, they’ll want your fingerprints, DNA, and retinal scans, as well. As the filtered part of your cigarette grows longer, the part with tobacco will grow shorter. Ever see what they smoke in Russia?

It says here 21 percent of the American public smokes cigarettes. (I’d bet almost anything that the real number is higher; I’ve seen the same pollster lie about guns and the Vietnam war.) There being about 300,000,000 Americans, that means at least 63,000,000 of them smoke, a number comparable to that of gun owners, and half again the number of blacks or Hispanics, two minorities politicians pay close attention to.

The same pollsters say smokers are "too diffuse" a group to be useful to any party or individual candidate, and besides, most smokers say they want to quit. (That much is true; I spent most of my thirty smoking years saying I wanted to quit, and occasionally trying to, but it took the poleaxe of a heart attack to make me do it for once and always.)

Another reason it’s hard to organize smokers is that government, media, and the schools have been making them feel guilty about their habit for three generations and now the Gang of Three has them by the nads. Guilt is a solitary affliction and keeps people apart from one another.

What smokers need is a smokers’ union—I’d join up in a minute, as a "smoker emeritus"—to identify their common interests , provide certain benefits, and put a finger on the disgusting politicians who prey on them. It might begin as a smokers’ caucus of the Libertarian Party.

However that turns out, if you smoke—if you ever smoked—I want you to pledge with me, right now, that you will never vote for another Democrat again, for as long as you live. They are the ones who did this to you—FDA regulation, $4.76 a pack, no smoking even in restaurants that would prefer to allow it, huddling in the broiling sun or freezing rain outside your office building trying to get a nicotine break—and they are the ones who must be forced to pay for it.

Vote for any Republicans or Libertarians who will treat you with respect. I’d be interested to see where Dr. Ron Paul stands on all this.

In the end, there can be only one resolution: abolish the Food and Drug Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, as well. Both have murdered more individuals than they claim to have saved. Neither is sanctioned by Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which makes them nothing but gangs of outlaws, bent on stealing our money and destroying the last tattered vestiges of our freedom.

Now if you’re gonna write to tell me smoking’s bad, or that people who do it—especially near kids and pets—should be castrated with a rusty chainsaw and baked in clay over a slow fire, save it. Better yet, stuff it. Having never been permitted to hear half of all the facts about tobacco, you are operating out of ignorance. Check out the connections it has historically with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and asthma. Whatever the truth may be, my life is none of the government’s business.

How about it, smokers? You can get it started in our letters column.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world’s foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of more than 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.
Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil’s 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas is currently running as a free weekly serial at www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?page_id=53
Neil is presently at work on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on What Libertarians Believe with his daughter, Rylla.
See stunning full-color graphic-novelizations of The Probability Broach and Roswell, Texas which feature the art of Scott Bieser at www.BigHeadPress.com Dead-tree versions may be had through the publisher, or at http://www.Amazon.com where you will also find Phoenix Pick editions of some of Neil’s earlier novels.

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The Smoking Goons, by L. Neil Smith

Acid House Parties Against the Lifestyle Police and the Safety Nazis

David Davis

I was alerted to this by Brian Micklethwait writing on Samizdata just now. Guido was a great writer of tracts long before scumbags like Damian McBride and Derek Draper were out of their pre-Enemy-Class-nappies, so to speak.

Probably Gordon Brown could not organise an Acid House Party even if he tried.

Brian “gets” the importance of what Guido has done, more than probably any other blogger at this time – to say nothing of the MSM. He also helps us understand that Guido is not “nihilist” or “right wing” – certainly not that latter calumny for sure! The Enemy Class just can’t yet understand what it means to be “anti-politics” – which is to say, “against the destruction of proper discursive politics conducted in a Classical liberal tradition.

There would never probably have been an “anti-politics” front in “politics”, if politicians had not set out on the gramsco-FabiaNazi road they have latterly, in the last 120-odd-years, taken.

The NHS: new Libertarian Alliance series: “A Doctor writes”

David Rønnqvist

No more “bedside manner”?

 

Interpersonal altercations were the sort of thing that it was once judged could usually be left to be negotiated by the people concerned. Increasingly, however, minor disputes are coming to be seen as requiring layers and layers of bureaucratic management, changing the nature of the public services we receive and altering the once-pleasant feel of England as a country to live in. We have all heard of the use of home-school contracts in the state education system and of councils that refuse to take away rubbish where the bins cannot be pulled with two fingers. This sort of thing is becoming the norm across society, and I want to focus on how it is altering the National Health Service (NHS).

 

Doctors used to be esteemed for their bedside manner, but now often behave like faceless bureaucrats who could be working at public expense in any branch of government. I recently joined a new surgery and was very surprised to receive a Patient’s Agreement to sign, promising not be abusive to surgery staff. Apparently these forms are standard now. The covering letter stated that if I did not sign the form and return it within three weeks, I would be expelled from the practice. I wondered how this complied with the requirement under the farcical Patients’ Charter to be respectful to all patients and with the right of patients under the Charter to have a general practitioner. Such mission statements and charters tend to proliferate in the public sector precisely when conflict with members of the public is rising, and can probably be taken as backhanded admissions that such public bodies no longer treat members of the public with respect.

 

In itself the silly Patient’s Agreement is just a small thing, but family members working in the NHS confirm that the trend within the NHS is towards greater officiousness towards patients. A district nurse has told me that there are altercations every single week in her practice between district nurses and old-age pensioners in their own homes over the patients’ right to smoke. Apparently the NHS believes that all their staff have the right to work in a smoke-free environment. But, rather than leaving such a minor matter to individual negotiation, smoking in front of a district nurse is now sufficient justification for explusion from a practice. The same nurse told me that when she visits patients in pairs, the other nurse will frequently issue an peremptory order along the lines of “put that cigarette out immediately or you will be expelled from the practice”. Such issues “empower” the NHS staff to behave in a bureaucratic and officious manner. No longer are they required to show respect to their patients in their own homes by asking politely for the cigarette to be extinguished.

 

Another aspect of this agenda relates to “inappropriate” language or behaviour by patients. The same nurse told me about an occasion where a 90-year-old man being catheterised in his own home made an “inappropriate” joke. When other nurses at the practice found out, one of them put in an official complaint against the patient “on behalf” of the other nurse, leading the surgery to consider whether the 90-year-old should be listed as a potential abuser and placed on a list of patients who cannot be visited alone.

 

Despite the right to care under the Patients’ Charter, patients with “inappropriate” views may be denied care. There are a number of examples in the media where patients with “racist” views have been left without care in hospital corridors. This reminds me of how my dying grandfather, who went through World War II, became disoriented in his final days, and thought the Chinese nurse attending him was one of the “Japanese”. He thought the Imperial Japanese Army was attacking down the corridor. Nowadays, such comments by a less than lucid dying man could in some hospitals be seen as justification enough for denial of care.

 

Professional behaviour in the NHS requires that all patients are treated, regardless of any “offensive” language or behaviour on their part. Medical care is not something that should be withheld as a punishment for political views. Old soldiers who do not wish to be treated by certain medical staff may be violating the most sacred principles of the multicultural elite, but the issue should be treated pragmatically. Similarly, offensive comments by Islamic extremists, or anyone else, should not be used as an excuse to deny treatment, however satisfying the “fix” of moral superiority such a response would give the NHS bureaucrat involved.

 

I note that all surgeries are engaged in constant propaganda over violence against their staff-but I believe such violence is very rare in fact. The ambulance service has a list of homes where violence is feared-apparently 729 in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset-and are wondering whether to blacklist the homes or mandate the wearing of paramilitary jackets when summoned to those addresses. However, press reports make clear that the inflated number includes houses where staff have experienced “verbal abuse”. Only a minority of these people will have actually assaulted NHS staff. Some of the rest may have simply expressed anger at the treatment of their sick relatives or slow ambulance response times. A recent survey of around 1800 NHS staff by the NHS Security Management Service shows that 41% of NHS staff have experienced verbal abuse, but only 2% were physically abused.

 

I certainly do not believe that patients should be violent to staff, but knowledge of British society would confirm that violence to NHS staff is very rare. It may be that incredibly minor events are being classed as verbal or physical abuse today. Of those experiencing verbal abuse (in other words, an altercation of words they should be able to deal with themselves), only 54% reported it. An even greater percentage, 66%, of those physically abused did not report the attacks, confirming the view that in nearly all cases what is classed as “physical abuse” is of an incredibly minor nature.

 

I would expect that abusive or rude behaviour among patients is on the increase, but this is likely to be a reaction to the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the NHS. Contrary to the posters adorning surgery walls, serious violence to NHS staff is virtually unknown. It may be that smug bureaucratic behaviour on the part of the NHS is a reaction to perceptions of rude behaviour among patients. Patients dealt with poorly could become angry and emotional. NHS workers on the receiving end of abusiveness may call for increasingly peremptory bureaucratic controls on patients in a kind of vicious spiral.

 

It is difficult to know how to respond to the officiousness of NHS staff. Complaints or even polite comments pointing out the insulting assumptions in NHS literature would get nowhere. In the end, as the Libertarian Alliance has pointed out, the increase in bureaucratic jobs in the NHS tends to produce more and more bureaucratic initiatives. Cutting the state, or even giving the individual the ability, whether by vouchers or otherwise, to purchase healthcare would restore a sense of dignity to patients-after all, these people’s salaries are paid for out of the taxes that we pay!

 

---

See link at http://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/SecurityManagement/Documents/violence_towards_NHS_staff_from_the_public.pdf.

War on drugs

End it now, says liberal Conspiracy.

David Davis

We couldn’t agree more. Tip Guido.

Mexico coming undone at the seams: why ALL drugs should be legalised absolutely everywhere.

David Davis

We stand aghast, at the possibility of “military intervention by the USA” against – of all places – Mexico. We know that, since “drugs” are grown in Latin America, and since Mexico is in the way of their transfer to “Film Stars” and wannabes in British North America, where these things are officially illegal to have or trade, that therefore mexico will be on the road of transfer.

This is all very well and ought not to matter. Cars and lorries carrying cocaine and other stuff whose names I can’t remember ought to be able to cross Mexico as though it was anywhere. The problem arises because – and only because -  it is locally illegal to have, sell or use these substances, in the points of destination.

This has several effects:-

(1) It makes the substances themselves more desirable in the eyes of certain people. They will want it more because “The State” says they shouldn’t have any at all at all at all, for their own good at all at all at all .   Nsty useless Hollywood delinquents film stars will leak details of their use of it, and because they are pretty and shaggable (and that’s just the men) you will want to do it too, as you are sheeple because the liberals Stalinists have told you to become so.

(2) It makes it risky and unprofitable and demoralising, for legitimate businesses to supply the stuff. If you wozz an off-licence, would YOU want to supply cocaine to any willing buyer, if you got raided every week by the rozzers for doing it, and had your shop smashed up by them (rozzers) and were put in jug?

(3) It makes the risks of supplying it worthwhile, for shysters and hoods, who don’t mind having to shoulder the boring business of killing people including police and soldiers, in the course of securing their hold on the distribution of of their stuff, to you. The £5-a-day habit, if the stuff was legally sold through chemists even including the impost of State Taxation, becomes the £100-a-day habit if you have to buy it through hoods who have to insure themselves – at your cost -  for their own risk against both the State and against other hoods who want to compete, for what is really a rather small niche sector.

(4) it makes jobs for Police rozzers. Rozzers are inherently tormented people, who ought not to have got like that; they need psychiatric help, and quickly.  Just as you ought not to want to be a criminal, also you ought not to want to be a policeman in the 21st century: what does that desire say about you, and your morals, and world-view, as a person?

So the way forward is quite clear. ALL drugs have to be legalised, in all jurisdictions, preferably by yesterday. This will have a number of good effects:-

(1A) The “Police”, currently a pantomime collection of gamma-minus droids unfortunately increasingly supplied with real guns as opposed to things that shoot out a flag which says “bang”, and who are “employed” by their “states”  not in chasing real muggers, robbers, burglars and killers but in harrassing “drug dealers”, “motorists”, “paedophiles”, “racists”, “terrorists”, “non-payers of council tax”, “TV-license-evaders” and “climate-change-deniers”, will find that their workload is decreased alarmingly. We will “need” fewer of them. Good.

The main solution to civilisation’s ills is

fewer Laws,

and more and better people.

There may even be “calls for” “FEWER POLICE ON THE STREETS”. I think that in a civilised society, the police ought to be invisible: see poll below.

(2A) The use of “drugs”, which is to say substances currently classified as drugs”, by all people, will fall dramatically. or it may not: I do not know. But I think it will fall.

(3A) The legalisation of “drugs” will mean that Galxo-Smith-Klein, Schering-Plough, Ciba-Geigy, and all the others, will be abot to compete legally for whatever market they think they can get. Adverttisisng will be allowed. Advertising is the best way to garotte bad stuff fast. The purity and quality of products will thus rise, and the price will fall to the point where the “State” will come in.

(4A) The “State” will take a take. Where GSK wants to sell you your Ecstasy for 50p a go, via the chemist down the road in Shaky-street (PR8  . . . ) , the State will take £4 or so, making it about the price of 20 fags. What’s the point of going and doing crime, if it’s only that much? You can get it from your dosh you that get “on the sick”.

OK so the “State” wins, win-win in the short run. But it’s got to justify how it needs to spend so much less on policing, since there’s so much much less less petty crime going on down.

That in itself will be tremendous fun to watch.

SMOKING, health fascism, New Labour, and Children: two more reasons why you should smoke. And Keeley Hazell wants her little shops to stay open late.

UPDATE:- And Gordon Brown wants  __YOUR__  body…..

David Davis

We talked about this some months ago. Now also, you should smoke for the children, and also to keep up ZanuLieborg’s taxation-takings, so they can continue to dip their hands in the Till at the expense of poor-people who have nothing else much to lighten their miserable Nazi-jackbooted lives.

It is an absolute wonder, to me, that nobody else in the media-Glitterati can see that we are being marched, by jackbooted ThugNazis in our government, back to a pre-capitalist, neo-feudal society, that looks like anything pre-1381 – the date of the first bourgeois tax-revolt.

Ordinary common-or-garden Nazis were disarmingly frank and openly brutal, by comparison. They approached Mugabe’s PR skills, in fact.

Now  then….This caught my eye as the Firefox foxthingy animal-dooberry started to run just now.

What else is “to be sold under the counter” on direction from “ministers”, in due course?

Alcohol (causes death by driving), knives (kill people), tabloid newspapers and “Zoo” and “Nuts” (offend wimmin), FHM, pork (offends Moslems and contains cancer-causing chemicals), automobiles (pollute the planet), and we could all name more things that “dangerous”, “offensive” or risky in use.

You’d have thought that this junta, so keen on promoting the plight of “small shops” and “small businesses” would want to make it easier for them to sell gear to people, not harder. I don’t believe for a moment that !”ministers” who write and spout this stuff are unaware of its shining fascism: I think they mean it very, very sincerely and that they absolutely know that they can, must, and will force people to behave in defined ways predicated by themselves and theyr gramsco-Marxian “uni” Tutors. Just regard some of this blisteringly fascist prose:-

Tobacco products will be barred from display in shops despite fears it could hit small stores during the economic downturn.

The new restrictions come after an extensive consultation on measures to reduce the number of children who take up smoking and helping those already addicted to quit.

But ministers will not go as far as recommending all cigarette packaging be plain with only the brand name and health warnings printed on them.

Sales from vending machines will also be restricted as research has shown children can buy cigarettes from them easily even though they are supposed to be in places where shops owners and pub landlords can supervise them.

Experts are keen to build on the success of the ban on smoking in public places, introduced in England in July 2007, and the increase in the legal age to buy tobacco to 18.

The main opponents have been concerned at the impact on small businesses during the downturn and a surge in illegal tobacco smuggling into the UK.

Last night a Business Department source said: “We know that business has been resisting this but there are times when the consumer’s interest must outweigh that. We believe the public are with us on this move.

“We have asked smokers’ views on this too. There is no doubt that the vast majority want to quit.”

It was reported last month that Business Secretary Peter Mandelson was attempting to block the moves because of the effect on small newsagents and corner shops which rely on cigarette sales for up to a fifth of their custom.

Research has shown that children recognise many brands of cigarettes and prominent displays of products helps to reinforce their familiarisation which influences them to take up smoking. A study in California found children aged between 11 and 14 were 50 per cent more likely to smoke if they had been exposed to tobacco marketing in corner shops.

Shelves full of cigarettes also lure those trying to quit smoking into buying more packets or tempted those trying to quit to buy them, the Department of Health consultation said.

Almost a third of smokers thought removing cigarette displays would help them to give up.

The products will not necessarily have to be placed under the counter but should not be visible, ministers will say today.

It could mean that cigarette packets are covered, placed in a cupboard or a back room.

Launching the consultation in April, health minister Dawn Primarolo said: “It’s vital we get across the message to children that smoking is bad. If that means stripping out vending machines or removing cigarettes from behind the counter, I’m willing to do that.

“Children who smoke are putting their lives at risk and are more likely to die of cancer than people who start smoking later.”

Other countries have already banned the display of tobacco at the point of sale or are planning to do so including Iceland, Thailand, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway.

Latest figures show 22 per cent of adults smoke in England, which is down by 1.9m since 1998, and the Government is on target to reduce this to 21 per cent by 2010.

However almost 30 per cent of those in routine and manual jobs still smoke and rates are not dropping in this group as fast.

Smoking is one of the leading causes of early death and accounts for 87,000 deaths in England each year and smoking related illness costs the NHS £1.5bn a year to treat.

Among children nine per cent of 11 to 15-year-olds smoke regularly, rising to one fifth of teenagers aged 16 to 19. More than three in ten 20 to 24 year olds smoke, which is the highest of any age group.

And…I’m sure that Keeley Hazell would not want her little local shops, in Bromley, to go bust through lost ciggy-sales…the sales merely lost to the pushers, at £125 for 20 smacks! I’m not betting on it, but I’d guess the “street” price of 20 “Marlboro’s”, not legally manufactured by Philip Morris, at all, to be about £5 or £6 per spliff… and that’s for starters, until it gets more difficult to supply….

"Sorry I'm not allowed to smoke on film...."

More about capital punishment

David Davis

My esteemed LA colleague from Scotland wrote a piece the other day, here. This was, _inter alia_, referring to the issue of capital punishment as ought to be able to be inflicted on unfriendly intruders onto one’s property, none of whom can have one’s interests at heart while they are where they are.

He and I are both iffy about the possibility of the “State” being able to dispense such punichment. History shows that in almost all cases, we are right. This is of course, as everyone will agree, with the absolute exception of Britain and the British Empire and the Anglosphere. Elsewhere, this dispensation has been unsuccessful as the buggers-in-power have never been able to be trusted not to abuse such a delegated right. Or, indeed not to simply usurp that power unilaterally, for various spurious doctrinal Utopian reasons.

However, “polls” show a consistent majority of British people in favour of a return to capital punishment. This is all very well, but they want the wrong solution to the wrong problem, although they think currently that it’s the right solution to the right one.

The problem is that violent and “medium” crimes are out of control because the British socialist state does not want to reduce or control them. It is convenient for it to have a monopoly of force and power of arrest, and for no weapons of any consequence to be held by anyone who cowers in terror, which is most of us – excepting real criminals who don’t mind hurting people in the course of ordinary business.

This is excepting knives, which will be hard to eradicate and ban the possession of, given this British Socialist State’s obsession with forcing us all to eat what my wife calls “unprepared food” – that is to say, stuff that you have to peel and boil (without salt) or even grow, if you are unfortunate enough to be a farmer. Apart from knives, everything else has effetcively been cleared away from all those who most need the gear. I expect that compressed-air-weapons will be next. The number of staged “accidents” involving “boys” is rising.

The State made a contract to propect individuals from harm, crime and loss of property or llife, in return for us surrendering our right to exercise force in the defence of those rights. It has failed, and has signed away our right (delegated to it on our behalf) to kill serious evil-doers. I am therefore not (at this time) in favour of the death penalty returning, unless the reciprocal right to harm or even kill an assailant (vested in an individual) is returned to individuals.

Then, we can properly re-delegate the exercise of that right to a State, in absentia. but we can’t do that, unless we previously have that right ourselves. Discuss!

 

British Government “survey” of people’s sex lives, partners, children – living or dead – and incomes. What have these got to do with each other except as an extremely perverted form of coercive socialist pornography?

David Davis

The title says it all. Here’s the thingy in the Daily Torygraph. I believe the Mail on Sunday yesterday 20th April carried it as front-page.

It’s serious Political-Correctness gone sane.

Fully.

Logical-conclusion-stuff. 

(Wish it WOULD go mad, fall off a cliff, and die.)

Passive drinking …. here we go down to the cesspit again! Next, it will be “passive driving”. Wonder when we will have to admit to “passive sex” as a way of reducing “teenage pregnancy”?

David Davis

Here we go. The stalinist bastards have got out of bed before us, as ever (‘coz they izz boring turds who don’t write computer-games or run silicon-valley firms.) Perhaps we should design less comuter games, and have less long hair and lip-piercings; and instead carry more real guns and point them while loaded at bureaucrats who have no sense of humour.

Why don’t bureaucrats laugh at anythng? When did you last see a “public employee” laugh?

I though so.

Here’s some of it:-

 

The war on ‘passive drinking’

Posted by Bruno Waterfield on 17 Apr 2008  at 21:27 
Tags: Crime, EU, public health, Alcohol

 

European Union and United Nations officials are plotting to make drinking as socially unacceptable as smoking.

 

Your drink could endanger others, claim UN and EU officials

Hectoring campaigns over “passive smoking” are credited for Europe’s almost total smoking ban. Now alcohol is in the sights of the public health miserablists and they have invented the concept of “passive drinking” as their killer argument.

The Daily Mail takes up a report in New Scientist to trumpet a new “guilt campaign” that is heading our way. “The World Health Organisation’s global strategy will aim to match the success of campaigns which have made smokers feel guilty about the harm second-hand smoke does to others,” says the report.

Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians is wheeled on to confirm the new approach. “The tipping point for banning smoking in public places was third party damage,” he said.

The EU public health brigade are not far behind, in fact Brussels miserablists in the European Commission’s DG SANCO have been trying to poison the drinking debate with this new assault on reason for years.

I took up the EU “passive drinking” debate around two years ago in response to strident claims, in a Commission report, about the high environmental or social toll of alcohol, the “harm done by someone else’s drinking”.

“The total tangible cost of alcohol to EU society in 2003 was estimated to be €125bn (€79bn-€220bn), equivalent to 1.3 per cent GDP, and which is roughly the same value as that found recently for tobacco,” said the report written by Dr Peter Anderson, who has a background in the World Health Organisation (WHO) and who played a leading role in Tobacco Free Initiative Europe.

“The intangible costs show the value people place on pain, suffering and lost life that occurs due to the criminal, social and health harms caused by alcohol. In 2003 these were estimated to be €270bn, with other ways of valuing the same harms producing estimates between €150bn and €760bn.”

On Thursday, at an informal meeting of health ministers in Brdo, Slovenian Health Minister, Zofija Mazej Kukovič dusted off the report – and its language.

“Harmful and dangerous alcohol consumption causes more than seven per cent of the premature morbidity and mortality in our countries. The annual costs stemming from this have been estimated at as much as €125 billion for the EU as a whole. However, the harm caused by alcohol is still underestimated,” she said.

The figures are meant to be pretty scary. Drink is responsible for 2,000 homicides, four out of 10 of Europe’s annual murders. “The economic cost of alcohol-attributable crime has been estimated to be €33bn in the EU for 2003….while the intangible cost of the physical and psychological effects of crime has been valued at €9bn – €37bn,” said the Anderson report.

Children, too, are passive victims of drinking. “Many of the harms caused by alcohol are borne by people other than the drinker responsible. This includes 60,000 underweight births, as well as 16 per cent of child abuse and neglect, and five to nine million children in families adversely affected by alcohol,” says the EU report’s summary.

 

The link made by between alcohol and crime today, whether violence or child abuse or other social ills, follows not from hard facts but from an outlook that sees human characteristics as damaging in general. And if human beings, particularly when under the influence of stimulants, are destructive, then, the argument goes, social intervention must follow. The idea that almost any activity – drinking, eating, speaking, even thinking – can cause harm is often blown out of proportion and used to generate frightening figures and policies.

The sheer absurdity of the idea of “passive drinking” would be funny if the public health lobby was not so powerful and unpleasant. I found that in a twist of irony, probably lost on po-faced public health types, that the expression “passive drinking” seems to have originated as a spoof in two Peter Simple columns in the Daily Telegraph in 2002 and 2003, written by the late Michael Wharton.

Mocking the rise of nonsense research to justify social measures, he wrote about research work being carried out by “Dr Ron Hardware of Nerdley University”.

“They were the first to discover the scourge of ‘passive drinking’, showing by painstaking experiments and finely adjusted statistics that it was just as deadly as ‘passive smoking’ and equally capable of causing cancer and innumerable other ills,” he wrote.

It is no longer a joke or satire – do read more here on Spiked.

We need to stand up to these people.

Posted by Bruno Waterfield on 17 Apr 2008 at 21:27

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Judith Hatton RIP

Sean Gabb

It is with deep regret that I announce the death last Thursday the 10th April of Judith Hatton. She was for many years one of the most formidable defenders in our Movement of the right to smoke. One of her last achievements, indeed, was to advise the makers of the film Topsy Turvy on smoking habits in Victorian England. Thanks to her, this remarkable film is drenched in alcohol, nicotine and other recreational drugs. She turned a film about Gilbert and Sullivan into a window on how life was lived in a free country.

Her death is to be lamented. However, bearing in mind its great length, and its general richness, we ought much more to celebrate her life.