Hash and ecstasy should not be illegal

Celebrity racehorse owner John Magnier of Coolmore Stud and his associates won’t have been aware of the maltreatment of residents of care homes run by their UK company Castlebeck until the truth was revealed by BBC’s Panorama on June 1.

Attitudes to residents of Castlebeck’s Winterbourne View home in Bristol were encapsulated in film of a member of staff jeering at a woman with learning difficulties whom he’d just slapped: “Would you like me to get a razor and cut you up? You like that?”
On the Saturday after the programme aired, the Coolmore group saw their colt Pour Moi win the Epsom Derby. I wonder if it occurred to them as they stroked Pour Moi’s sweat-streaked rump afterwards that they’d never allow one of their horses to be treated in the way they now knew some of the residents of their care homes had been treated.

Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Paul Volcker and ex-presidents of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Switzerland are among the 19 members of a global commission calling for the legalisation of cannabis and ecstasy.
The commission estimates that over the past decade, world opiate consumption has risen by more than a third, and cocaine and cannabis use by 27 percent and 8.5 percent respectively.
Morality and civil rights considerations apart, the drugs laws demonstrably don’t work.
Distribution of drugs is left in the hands of criminal gangs, each with no means other than violence to defend its territory. The result is murder on the streets of Dublin and spiralling violence across Latin America and the slums of the underdeveloped world. Mexico’s war on drugs has seen 38,000 deaths in five years.
The figures are to be compared with the UN estimate of 8,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan in the last four years.
The main reason this death toll doesn’t excite greater concern is that virtually all of the victims are drawn from the lower reaches of society.
But still, legislators, including in Ireland, obdurately refuse even to contemplate reclassifying cannabis and ecstasy. There is no evidence of any sort to justify this stance. It is rooted in ignorance, prejudice and political cowardice.

The former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed El Baradei says that he has not seen “a shred of evidence” that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.
The last two US National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) have found “no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.”
Lieutenant General James Clapper, director of the intelligence unit which compiles NIE reports, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this year that he had “a high level of confidence” that Iran has not re-started a nuclear weapons programme.
A retired senior intelligence officer has told the New Yorker: “None of our efforts – informants, penetrations, planting of sensors – leads to a bomb.”
Israel’s just-retired spy chief, Meir Dagan, said in January that Iran didn’t have the capacity, even if it were so minded, to begin a nuclear weapons programme before 2015.
Yet in the same month, British Defence Minister Liam Fox told the Commons that “it is entirely possible” that Iran would have nuclear capability by next year.
In March, Hillary Clinton’s Chief Adviser on Arms Control, Robert Einhorn, declared that the Iranians “are clearly acquiring all the necessary elements of a nuclear-weapons capability.”
The Senate’s leading advocate for Israel, Joseph Lieberman, told Agence France-Presse in April that, “It’s pretty clear that they’re (Iran) continuing to work seriously on a nuclear-weapons program.”
All of the intelligence information says it’s not so. But the politicians pushing for war and the commentators cheering them on aren’t impressed by mere truth.
This is where we were in the months leading up to the blitz on Iraq.

Here we go, here we go, here we go.
So scrub my skin with women
Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Iran.

Play it at proper volume and And So I Watch You From Afar’s Gangs will split your head open and gush blood from your ears. Chunks of sound flung into your face like slabs of stone, riffs to ram you against the wall, melodies woven from hawsers of steel, the drummer twirls sledgehammers to thud out a rhythm for the hobnail stomp: herewith the rumble of apocalypse approaching.
It’s also thoughtfully paced so you can pick yourself up for respite and recharge before breathing a lungful and plunging back in.
Its intricacies judder slowly to the surface to seep into dangerously delicate patterns.
“Homes - Samara to Belfast” is an anthem of epic grandeur, “Think:Breathe:Destroy” a tangle of guitar lines that ominously unravel, “BEAUTIFULUNIVERSEMASTERCHAMPION” a scrunch-fest of angry vindication.
Some of it listened closely tends to rumination. Some of it is suddenly as sweet as the eyes of a child. Some of it roars like madness, some holds the howl in, all of it aimed at the heart, like a dagger.
And it has the best song titles ever: “Search:Party:Animal”, “7 Billion People All Alive At Once”, “Homes – Ghost Parlor”.
Rock and roll.