Wasted in Crewe

I doubt you would have been able to predict, a year or so ago, just how crap Papa Gordon was going to be. Northern Rock, the snap-election indecision, fuel prices, repossessions, scrapping the 10% tax rate, and ignoring the government's own experts and reclassifying bob hope, in order to "send a message". Ffs. They sent a message that they were like a mad Daily Mail reading uncle who you only see at Christmas and who gets on about blacks as Dad's whisky bottle takes a pummeling and your trying to watch telly.

This is something that has always puzzled me: why does the Establishment have such a downer on pot? Is it really the alcohol industry's lobbyists? This article suggests so, (thought I'd feel it was more cogent if the writer's keyboard hadn't lost its apostrophe). Anyone who's personally compared cannabis against prescribed anti-depression drugs might also be able to give you a clue to the Pharmaceutical industry's interest in keeping it outside the law, too.

That article also links in the loss of the Crewe and Nantwich by election to the reclassification debacle. I doubt that it had a significant effect there, but I would say that there are a large number of people who really know about dope and its effects and know that most of what we read about it in the popular press is simply bollocks.

Last September, briefly in between jobs and on a thankfully isolated visit to the dole in Jarrow, a large young man in leisure wear announced to the waiting claimants as he was turned down for a giro, laughing, "I'd kick off but I'm too fucking stoned!". The fucker needed something to get him through the day, and everyone there could be grateful he'd chosen a 'teenth over a half dozen cans of Stella. And after he'd gone home and had a snooze, he too would be grateful that he wasn't waking up in police custody with grazed knuckles and a nightmarish hangover.

So maybe this is what it all boils down to, Gordon's binge of arse-kissing and bankrolling big business is giving him a nasty hangover. Not that the Tories, or any other electable politicians, will do anything different, mind.

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