Alfie Langer's drink-drive charge: Broncos' PR self-pwning

It was only a few hours ago that I read what I took to be a patently false piece of PR from the Brisbane Broncos published on the Courier Mail website following news of Brisbane Broncos rugby league player Allan 'Alfie' Langer being stood down following a drink driving charge.

The Brisbane Broncos will review rugby league legend Allan Langer's future at the club after he was charged with drink driving with an alleged blood alcohol level three times over the limit early today.

Police stopped Langer for a random breath test on South Pine Road at Everton Park, in Brisbane's north, around 1.40am on Monday, several hours after the Broncos' 48-16 loss to the Warriors.

[...]

The players didn't go drinking after Sunday's big loss.

It's believed Langer had dinner with his family after the game and was driving home to the Sunshine Coast where he lives at Pelican Waters when he was stopped for a random breath test.

As I said to Gam at the time, there were a number of holes in this lovely family-friendly scenario.

=================================

1. Langer was pulled over at 1:40am. Rather late to be finishing dinner with one's family, no?

2. He was presumably pulled over as the sole vehicle occupant (either that or he was drink-driving with his family in the car!). Why would he be heading home alone after a family dinner?

3. Whose family would let them drive home after having drinks with dinner?

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Not long afterwards, while watching news on the TV, we saw video of this:

Oh yes! Unfortunately it's not on YouTube yet... talk about having a piece of PR spin unravel at lightning speed!

Look over there! The media's war on drugs

One day we read about some idiot junkie-slash-'pseudo- runner' being thwarted from buying hayfever tablets at a hundred pharmacies by the fantastic electronic mapping system of 'Project STOP'. Let's be generous and say these are the strongest hayfever tablets available and contain 120mg of pseudoephedrine per tablet. Six tablets per packet (at $12 or so) equals 720mg of pseudoephedrine per packet. Allegedly these packets of hayfever tablets- Clarinase, Telfast decongestant, or whatever, fetch $100 on the black market.

The next day we read about former NSW top cop Mark Standen allegedly conspiring to import 600kg of pseudoephedrine. They never caught the shipment- it didn't show up in the container it was expected to show up in (and we're expected to believe it vanished into thin air, rather than that drug criminals were able to thwart authorities' efforts to prevent its entry into Australia... *cough*).

600kg of pure pseudoephedrine would equate to more than eight hundred and thirty three thousand packets of hayfever tablets.

And yet, every time I visit the chemist I'm treated like I'm the problem.

I get through one packet of hayfever tabs a week, on average. It would take me sixteen thousand years to amass the quantity of pseudoephedrine that Mark Standen is accused of conspiring to import. But I'm the one who gets asked "Do you know you bought a packet of Clarinase only one week ago?" (it's 12 hour Clarinase, six tablets will only last 3 days if my hayfever is bad!).

Are we supposed to believe that Mark Standen is the only man in Australia who has ever tried to import pseudoephedrine? What about all the guys who succeed and don't get busted? And yet the situation is continually painted as if it's sales of pseudoephedrine-containing medications for cold-and-flu and hayfever sufferers that need to be tackled. Not the illegal importation of tonnes of the pure drug every year.

"To date, we've stopped 26,000 packets of pseudoephedrine products leaving the store," said the scheme's co-creator, PGA Queensland manager of Innovation and Development, Shaun Singleton.

Yeah, and 20 000 of them are probably because of people like me who'd rather suffer through a bad episode of hayfever than go to the chemist only five or six days after their last purchase of the damn tablets and suffer the accusatory tone and compulsory cavity search that accompanies any purchase of the only drugs that work to dry up a streaming, runny nose that accompanies the incessant sneezing.

Taxpayers' money, via the Federal government is being poured into Project STOP when the project is essentially just a big fat publicity measure to allow them to pretend that they have scored a success in the 'war on drugs'. What a crock of shit, Shaun Singleton.

Eric Abetz spruiks alcopops

"Trust me, this stuff is like vitamin water for young girls! Hehehe"

I sent a link home from work so I could post about this, but CosmicJester beat me to it with a fine post on the story- our nation's slimiest senator, Eric Abetz, has been touting the benefits of alcopops. Yup, those poor-quality, sickly-sweet alcoholic beverages cure everything from hangovers to rape!

Gah!

So Michael Phelps likes to get high. Big fucking deal, that would make him exactly like all the alcohol drinking, ciggie smoking, prescription abusing people in the world. The only reason it's a big deal is that the fact that you can become the most successful olympian who ever lived AND hit the pipe on a regular basis blows a big hole in the 'don't try drugs because you will die' argument.

Illegal drugs aren't really that dangerous. Hollywood is filled with people who abuse cocaine and heroin every day and the occasional death involving drugs is more likely to involve prescription drug abuse, like Heath Ledger. In this list of notable drug deaths, the people NOT highlighted are probable unintentional drug deaths. This obviously doesn't include people who made medical conditions worse. Note the presence of alcohol and the TOTAL FUCKING ABSENCE of mary jane. Bad drugs, cut with god knows what, is what kills people. If you're a hollywood star you can afford top quality drugs which makes dying from them that much harder, just like how deaths from poorly distilled alcohol dropped when the prohibition ended in the US.

If anything all the tut tutters should STFU and be happy that Phelps picked an illegal drug that's safe as houses as opposed to the cocaine and heroin preferred by pretty much everyone who's supposed to be a 'role model' for kids. If Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan can still appear on magazines aimed at kids Phelps can still be a swimmer.

Queensland government cures the 'Ice Plague'

Me, attempting to buy Clarinase for hayfever relief under Stephen Robertson's super-dooper Pseudoephedrine Enforcement Taskforce.

Good news! Queensland's incompetent health minister Stephen Robertson, when not preoccupied by diminishing the seriousness of the lapses under his watch that led to the rape of a nurse in the Torres Strait, has been single-handedly stemming the flow of meth onto Queensland's streets. It is now no longer possible for anyone to buy meth, thanks to Stephen's crackdown on dodgy pharmacists. Hooray Stephen!

Meanwhile, with Ivory Curl trees in flower, my hayfever is at an all-time high. I'm forking out $10.95 for a 6 pack of Clarinase- $14.95 if I have to get it from the Taringa Day & Night Pharmacy that lasts me 3 days. I'm starting to wonder if it would be cheaper to have a meth habit instead of hayfever.

Having to go and buy this shit every 3 days instead of once a week means I have to endure the routine interrogation twice as often:

Q: "What are you taking this for?"

A: I'm a meth cook and I'm buying a six-tablet-pack of Clarinase within a 50km radius of here, because at >$2 a tablet it makes great economic sense to do so My hayfever.


Q: "Have you seen a doctor about it?"

A: No, I quite enjoy having hayfever so debilitating I can get through a 250-pack of tissues in one day. The sensation of having your face swollen and your nose and eyes running for hours, rendering you unable to complete any normal activities is something I highly recommend. I've never seen the need to ask a doctor if there's anything more I can do to cure it. Er, yes, many times.

Q: Can I have your licence, please?

A: Yup, here you go. Why yes, this doesn't make me feel like at all like a criminal rather than someone with a debilitating medical condition that requires a drug to control it in order that they may lead a somewhat normal life.

Today was just a great example of how well Stephen Robertson's system is working. I was in dire need of some Clarinase, so we walked to Toowong and I went to the Discount Drugstore, where I normally purchase it. They were out of stock, but the pharmacy assistant sold me a packet of Demazin, telling me it was pretty much the same, only I could take one every 6 hours instead of every 12 hours. My hayfever was so bad I didn't wait until we got home to take one- we bought a bottle of water in Coles and I swallowed a Demazin before we walked home.

Shortly after we got home, I became incredibly tired and passed out in bed for a couple of hours before Gam woke me. It took me another 15 minutes to drag myself out of bed- I was incredibly thirsty but felt unable to get up.

It was then that Gam asked me to check the pack of Demazin to find out whether the antihistamine it contained was one that induced drowsiness. It was. I know I should have read the packet before taking one, but I'm not always in the soundest frame of mind when I have bad hayfever. The pharmacy assistant had told me it was pretty much the same as Clarinase, except for the dosage instructions. Failing to mention that the antihistamine in Demazin, unlike the one in Clarinase, was one that induced drowsiness was a huge omission: antihistamines of the non-drowsy variety always knock me out cold.

Gam, not liking the idea that the only antihistamine-decongestant I had at my disposal was one that rendered me unconscious, drove us to the Taringa Day & Night, whereupon we had to repeat the whole interrogation- after the girl first told us they'd sold out then, when Gam made some disbelieving comment, went and found some. God knows whether daring to buy two medications containing pseudoephedrine in one day will place a red flag against my name in Stephen Robertson's stupid system and cause the interrogations to be even more irritating, humiliating and stressful in the future. I wonder whether the system persecutes pharmacists who don't see the need to make their customers feel like criminals before handing out a single 6-tablet-packet of a drug that is now about 3 times as expensive as it used to be before the government started this crap.

Thank god that at least we can all rest safe in the knowledge that there is no more Ice on Queensland streets.

She's right, but she's probably doomed

I agree with Dr Jeanette Young, Queensland's chief health officer, that alcohol company sponsorship of sporting events should be banned within 5 years:

Dr Jeannette Young said alcohol advertising had to be treated like tobacco advertising and should be totally eliminated from sports sponsorship over a number of years.

She said battling alcohol had to be done on three fronts; increasing prices, reducing alcohol advertising and "removing the glamour", in the same way tobacco advertising was reduced.

"Society has totally changed their view towards smoking and we have to do the same with alcohol," Dr Young said.

It's a shame that whatever government happens to be in power over the next 5 years, whether it's Bligh's Labor or the Borg's LNP, those same alcohol companies will be pulling strings with influential people in an attempt to have her relieved of her position.

Mercy!

Something I've known for a while is that there are two things in particular that make my chronic hayfever much, much worse: chocolate and alcohol. I hardly ever drink, so chocolate is obviously much more difficult to abstain from. Usually I pay for my transgressions the morning after I consume the offending food or beverage. Still, having just now had a glass of red wine and shared a bar of chocolate with Gam, I'm suffering an attack of fairly nasty hayfever, and it's rare for that to happen at night, even if I do eat a lot of chocolate. Coincidence, or could it be that I really can't tolerate wine any more?

So long, suckers!

I had to share this, just in case anyone missed it. Bloody hilarious.

Andrew Lahde, the hedge-fund manager who quit after posting an 870% gain last year, said farewell to clients in a letter that thanks stupid traders for making him rich and ends with a plea to legalize marijuana.

Lahde, head of Santa Monica, California-based Lahde Capital Management, told investors last month he was returning their cash because the risk of using credit derivatives - his means of betting on the falling value of bonds and loans, including subprime mortgages - was too risky given the weakness of the banks he was trading with.

''I was in this game for money,'' Lahde, 37, wrote in a two-page letter in which he said he had come to hate the hedge-fund business. ''The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.

''All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other sides of my trades. God Bless America.''

Lahde, who managed about $US80 million, told clients he'll be content to invest his own money, rather than taking cash from wealthy individuals and institutions and trying to amass a fortune worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

''I do not understand the legacy thing,'' he wrote. ''Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.''

Request for Soros

He said he'd spend his time repairing his health ''as well as my entire life - where I had to compete for spaces at universities, and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management - with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not.''

He also suggested that billionaire George Soros sponsor a forum in which ''great minds'' would come together to create a new system of government, as the current system ''is clearly broken.''

Lahde ended his letter with a plea for the increased use of hemp as an alternative source of food and energy that segued into a call for the legalization of marijuana.

''Hemp has been used for at least 5000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products,'' he wrote. ''Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term.''

'Innocuous Plant'

He added, ''The evil female plant - marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country.''

Lahde said the only reason marijuana remains illegal is because ''Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other addictive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers.''

Here's a link to the letter in its entirety. I highly recommend reading the whole thing- it's hilarious, blunt and very pertinent. Here's another excerpt:

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck.

Finally, here's a link to some predictions Lahde made back in September 2007- 100% likelihood of a recession in the US, anyone?

I honestly don't see Lahde's vision of a government based on meritocracy being achieved, but it's a worthy sentiment. Good on him, and good luck to him.

Nooooooooooooooooo :(

Our coffee machine died yesterday.

It was less than 2 years old!! In February 2007 we bought the same model-a Sunbeam Cafe Crema- as our first coffee machine because the first one lasted 4 years. That one also died slowly, giving us plenty of warning in time to get a new coffee machine.

This one- it made funny noises for the first time a couple of days ago. Then yesterday, after I made Gam's coffee, it made the noises again, and suddenly wasn't pumping very well- more of a weak dribble. My coffee was horrible as a result- a dark, burned-looking crema, and some big bubbles.

I clean it out by pumping a mixture of white vinegar and water through it every couple of months, as per instruction, so hoping against hope that it just needed a clean I did that again. No luck. It cleaned out about the same amount of gunk as usual, but the pumping was still weak the whole time, and afterward. After putting through a full reservoir of water after the vinegar and water mixture, I tried making a coffee. Again, it was terrible. It tasted so bad that I put in so much milk that the flavour of the coffee was all but drowned out.

So I think it's dead :(

This morning- and this is how pathetic I am- I made turkish-style coffee in a saucepan on the stove because I didn't want to go without coffee altogether! It was actually pretty good- way better than the bad coffees made by the dead Sunbeam, and Gam reckoned it was better than the good coffees made by the Sunbeam. I wouldn't go that far! Still, it was slooooow- no almost-instant gratification like there is with an espresso machine.

To think I plan on giving up coffee when I get pregnant... I may just be comatose for the full 9 months.

Rudd's budget woes solved

What Kevin Rudd ought to do in response to the ineffectual opposition's attempts to block aspects of his budget, including his alcopop tax hike, is what he really should have done in the first place: increase alcohol taxes across the board so that all alcoholic drinks are taxed according to the volume of alcohol they contain. Not according to how politically sensitive a tax hike on a particular drink will be. What Rudd did on alcopops, while defensible to some extent (i.e. 'probably better than doing nothing), was the cowardly populist option. To have any real effect on harmful patterns of alcohol consumption, he needs to ensure that people who are just drinking to get drunk don't just simply need to change what they're drinking.

As for the opposition's efforts to block the tax increase for luxury cars, all we need there is an ALP-funded advertising campaign with a picture of Malcolm 'Silvertail' Turnbull side-by-side with a picture of a Bentley, or a Merc. A good old-fashioned dirty paid-for-by-the-party ad. Not a John-Howard-patented political ad masquerading as a public information campaign. I think a low blow like that would really strike a chord with 'struggling Mums and Dads'. And it certainly wouldn't be as stupid or desperate as Brendan Nelson's attempt to label the tax a 'Tarago tax'.

And if all that fails, just hold a bloody double-dissolution election. Hopefully that would mean nutty religious senator Steve Fielding and the fickle one-issue senator Nick Xenophon would be out on their arses and Libs might possibly lose a couple of senate seats. Better than all the dilly-dallying and horse-trading that's going to be going on between the Labor party and those two nutbars. But I do wish they'd give Nick Xenophon his wish and just ban poker machines throughout the country. We'd all be better off without them.

Aussies CAN get beaten fair and square

Yesterday, on every bit of news I heard about Grant Hackett 'losing' the 1500m swimming event at the Beijing Olympics, there was mention of how the gold medallist, Tunisia's Oussama Mellouli, had previously been banned for a 'doping violation'. Report after report referred to Mellouli taking a 'banned substance', insinuating that he was a filthy, dirty cheat who stole the gold medal from Our Grant. After all, if an Australian or American didn't win it's practically evidence of shenanigans, right? Especially with a name like Oussama, a name that happens to sound like that of a well-known terrorist.

Given that Mellouli had been given a light penalty for the violation and the Australian media studiously avoided any mention of what the 'banned substance' that caused his 'doping violation' actually was, suggesting the offense was so slight that the facts would detract from the narrative they were inventing, I decided to look it up.

Mellouli took an Adderall. Adderall is a performance-enhancing substance, if by performance we mean "staying up all night to finish an assignment". Which is what, as a university student at the time, Mellouli claims to have been doing when he took the Adderall. It's a drug most commonly used to treat ADHD, but is commonly misused by students for this purpose. God knows there've been times I could have done with one... As far as I know, Adderall does not impact positively on athletic performance, let alone two days after consumption. Any athlete would know that swallowing anything without first triple-checking whether it contains any substance banned under anti-doping rules is a dumb idea, but it happens. Even to Australians. And don't we get our knickers in a knot over how silly those rules are in such cases?

I'm glad Grant Hackett and Australian team coach Alan Thompson didn't see fit to get stuck into the mud-slinging. There are probably thousands of athletes at the Beijing games who are taking performance-enhancing drugs. Most of them won't get caught, but the reaction of the media to 'our' champ being beaten was petty and smacked of sour grapes.

Jamaican athletes cry blood-poor

Members of Jamaica's athletics team are apparently complaining about the number of doping tests they're being subjected to at the Olympics, to the point where 100m runner Asafa Powell has claimed that the amount of blood being taken in the tests may adversely affect his performance.

It's not that Jamaica's athletes are necessarily any more filthy than the US athletics team when it comes to the presence of drug cheats, but the reason Jamaican athletes are being heavily scrutinised is because Jamaica doesn't have its own anti-doping agency:

Neither the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) nor the Jamaican authorities have been able to confirm to BBC Sport that [the Jamaican Anti-Doping Commission] is actually operating yet. The situation is further muddied by Jamaica's decision to opt out of the Wada-approved Caribbean Regional Anti-Doping Organisation (Rado).

The only organisation currently undertaking widespread testing in Jamaica is the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

The Monaco-based governing body has raised its game in recent years, and now actively targets countries without adequate anti-doping regimes of their own (Jamaica is the IAAF's fifth most tested nation), but question marks remain over the effectiveness and transparency of its operations.

Of course, more testing doesn't mean the cheats are likely to get caught- the BALCO scandal demonstrated that clearly enough. But it's a bit rich of Jamaica's top sprinters to whinge about all the testing when they're from a country renowned for its lassez faire approach to testing for doping in its athletes at a time when they happen to be ruling the roost in the 100m. Maybe they ought to be whinging about how their government's lack of action on the doping front is leading to all the unwanted attention.

Olympics unfair even without drugs

Shameless money-grubber

All the recent news about the possibility of systematic doping in the Russian Olympic athletics team proves is that the Russians are 10 years behind the US when it comes to producing the best and least-detectable drugs to cheat with. What's hilarious about the whole thing is that the IOC is feigning shock that anyone could be involved in doping.

As for Tamyn Lewis' rant about the fact she'll be up against drug cheats this Olympics, well... it's hard to blame her. If there's one team that's clean it's the Aussie athletics team. Otherwise they'd probably be winning more medals. On the other hand, even without drugs it's clearly not a level playing field. Just check out the stories of runners Samiya Yuusf Omar of Somalia, and Hem Bunting of Cambodia, part of the BBC's excellent 'against the odds' series. We hear plenty of athletes complaining about an unfair playing field thanks to the prevalence of drugs, but never complaining about the fact that they're already running an unfair race thanks to the huge advantages that the amount of funding available for sport in western countries affords them.

Given the fact that Australia already punches above its weight in terms of medals per capita and public funding of sports, I resent AOC fatcat John Coates demanding more taxpayers' money to fund elite sport in Australia. When winning gold medals is indicative of nothing more than how much public money is flung at a sport, it's hard to think of it as sport at all. Certainly it's not sporting. Maybe Australia should be offering more scholarships to overseas athletes from impoverished countries so we don't have the embarassment of flogging competitors who would provide a real challenge if only they could afford a good pair of shoes and a bit of meat to add to their rice every day, let alone a team of sports psychologists, doctors, physiotherapists and dieticians to cater to their every need. The Olympics was never supposed to be a competition of economic might, but that's the way it's turned out.

Meet the Angry Bogan

We saw this ad featured last night on the news. Not sure if it was SBS or the ABC, but oh boy is it a classic. If this 'ute man' ad (I prefer to call it the Angry Bogan Ad) by the Independent Distillers of Australia is representative of the electorate of Gippsland (and well it might be, if this article in The Australian is anything to go by) then they're a bunch of bogan idiots and it's no surprise that they've consistently elected National Party members as their MPs. Regardless of how accurate it is, it's a terribly unflattering portrayal.




"Loik, farken oaf it makes me aaaaangry that me booze is gitten expensive! Oi'm gonna throw away me vote cos nuffink is more important than maken sure me grog stays cheap. Oi mean, sure, hospitals and me foive kids' educations are important to me and stuff, but they're gonna hafta wait so Oi can sind Kevin Rudd a message that Oi'm unhappy about the proice of me bourbon and coke. Gotta getcha proiorities roight, y'know."

Pushers in planes

We are treated to so many horror stories of rampant alcohol abuse in Aboriginal communities that it takes a lot for one to stand out. This one does.

But it, like all the others, fails to ask how the mercenaries who fly in the grog to feed the addictions and the misery, are allowed to get away with what they do. The people who supply grog to these communities should be named and shamed, and any liquor licenses they possess revoked for life. They are the filthiest of drug pushers and should be treated as such.

Blowing Smoke Up Your Arse

Healthy lung left, smoker's lung right

What is it about smoking that brings out the most infantile attitudes? Any attempt to restrict the ability of smokers to smoke when and where they like is bound to bring out the silliest self-serving nonsense. Case in point is the BCC's latest move to restrict smoking on Queen Street Mall. The idea that I shouldn't have to partake of someone else's smoke just because I want to go shopping elicits comments like these:

City worker Leah Nesbit said she was more concerned about the plans to ban smoking in cars if there was a child in the car
....

She said the changes would affect her smoking and driving.

"I would stop and pull over and then smoke," she said.

Bad luck if you're Ms Nesbit's child I suppose. A potential lifetime of asthma and impaired neurological development could be in your future.

City News worker Warren Burton said he believed any toughening of anti-smoking legislation would drive some people from the mall.

He suggested "sectioning off" an area of the mall for smokers.

"In one way it would would mean that we would lose customers out of it," Mr Burton said.

No Warren, no one is allowed to smoke in stores anyway, anyone who couldn't visit the mall because they're so addicted to ciggies wouldn't be able to stop smoking long enough to enter a store anyway.

"Why don't we section an area off," he asked.

"And put in proper bins and smoking trays."

Mr Burton said one problem in the Queen Street Mall at present was burning cigarette butts setting rubbish in bins alight.

"What people really object to is the butts lighting up," he said.

I don't see why the tax payer should be forced to pay for arson proof bins. I manage to not set my bin on fire on a daily basis, it shouldn't be too hard for other people. Also a sectioned off area for smokers means smokers, people who make a PERSONAL CHOICE to smoke, get to enjoy the whole mall while people who do not want to smoke are forced to take part in someone else's habit if they want to enjoy the entire mall.

And finally:

Smoker Mark Bahnisch said he understood that passive smoking was a problem, but believed most people were responsible smokers and stood clear of people while they smoked.

"I think we need to draw a line somewhere," Mr Bahnisch said.

"Because it is an addiction and if you stop people smoking here, then you will just get more smokers in a smaller area.

"And then you just have to ask how ridiculous is it in terms of people's personal freedoms."

BT

How precious. Personal freedoms are not synonymous with getting to do whatever you want to other people. I didn't choose to smoke, someone else did. Why should I get to smoke too? Maybe I should spray bug spray in his face* and tell him how ridiculous his objections are in terms of my freedom to spray a toxic product freely available from supermarkets where I like. Is this one of the guys from Larvatus Prodeo? Sarah reckons it is. If it is, how disappointing. My right to not breathe your smoke trumps your right to enjoy your cigarette. Why? Because you can still smoke, at home, at other private places and, god help us, public designated smoking areas.

My right to not stink of cigarette smoke and feel like I'm gargling gravel can be upheld by you simply NOT smoking. You made the choice to increase your risk of dying from something horrible, I didn't, should I share that risk just for being in public? You don't have to do anything special or stop smoking altogether. If I don't choose to smoke I shouldn't be forced to do so simply by being in freaking public. You're not forced to drink alcohol if you go to a bar, an establishment specifically for the consumption of alcohol, so why the hell should I be forced to smoke because I'm in public and some dude wants to indulge in their habit because they feel oppressed?

I've gotten to work with people who have wound up with smoking related diseases. They all vehemently and vocally regretted it and wished they could have chosen differently. A few of them expressed disbelief at how younger people were STILL taking up smoking despite the new warnings and information they'd never had. Still, just because it's a stupid risk to take doesn't mean I think people should be stopped from taking it. I just don't want to go along for the ride because I'm queuing for the bus or walking down the mall.

* Clearly I wouldn't do this. But smokers do this to non-smokers every day.

Children, please avert your eyes

Is it just me, or does it seem a little dodgy that there's a law that enables a special charge to be laid against someone who grows marijuana because a child was 'exposed' to the marijuana cultivation?

Now, I can understand it being illegal to expose a kid to the manufacture of certain other drugs- a meth lab comes to mind- but the growing of marijuana? Maybe I'm missing something, not ever having had a massive hydroponics setup growing in my house, but it doesn't actually sound dangerous- more like a horticultural experiment. Unless there is something in there that is actually going to physically harm the child, I think that sounds like a really, really stupid law, just designed to tack another year or two onto the sentence of someone unlucky enough to get busted growing commercial quantities of pot.

Bad idea, Mercedes

When Mercedes Corby started defamation action against Jody Power for the 'outrageous' claim that Mercedes had done and dealt drugs, I thought it sounded like a bad idea.

It was a bad idea.

MERCEDES CORBY, sister of the jailed drug trafficker Schapelle Corby, was so keen to consume the drug speed at a hen's party celebration at the Gold Coast races in 2002 that she went to the women's toilets, chopped up the powder on top of a toilet cistern and snorted it through a bank note, the Supreme Court heard yesterday.

According to Ms Power, a photograph of Mercedes when she was in her late teens showed her with marijuana in her hands and a "mull bowl" nearby, while her brother, Michael, held a "cone".

Another photo tendered to the court showed Ms Corby using a "penis pipe", a drug-taking implement named after its shape.

And in a photo taken in 1993 or '94, according to Ms Power, Ms Corby was smoking marijuana with a "mull pipe". Two weeks later she went to Japan.

From Toyama, Japan, Ms Corby had described the delights of the "mull" - tobacco mixed with marijuana - available in Japan and had said: "I only need three or four puffs and I am wasted." She also said mull originating from Hawaii was "the best", that she was getting stoned and enjoying herself, but to apologise to her brother Michael jnr that she could not send any of "the Es" (ecstasy tablets).

Ms Power told the court that after the party at the Gold Coast races, when she says Ms Corby had snorted speed, she and a number of young women had gone to a penthouse where a woman sold "party packs" comprising ecstasy, speed and cocaine. Mercedes had a line of cocaine.

Ms Power had moved to a flat at Keira, then to Byron Bay, where she had made regular purchases of marijuana for $70 to $80 a half-ounce from Michael Corby jnr, and sometimes Mercedes would help in the delivery.

Mercedes Corby had told her she had taken "small amounts" of marijuana to Bali before and had asked Ms Power whether she would be prepared to do it. Ms Power had said she would not.

Ms Corby had asked her to help water a marijuana crop being grown by Ms Corby's father, which Ms Power also refused.

Ms Power said that in October 2004 she had gone to Bali to celebrate Mercedes's 30th birthday.

She heard that Schapelle, who had travelled separately, had been arrested. And Mercedes had told her she had gone to the airport with 1 million rupiah to bribe Schapelle's way out but when she saw the amount of the drug realised a million was not enough.

The judgement to be handed down at the end of this promises to be quite hilarious, I think...

UPDATE: The jury bought it. Colour me surprised.

US a 'Post race society'- and George Bush is a genius

From the New York Times:

A study released Tuesday reported that between 1998 and 2007, the police arrested 374,900 people whose most serious crime was the lowest-level misdemeanor marijuana offense.

That is more than eight times the number of arrests on those same charges between 1988 and 1997, when 45,300 people were picked up for having a small amount of pot.


Nearly everyone involved in this wave of marijuana arrests is male: 90 percent were men, although national studies show that men and women use pot in roughly equal rates.

And 83 percent of those charged in these cases were black or Latino, according to the study. Blacks accounted for 52 percent of the arrests, twice their share of the city’s population. Whites, who are about 35 percent of the population, were only 15 percent of those charged — even though federal surveys show that whites are more likely than blacks or Latinos to use pot.

Galangal, Keith Richards' drug of choice

A while back, I had a piece of old galangal root in the fridge. Not having any immediate use for it, I decided to plant it in Keith Richards' side of the garden, next to the ginger plant. A week later I found it outside Keith Richards' house, at the opposite end of 'his' garden. Weird. So I planted it again. Next time I went to clean out his bedding, I found the galangal stashed in his house, with teeth marks in it. It didn't look like he'd been eating it, as such, just gnawing. So I hauled it out, and figuring it was by now probably too dead to grow, just tossed it up the opposite end of the garden. Next time I went to clean out his bedding, same thing happened! I wrapped up the galangal with the old newspaper and tossed it in the bin.

But I did have some curiousity as to why he seemed to like the galangal so much even though he wasn't eating it. So yesterday I bought him a nice fresh piece and waved it around his front door, whereupon he snatched it straight away and I heard crunching noises... I have yet to look inside and see whether he's eaten much of it or just sort of chewed on it, but the Wikipedia article on galangal that I looked up today appeared to hold some answers:

A mixture of galangal and lime juice is used as a tonic in parts of Southeast Asia. It is said to have the effect of an aphrodisiac, and act as a stimulant.

Hmmm. Keith Richards doesn't have any furry friends to get sexy with, so maybe he's just using it to get high? Either way, galangal appears to come highly recommended... at least for guinea pigs.

UPDATE: I checked out the galangal to see what he'd done with it, and it looks the same as last time- just a few bite marks. So he's not actually eating it like he would do with another root vegetable like a carrot. Just getting high... I'm quite tempted to put some through my juicer and see if I get anything out of it!