Re: Sunday Times Scans reveal brain damage from cannabis.


"Claude" <Claude@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:memo.20051211153125.1416B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In article <sfcop15fulbb0j9jdiu8mnnec38od48282@xxxxxxx>,
> requiem@xxxxxxxxxx (Dave J.) wrote:
>
>> *From:* Dave J. <requiem@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> *Date:* Sun, 11 Dec 2005 14:21:12 +0000
>>
>> In MsgID<dnha9v$br6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> within uk.politics.drugs,
>> 'Sla#s' wrote:
>>
>> >
>> >"Claude" <Claude@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> >news:memo.20051211012625.820E@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1920069,00.html
>> >>
>> >>
>> >It's all very well them continually saying this but as cannabis use
>> has >increased a thousand fold since the fifties; where are the bodies?
>> >The schizophrenia rate in the UK has not changed for a hundred years.
>>
>> You can't knock the finding of demonstrable changes in the brain, even
>> though they don't mention the fact that for scientific thoroughness
>> there
>> should have been a similar study of adult smokers. This implies either
>> that the same change wasn't detected once the user is older or that the
>> test was specifically designed to show one result only.
>>
>> They also don't mention whether that change is long term, where are the
>> scans of the brains of past adolescent users?
>>
>> As you say, the true bottom line is that there isn't a statistically
>> visible upsurge in the rate of schizophrenia, so the real risk must be
>> vanishingly small.
>>
>> At the end of the day the real reason for disapproval is that cannabis
>> (and other decent recreational drugs) allow for happiness without any of
>> the 48hr a week slaving that the billionaires at the top need to inflict
>> in order to continue their rise in the rich-*** stakes and in order
>> to
>> distract the rest of us from realisation of how stupid it really is.
>>
>> In other words, pot allows for escape, not just short term psychedelic
>> escape but long term attitude-change escape and they fear that more than
>> anything else.
>>
>> Dave J.
>>
> That sort of pathetic "change escape" often includes bumming of those who
> did not escape, when things go wrong! Health, welfare etc
>

Welfare !!! Don't make me spit........

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/13/the-corporate-begging-bowl/

The Corporate Begging Bowl
Filed under:
a.. corporate power
b.. farming
They bleat about the free market, then insist that we subsidise them.


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th December 2005

Never underestimate the self-pity of the ruling classes. Since Labour took
office in 1997, the Confederation of British Industry has been engaged in
one long whinge. It doesn?t matter that our taxes are among the lowest and
our regulations among the weakest in the developed world. It doesn?t matter
that the rich are richer than they have ever been. The CBI is the monster
with a thousand stomachs, that will never be satisfied.

In the submission it made to the Chancellor?s pre-budget report it demanded
that the government spend less on everything except business(1). The state
should cut its planned spending on health, social security and local
authorities, and use some of the savings to protect and enhance its ?support
and advisory services for trade and businesses.? Our higher education budget
should be used to supply free research for corporations. The regional
development agencies should ?expand their activities to support more
extensive business-to-business networking and collaboration?. Further road
taxes should be abandoned, and the climate change levy ?should be frozen?,
but the government should help businesses by building more roads and
airports. This is what the CBI means by free enterprise.

I mention it to provide some context for the extraordinary revelations
published by the Guardian last week. Felicity Lawrence used the Freedom of
Information Act to discover who has been receiving the European Union?s farm
subsidies(2). The biggest beneficiaries, she found, were not farmers but
food manufacturers. In 2003 and 2004, the sugar company Tate and Lyle was
given £227m of taxpayers? money. Nestle was paid by you and me to export
milk: I wouldn?t be surprised if that includes its ever-popular sales of
powdered milk to the third world. Gate Gourmet, the airline catering
company, took half a million pounds from us for the little sachets of milk
and sugar it puts on passengers? food trays: because they leave British
airspace, they qualify for export subsidies. KLM received a farm subsidy for
?rural restructuring?: turning part of the Dutch countryside into a runway.
GlaxoSmithKline, Boots, Eton College, Heineken, Grolsch, Shell and the
tobacco company Philip Morris have been given millions of pounds of farm
subsidies, and at least one of them (Eton) doesn?t even know why.

The British government can?t be blamed for this. Mr Blair has been trying
for years to cut the money handed out under the Common Agricultural Policy,
and for years has been thwarted, principally by France and Germany. At the
European summit this week, France and Germany will doubtless ensure that
nothing changes until at least 2013, undermining everything they claim to be
striving for at the simultaneous trade talks in Hong Kong. But what bothers
our government is not that the poor are giving to the rich, but that the
Common Agricultural Policy represents a general and unnecessary drain on
state resources. How do I know? Because when Britain provides its own
agricultural aid, the same thing happens.

On Thursday the research organisation SpinWatch published a report on the
outcome of the government?s Curry Commission, which was supposed to help
farmers recover from the foot and mouth epidemic(3). When the commission
released its findings in January 2002, it claimed that the measures would
help to reconnect farmers with their market, reconnect food production ?with
a healthy and attractive countryside? and reconnect consumers ?with what
they eat and where it has come from?(4). The government put aside £500
million to make this happen, then used the money to make sure it didn?t.

It spent £2.3m on setting up something called the Food Chain Centre, which
would ?help build more effective and efficient supply chains?(5). The centre
is run by the Institute of Grocery Distribution, a research group working
for the food manufacturers and superstores. All but one of the IGD?s board
of trustees come from companies which could be accused of helping to break
the connections between farmers and the market, the market and the
countryside and consumers and the food they eat: Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda,
Compass, Nestle, Heinz, Procter and Gamble, Bernard Matthews, Kraft and
Unilever (6). (The exception, whose presence on the board is something of a
mystery, works for the razor company Wilkinson Sword). The Food Chain Centre
helps companies to reduce their costs and enhance their profits, and we pay
for it.

A further £1.4m has gone to the Cereals Industry Forum, which is run by the
food industry?s big lobby groups. The government has given £6.8m to the Red
Meat Industry Forum, which, among other public services, has been helping
Tesco to find cheaper ways of producing pork sausages (7). So it goes on.
But when the National Association of Farmers? Markets, which did exactly
what the Curry Commission recommended, applied for £150,000 from the
government, it was told to get lost. It collapsed soon afterwards. Doubtless
the money had already been spent on helping Tesco find new ways of
destroying its competitors.

There is nothing unusual about these handouts for private companies. In his
book Peverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Myers estimates
that when you add the direct payments US corporations receive to the wider
costs they oblige society to carry, you come up with a figure of $2.6
trillion, or roughly five times as much as the profits they make(8). As well
as the $362 billion the OECD countries were paying for farming when his book
was published (or rather, as we have seen, for activities masquerading as
farming) they were shelling out some $71 billion on fossil fuels and nuclear
power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide,
governments pay companies $25bn a year to destroy the earth?s fisheries, and
$14bn to wreck our forests.

The Energy Policy Bill the Bush administration drove through Congress this
summer handed a further $2.9bn to the coal industry, $4.3bn to nuclear power
and $1.5bn to oil and gas firms(9). According to the Democratic congressman
Henry Waxman, the oil subsidy ?was mysteriously inserted in the final energy
legislation after the legislation was closed to further amendment ?
Obviously, it would be a serious abuse to secretly slip [in] such a costly
and controversial provision?(10). Most of the money, he discovered, would be
administered by ?a private consortium located in the district of Majority
Leader Tom DeLay ? The leading contender for this contract appears to be the
Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America consortium? whose board
members include Marathon Oil and our old friend Halliburton. ?There is no
conceivable rationale for this extraordinary largesse. The oil and gas
industry is reporting record income and profits ? the net income of the top
oil companies will total $230 billion in 2005.? It would be tempting to hold
Bush responsible for this, but that would be only half right. The oil firms
were scooping up taxpayers? money long before they put their robot in the
White House: Norman Myers reports that between 1993 and mid-1996, ?American
oil and gas companies gave $10.3 million to political campaigns and received
tax breaks worth $4 billion.?

This week the rich countries gathering for the World Trade Organisation
meeting in Hong Kong will tell the poor ones to open their economies to the
free market. But the free market does not exist. In every nation, the
corporations hold out their begging bowls and tax-payers line up to fill
them. We are the ragged-trousered philanthropists of the 21st century, the
comparatively poor obliged to sponsor the rich.


--
Jez, MBA.,
Country Dancing and Advanced Astrology, UBS.

'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion
that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to
accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what that
reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of
someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn







.