When your government knows what's best for you...

Why is it that governments always seem to know what's best for the populace? When they get elected, they seem to think that they have some moral mandate to clean up all our lives? As if we couldn't possibly exist without Big Brother looking over our shoulders watching out for us?


I read with interest recently the interesting article entitled "Cocaine study that got up the nose of the US" by Ben Goldacre. In it, he charges the US government with at best exaggeration, at worst downright lying. One example is the way in which the government tried to prove that new forms of cannabis e.g. skunk, are twenty-five times stronger than they were in the heady days of the 1960s with flower power and the hippy revolution. This was tested and found to be patently false.

As he says,

"In areas of moral and political conflict people will always behave badly with evidence, so the war on drugs is a consistent source of entertainment. We have already seen how cannabis being "25 times stronger" was a fantasy, how drugs-­related deaths were quietly dropped from the measures for drugs policy, and how a trivial pile of poppies was presented by the government as a serious dent in the Taliban's heroin revenue."


Why is it then that governments so feel the need to exaggerate these kinds of statistics? In fact there's little evidence to suggest that soft drugs, and by this I mean class B or C drugs, lead to long terms health problems at all. This leads me to question why governments, which are inherently right wing if not politically, then certainly socially and morally, resort to this kind of false reporting which at times borders on propaganda? Is it because a lot of revenue is spent on these kinds of recreational drugs which doesn't find its way into state coffers in the form of VAT and other direct or indirect taxes? Surely it must be for another reason for we have come a long way from the 1970s and 1980s when any form of drug taking was frowned upon and lengthy jail sentences routinely handed out.

Quoting from a report by World Health Organisation (WHO) which was ignored, repudiated by respected bodies, and left unpublished,

"Such programmes rely on sensationalised, exaggerated statements about cocaine which misinform about patterns of use, stigmatise users, and destroy the educator's credibility."

As Ben Goldacre continues,

"Health problems from the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine use," they said. "Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common and more severe for intensive, high-dosage users and very rare and much less severe for occasional, low-dosage users."

We see this dynamic play itself out in other areas where government control is routinely exercised albeit in an unwanted, unwarranted, and heavy-handed way. For example, after 9-11, we were treated to scary movies about perceived terrorist threats which probably came straight out of the Bush family homegrown terrorist factory, edited by Dick Cheney, with special effects from Donald Rumsfeld, and special lighting from Russ Limbaugh. All the interviews, videos, banners, ads, billboards were designed with one purpose in mind - to scare the living bejesus out of all of us and hand control back to our paternal brothers in The Whitehouse, Downing Street, The Reichschtag, The Elysee Palace (or wherever the French government convenes) and elsewhere.


We were scared into thinking that we were in mortal danger because of the 9-11 attacks when in fact only about 3,500 people died. Instead of us being victims of an outside terrorist group we were in fact terrorised by our own governments with the advent of the Patriot Act, where civil liberties went out the window along with the proverbial bathwater and the baby, so again we had a complete exaggeration of the dangers to us as a populace.

The most recent of these exaggerations came about with the advent of the Swine Flu. As I said in another entry, we have more chance of being struck by a meteorite than contracting the Swine Flu, yet if you read the propaganda coming out of government offices and subsequent press releases, you'd think the world was in imminent danger of a total collapse like it was during the Spanish Flu pandemic in the last century, in 1918. This is patently absurd and the virus is nowhere as potent as government agencies would have us think.

This is the Politics of Fear which we must all be on our guard against! The kind of dystopia that George Orwell talked about half a century ago in his novel 1984 is now coming to pass. It's a sad day when, as the American interviewed in his new home in Paris admits in Michael Moore's video Sicko, when asked why he didn't live the US any more - "I can't live there any more because the government scares me."

I wouldn't sell that mob a virus...

Recently, I heard the manager of Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson, remark that he "wouldn't sell that mob a virus" when referring to the possible sale of Ronaldo to Real Madrid. Whilst Ferguson was using the term in a pejorative way, he was using it in a sporting context although as we've recently seen, he did in fact sell the virus to Real Madrid as presumably did Inter Milan in selling Kaka to the same club.

However, it always used to be that when you heard the word virus, you immediately thought that some Trojan had infected your computer, and the worst case scenario was that you'd have to wipe your hard drive clean and reformat it. The fact is the word virus has taken on a whole new meaning and rarely been out of the news lately in one form or another, and I predict that it'll be used just as prolifically in the future.


A friend recently emailed me the following to which I replied.

Hi UrbanCrazyMan,

The world of viruses is a wild place. This is where we realise that we're not in control. Apparently, there are researchers trying to ascertain whether diabetes and other diseases are started by a virus, and then develop.
Like I said, they're gonna get us one way or another because we crowd together so much. We're not meant to do so, and neither are animals. The conservative opinion on the H1N1 is that it's the high volume, low quality of life, cramped-farm pig rearing that caused the virus to spread and then metastasise to the humans around them. I can believe that.

Achoo... I mean cheers

My reply:

Hi,

I agree that the appalling cruelty e.g. battery farming and other unsavory aspects of so-called modern modes of food production have contributed to the growth but not origin of these viruses. I suspect darker forces at work I'm sorry to say.

We've unfortunately come to an era in human development where bombs and battlegrounds have shifted in a seismic way. Some clever people have realised that you can first control, then wipe out an entire generation of people through chemical as well as biological warfare. That's too scary to imagine! Now, instead of sendining off the troops to battle in huge numbers (only 4,000 US soldiers have died in this Iraqi conflict), the soldiers have become pharmacists and chemists controlling us with their poisons.

Although some people are silly enough to think that this locus of control somehow takes place in a similar arena of war like Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds in the north of Iraq, when in fact it is something that lays itself out in every major city through vaccinations, and other supposedly healthful ways.

Who knows what is in your medicines when you go to get a flu jab, or inoculate your kid from TB? Rubella? Measles? Or when you get a Hep B, or C booster? A Diphtheria back up? Or a ten-year Tetanus jab?


The problem is that governments are too closely connected to drug companies and too intent on staying onto power to care about the likes of me and you. "It's all about the money, baby."

I read recently that the British government under Blair then Brown has become more authoritarianism than any of its previous leaders and many people are really pissed about it - the Identity Card scheme, the Xenophobic immigration policies, the cameras everywhere (more than anywhere else in the world!)

Because of the crisis in the banking sector, and the destabilisation of the global economy, governments have become largely redundant, or at least shown up to be incapable of protecting their populaces from this kind of disruption, and modern warfare, which is the basic element of human existence and is manipulated by them to continue to wield their hegemony over the rest of us!

In other words, ether they manipulated the Credit Crunch and global downturn to get a tighter control over us, or they saw it happen and decided to take advantage of it. Either way, for my money, they are a bunch of dangerous rogues but rogues who cannot be stopped.