Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, is the new Prime Minister of Canada. Though a long standing Liberal I left the Liberal Party some 15 years ago to join the Conservatives. I voted for Mr. Stephen Harper. He lost after two terms as Prime Minister. I am by all measures a Canadian. I loved Mr. Harper's service to the country. I loved the Conservatives in power if only because the Conservatives and NDP are the only parties that have cared for Western Canadians. So I'm sad today that Mr. Harper and the Conservatives lost.
I personally am soured by Mr. Justin Trudeau. I appreciate his 'honesty' that he smoked marijuana while working. Was he smoking marijuana while a school teacher or just as a legislator? I hear he has perhaps minimized the times he smoked marijuana. Politicians aren't known for their honesty.
I am glad too that marijuana has essentially be decriminalized this last decade. I fundamentally don't agree with legalization because that actually means that marijuana can then be sold like bread or milk anywhere. I was very disturbed that the illegal marijuania distributions centres of Vancouver were offering free marijuana to anyone who voted.
What fundamentally bothers me though, is that I personally smoked marijuana. The last time was 17 years ago. I bought it from doctors, smoked it with doctors and saw a psychiatrist who recommended I smoke it. The trouble was, that I felt wrong about smoking marijuana and working as a doctor. It especially didn't seem right that I was smoking marijuana and working as a psychiatrist.
I was never 'impaired' at work. I wasn't an 'impaired physician'. I didn't present a 'risk to patient safety'. I just didn't think it was right that I was breaking the law. I also knew too many people who had suffered negative consequences of using marijuana, loss of employment, legal records and jail time. I have seen far too many relationships and families devastated by marijuana.
Justin Trudeau's mother was a marijuana addict. I have thought that Justin Trudeau must be in some serious denial about the effects of marijuana being the son of an addict himself.
I have mixed feelings about the process of my own recovery now. Personally I appreciate the spiritual benefits of the wonderful learning of recovery. I am so very thankful to have the clarity of mind restored that seemed somewhat lost the last year I smoked marijuana. Administratively thought the process was essentially 'punishment'. It was framed in different language but the process was still punishment. It was heavy handed, threatening, bullying, incredibly expensive, and shaming. There was and remains a 'double standard'. There are those who didn't get 'caught' and those who got 'caught' and people like me who sought help only to get caught up in the mixed message of a very sick and disturbed administration.
Now here I am today an addiction medicine specialist. I have patients who were like me. They have safety sensitive jobs. I see doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. I am expected to provide a rigorous treatment program with many random urine testing and onerous requirements because as I was told, these jobs are a 'privilege'. They're not a right.
Yet here the highest job in the country has gone to a person who has committed crimes without consequence. He's never been subjected to random urine testing, required to see psychiatrists, required to see addiction medicine specialists, required to attend counselling, had supervision in the workplace, or had the threat of losing his job if any suspicion fell on him. He has not had to be 'caesar's wife' in regards to his personal behaviour vis a vis the drug using crowd.
He hasn't had to deal with both the wonderful people in the recovery health care movement and the utterly sick and disturbed power weilding petty beaurocrats who holier than thou revel in their being above the law because they haven't been caught in their addictions. Being in the system I know so many people who have 'avoided' detection like the privileged who 'avoided' Vietnam leaving that war to be fought by the average joe.
Maybe my angst today is about the rich and privileged and the sons of the rich and priviledged. I don't like the double standard. Indeed I could have at any time 'avoided' the negative consequences that came from my seeking help when I was concerned that my failure to do so would eventually lead to a poor judgement. I held myself to a higher standard than those about me. I was 'offered' ways 'around' the 'system'. I was told I could 'deny, deny, deny, and lie, lie, lie' . Those close to me who had been 'caught' actually have used lawyers successfully to avoid consequences. Seriously people have told me over and over again what a fool I have been for my honesty.
I appreciate Justin's honesty therefore. I appreciate that the laws are wrong. There are many law which we don't agree with but there is a sharp division between the law breakers and those who don't. At least there once was. I don't appreciate that so many criminal drug dealers got rich by being smart and have 'cleaned up their act' by whitewashing their past. I know so many incredibly wealthy people whose wealth has come directly from the multi billion dollar drug crime industry. I'm a hopeless idealist and romantic. I have a horrible scar of cynicism.
There but for the grace of God go I. I am not here to "judge" Justin Trudeau. The country of Canada has accepted that a man of acknowledged deceitfulness and drug abuse is acceptable in the highest position. The former head of the Supreme Court of Canada was a roaring alcoholic or had a bit of a problem with drink (depending on what language one chose.) But he wasn't engaged in criminal activities. He wasn't a law breaker, that I know of. Unlike Justin Trudeau and his mother and a minority of Canadians.
I've been arguing for years that our judges need to be random drug tested if we're doing that to our athletes, doctors and pilots. There's a double standard. There's hypocricy that reigns.
I'm just struggling today wondering how I'm going to do my job. I'm kind of regretting too accepting the considerable abuse I experienced in recovery. The stigma and shame and being shamed so seriously by my superiors who I learned later were drunkards and did more drugs than I'd ever done. It's such a hidden epidemic. Meanwhile the minimization and deceit is rampant.
That's what I remember most about when I had the occasional toke. I didn't think there was anything wrong with it. I just thought everyone should 'lighten up'. Hell, I hoped everyone would 'light up'.
And it will get worse.
I see Justin Troudeau, not as others do but because of my own journey and the journey I have seen others on, I see the double standard. I wonder how I can cause people to lose their incomes and jobs and future and families by saying, it's because of the drugs ,when doing drugs has won Clinton, Obama and now Justin Trudeau their highest positions. How can I say to kids not to smoke dope. At least President Bush got recovery. Mayor Ford got recovery. Most of Hollywood got recovery. But not these guys.
It's confusing for me. It worries me. I'm struggling today. I don't really care that much if the Liberals beat the Conservatives because they're two sides of a very centrist coin. I'd rather the Liberals over the NDP but truthfully I'd really rather have had Mr. Mulcair Prime Minister over Justin Trudeau. Tom Mulcair wasn't creepy. But I'm probably wrong.
I did this silly little study and asked a hundred or more dope smokers and drug addicts and straights if they wanted their pilot or physician to be smoking marijuania. They answered unanimously that they didn't want him smoking marijuana.
Now I have the head of a multi trillion dollar business called Canada admitting to smoking dope, not once, not twice, but countless times. We don't accept the 'word' of a doctor that he isn't smoking dope. We don't accept the word of a criminal that he isn't doing crime. We drug test and find that countless, a very very high percentage of people who have ever used drugs, lie.
This is my personal problem. It's a problem I have with Canada today. It's a problem I have with our justice sytem. It's a problem I have with the supreme court. It's a problem I have with the police. It's a problem I have with authority. It's certainly a problem I have with the rich and privileged and those above the law. It's a problem I have with double standards. Its a problem I have with Justin Trudeau and his dynamic twisted family.
Maybe I'm just envious too. I've thought of that.
But this is why I didn't vote for Justin Trudeau more than anything else. That's the best I can get to the matter of why I will support him as Prime Minister but I don't think I'll trust him. I won't trust him even as much as I trusted his father. But I was younger when I voted for his father. I find it harder to trust today. I've been personally hurt by marijuana, drug dealers, tobacco companies, and especially drug addicts and twisted authorities and their sick double standard attitudes. I don't trust easily today. I don't trust Justin Troudeau.
I hope though that as Prime Minister he will earn my trust.But right now he has made countless promises. And I know drug addicts are the best people at making promises.
So I don't expect he will subject himself to random drug testing. Even the Supreme Court expects that of others but won't submit themselves to that. I would only ask that he make the one promise that really counts to me.
Justin, can you promise not to smoke dope any time during your reign as Prime Minister. Really, if you talk the talk, can you walk the walk!
Showing posts with label Justin Troudeau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justin Troudeau. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Marijuana Smoker
I see addicts all the time. Mostly they come to me complaining of ‘depression’. More commonly than not they have seen a colleague of mine who has given them an antidepressant. The colleague has usually avoided asking any details about lifestyle and especially glossed over addiction.
Most medications were tested in non alcoholics and non addicts. If my colleague called the pharmaceutical company that made the drugs he prescribed they’d say they were not tested in combination with 2 bottles of wine a day or 1 to 6 joints a day of BC Bud. If there were justice, my colleague would be faulted for 'lack of due diligence'. All manner of patients have difficulties with combined pharmaceutical drugs and street drugs. It's a common cause of "side effects' and 'death'.
Most of my colleagues don’t know that Amsterdam after 40 years of experience with marijuania has lifted the standard famed ‘BC Bud’ marijuana to the most dangerous drug category, alongside Heroin and Cocaine. The Dutch 'experiment' with drugs has been a failure and is being reversed. Pot Cafe's are now highly regulated. Portugal decriminalized drugs but made treatment of addiction central. Everyone except Canadian Teen Agers and Children, are getting off drugs.
Most of my colleagues and Canadians in general seem ignorant that the marijuana that the Beattles smoked in the 60’s had a THC content of possibly 1 whereas todays BC Bud is as high as 15 to 30.
When a person comes into the office and says that they are irritable and having trouble sleeping and feeling negative and have self pity and negative ideations and maybe even are suicidal, the first thing I wonder is, are they drinking or doing drugs. My colleague would say, I think they’re depressed. Yet I was in charge of a suicide ward and was a supervisor in a psychiatric emergency and reviewed all the completed suicides I’d known and lo and behold they were almost all associated with drugs and alcohol.
Suicide is under almost all conditions a severe brain disease. If you see a mouse running repeatedly head first into a wall trying to kill it self you don’t at first consider Nietze and philosophical things. Even a veterinarian thinks, Brain Disease, meningitis, brain timor, etc.
So similar real doctors are taught when they see a person with symptoms, especially of depression, to think first a foremost of ‘organic’ causes, especially if the disease is so severe as to be ‘life threatening’ as suicide is.
Just as a person could have lung cancer without smoking almost all lung cancers especially the horrid oat cell carcinoma were found in tobacco smokers. My famous Califorinia respirologist friend says, 'there would simply be no department of respirology were it not for cigarette smokers'. We now learn that hypertension and heart disease are diet and alcohol diseases, diabetes most a diet disease. Once called mental illness, most departments now are called "Mental Illness and Addiction". There's less and less mental illness and more and more addiction but we can't 'blame the victim' and the rich doctors never tell the emperor he has no clothes.
Yet, just because depression is common and increasingly with the increasing drug (specifically marijuana) abuse and alcohol abuse, suicidality is ‘common’ .
But today patients who are diagnosed with addiction or alcoholism may face consequences.
1) They lose the ‘sympathy’ of the ‘depressed’ patient. “Just Say NO” campaign, while being true, and helping countless people, also minimized the difficulty that addicts and alcoholics have stopping drugs and alcohol.
Most people who have come to me with ‘depression’ and ‘alcohol or drug abuse’ have indeed tried to stop. The CAGE Screening Test, the simplest 4 question test of all, asks ‘have you ever considered cutting down’. Not surprising people who don't use or even don't abuse drugs and alcohol have never considered 'cutting down' but some 80% of those who have turn out to have the disease of addiction. It's a marvellous red flag.
Most patients referred to a specialist like me for depression who also have alcoholism or addiction have indeed ‘tried’ and are ‘defeated’. They have ‘hopelessness’ because their lives are ‘unmanageable’ with their addiction. Yet they don't like the name 'alcoholism' or 'addiction' and were 'alcoholics anonymous' called 'stress stop' they'd go their in a minute. It's just that 'honesty' is lost early in the addiction cycle, for the addict and alcoholic, and for the enablers and for society. Everyone avoids talking about the 'elephant in the room'. Especially if they've seen an angry elephant. Historically addicts and alcoholics excelled young in the navy and army early in their disease. The air force began to have a problem with addiction when they got into jets and today alcoholism and addiction are identified early in the military but very late in politicians and others farther from the 'front'. Artists rarely get diagnosed as alcoholics and whole generations of artists have been influenced by pedophiles, just as an example, likening sex with infants to an 'addiction' and showing how it can be promoted as 'okay' and 'normal' especially by 'addicted' artists. But when I asked marijuana smokers if they wanted their neurosurgeon on marijuania they said no. Today I prefer artists who aren't intoxicated. Tiny bubbles is very passé.
Chemical addictions, like alcohol and marijuana ‘short circuit’ and ‘disrupt’ neuropathways. It’s like splashing a circuit board with water. The computer screen will show all manner of entertainment and flashes and gibberish just like the ‘delirium’ state caused by intoxication.
Here I note, a person can have 1 to 3 glasses of wine without ‘intoxication’. Note the word ‘toxic’. Drug experience is ‘on or off’. One can drink without getting ‘drunk’ but one smokes marijuana and gets ‘stoned’ . Drug addiction is ‘digital’. It’s on or off.
The ‘state’ has been described as ‘dissociated’ , two personalities, and over time the ‘dissociated self’ can ‘consume’ the well person, in the Doctor Jeckyl/Mr Hyde way all of us see who work in addiction. Recovery is to a very large extent the recovery of the authentic self and the expansion of the potentiality. The addict person is a very abbreviated reduced person with limited access to higher brain function and major loss of control.
The ‘sympathy’ component of addiction was associated with traditional ‘disease’ categories. A person had a ‘heart attack’ and it was thought to be ‘involuntary’ whereas a person showed up drunk in the Emergency and that was ‘voluntary’.
The ‘rage’ in ‘pharmaceutical medicine’ is the treatment of ‘involuntary’ disease. Fundamentally there is ‘fate” and “free will”. In our society we ‘take credit’ for our good deeds and ‘blame’ others or the universe for the ‘negative’.
Insurance companies excluded alcoholism and addiction (because they could get away with it and knew they’d save fortunes in the insurance lottery) but kept ‘heart disease’ and ‘lung disease’ as ‘involuntary’. Today we know that those who had heart attacks and lung cancer more often than not got them as a consequence of drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco.
Today we call them ‘diseases of lifestyle’. Life ‘style’ is such a politically correct ‘fashion favourite’. In the Bible they said the ‘sins of the fathers and mothers will be passed on to their children’. In the East they called it ‘Karma’. But in Consumer Corporate society it’s just called “marketing’. More often than not my alcoholics had parents who were alcoholic and the smokers had parents who smoked.
But nobody wants to be ‘honest’ and no one including the doctors, government and corporations want to do anything but ‘collude with the dying customer’. Indeed when the smoker gets lung cancer the covert aggression of the manufacturer and friends was to offer him a cigarette. Alcoholics on their death bed are given more to drink. It’s comforting.
So my ‘johnny come lately’ junior colleague has a wholly ‘addiction’ practice so that only ‘addicted’ patients are sent to him. This ‘selection bias’ ensures that he not only doesn’t have to make the diagnosis he’s politically correct and leaves the heavy lifting to the first doctor who says, “I think your diagnosis is alcoholism or marijuania addiction."
The beauty of heroin addicts and crack addicts is that the ‘prohibition’ society makes everyone’s life easy because these people know what they are doing is ‘wrong’ and no one has to ‘convince’ them they have a heroin or crack addiction. They just may or may not be ready to address the problem. Drug addiction and alcoholism are ‘fun, fun and trouble and trouble.’ The sooner you get off the train bound for institutions, early death, disease, jails, the easier the fall, but as that train speeds up and descends deeper and deeper it’s more frightening to jump off and much harder to crawl back to where you are no longer down.
Chemicals such as alcohol and marijuana and eventually all drugs of addiction, which mostly over stimulate and damage the dopamine (happy, think ‘dopey’) circuits are ultimately depressing.
The initial euphoria is a product of the ‘disinhibition’ of the loss of the frontal lobes which are the latest and most human structure of the brain associated with judgement and editorializing, delayed gratification, planning.
The buzz diagnosis in the pharmaceutic industry for the 'mood swings' of addiction is 'Bipolar II" disorder. Addiction and alcoholism are the 'great chameleons of mental illness because ever 'symptom' of mental illness can be seen in the addict, from the usual 'anxiety' to the final states' early 'dementia' or 'schizophrenia' like' psychosis. All intoxications are 'delirium like 'or 'cognitive impairments' and 'mood disorders'.
Spiritual teachers recommended a once a lifetime or once a year ‘drug experience’ to have this experience of being aware of the more primitive ‘childlike’ thinking but especially the notion of ‘time’ as a critical factor of ‘assumed’ thinking. Meditation is a ‘timeless’ experience but so is ‘drug abuse’ and ‘drunkeness’. Immediately in the altered state one loses ‘time’ awareness. In the proper ‘context’, historically and culturally established by tribes and medicine men one could have an induced religious experience. This ‘dangerous’ rite of passage, as described in Huxley’s Perennial Philophy and known to Indians in the “Peyote” experience is wholly different from the ‘abuse’ of substances seen today. For one these 'religious drug experiences' are a cultural and community and 'controlled and regulated by elders 'experience. But mostly they are just 'once' or at most 'once' a year. There's nothing 'religious' or 'spiritual' about daily or weekly 'intoxication'.
It’s all in ‘dosage’. To the addict or alcoholic ‘more’ is better whereas in fact the value of alcohol to ‘enhance’ a meal as often encouraged by gourmands is at most a glass. Two glasses of wine ‘dulls’ the palate’ just as with the heart, which is made better with 1 glass of wine is made toxic with three. Huxley suggested it would be beneficial for people to have an hallucinogenic experience once in their life. Not to live their life as Mr Hyde.
Whereas alcohol biological effects wear off in a matter of days, marijuana or cannibis last weeks to months. A person’s perception and interaction with others, relationships being most sensitive to drug and alcohol abuse, as with higher tasks of work and play, are not just affected in the ‘intoxicated’ phase but also in the ‘withdrawal’ phase. Weekend binge drinkers are in ‘withdrawal’ in the middle and end of the week.
One wonders about jokes about being careful with work done by governments and union workers at the end of the week. The ‘withdrawal/craving’ cycle is all part of addiction. With the classic white collar martini drunk Judge his ‘decisions’ made late in the day were commonly less favourable as opposed to those mid day. Astute lawyers timed their clients cases against the judges daily evening drunkeness.
The WHO has long held that one is only clear of drugs and alcohol if one has been abstinent for one year. The DSMV says a person is in 'remission' if one is one year abstinent. All 'harm reduction' strategies are only 'valid' scientifically and culturally if they are leading and directed ultimately to 'abstinence.' Otherwise they may well be enabling, and a doctor takes an 'oath to do no harm'. Enabling is harmful. If one is only providing 'palliative care' one should indeed tell the patient that they are being treated as if there is 'no cure'. Abstinence is a 'cure' for addiction. So it's ironic that people are so often offered 'harm reduction' sometimes even first offered 'harm reduction' rather than given the true facts especially those that say that the people working in predominantly harm reduction are usually the most negative about their clients potential.
There is no ‘healthy’ or ‘medical’ smoke. All smoking is ‘unhealthy’ and ‘not medical’. When a person tells me they use ‘medical marijuana’ I routinely ask them if they ‘smoke’ it, knowing that the estimate that 95% of British Columbia ‘medical marijuana’ establishments were for pleasure purposes. Smoking marijuania is 'recreational use'. The cost/benefit medicinal value of any marijuana is negated by smoking it. Only marijuana consumed without smoking is potentially of 'medical benefit' given the burden of disease associated with marijuana.
2) The patient who has been diagnosed as having addiction or alcoholism is suddenly fased with not being told to take ‘a pill’ as alcoholics and addicts have been pharmaceutical industries greatest friends. The last alcoholic drug addict that died whose pill cabinet I went through, had every prescription and over the counter mood altering substance known to man. Indeed if one was cynical one would consider that the ‘drug doctors’ avoid asking about addiction with any care, concern or ‘due diligence’ because they know they run the risk of losing a very valuable customer. These ‘prescription pad’ doctors would rather throw another drug into the mental soup of the insane patient than ‘make the diagnosis’ of alcoholism and drug addiction because this could ‘anger’ the alcoholic and drug addict. Freud considered alcoholics and addicts to be 'orally addicted' He thought these people were fixated on the 'breast'. He thought the damage psychologically was done in the developmental phase when one is being 'weaned'. He was probably right. However sex addiction and gambling addiction are not oral fixations so addiction to alcohol and smoke might well follow Freuds observations but overall addiction appears more a behavioural disorder of impulse dyscontrol and regulation failure. Cognitive therapists see marijuana and alcohol as potentially like 'computer viruses'. We know now drug addiction and alcoholism are 'contagious' but better still we know that 'recovery' and 'abstinence from drugs and alcohol' are equally if not more 'contagious'. Groups get better whereas those who isolate are the least likely to recover.
Why doesn’t anyone want to ‘anger’ the alcoholic and drug addict? Ask a wife or husband what their response was when they told their partner they thought they were drinking too much or smoking too much marijuana. It's not usual a Rockwell moment. There's nothing cuddly about an addict or alcoholic who is questioned or even criticized. The whole development of the 'motivation' interview was to avoid questioning or even' addressing' the addict or alcoholic in the 'denial' phase of addiction. Alcoholics Anonymous told people to come when they reach their 'bottom'. A bottom could be anything from loss of marriage or loss of job or just feeling stupid on marijuana and having had 'enough' . It's said you can get off at any floor , you don't need to take the elevator all the way down.
Note, I have had a dozen complaints to the College of Physicians and Surgeons solely by making the correct diagnosis. I have had my car windows broken by alcoholics. Marijuana smokers have murdered my dog. My life has been threatened repeatedly and my windows have been shot out.
Judges, probably drunk, agreed that it was okay if a man killed another ‘under the influence’ , the courts being the prime enablers in the country for drug addiction and alcoholism and the best friend of the tobacco companies. Ask Mothers Against Drunk Drivers who their greatest enemy is. For years it was the judge and the courts. Doctors working against the widespread promotion and sale of tobacco especially to children literally fight the government and courts to stop the killing.
When I last diagnosed a marvellous old chap with alcoholism and refused to give him ‘valium’ for his ‘nerves’ and indeed told him the ‘combination’ was dangerous and that I couldn’t in good conscience prescribe him more drugs for his ‘anxiety disorder’ and ‘depression’, he wrote scathing ‘rate your doctor’ comments for 2 weeks after the visit. The difficulty with rate your doctor is that when I fired a secretary who had relapsed on crack she too wrote a number of ‘comments’ about my character, practice.
Alcoholics never say they don't want to go to alcoholics anonymous because they want to continue to drink. That would be a very politically incorrect thing to say to a boss, for instance. They always say they don't want to go 'because of the God thing'. That's because the 'god thing' works today. 30 years ago they said they didn't want to go because of fears of anonymity. My favourite complaint is that they don't like the colour of the wall. Everyone knows that Alcoholics Anonymous membership would sky rocket and be as popular as the pubs if they served alcohol. No one complains about picture of the Queen in the pubs and no one complains about drinking in Christian establishments and the very best drinking goes on at religious funerals.
I had one pothead complain that I was a man. They never said that I'd told them to quit pot. No one ever tells family what the doctor said truly when he tells them to stop watching porn, stop drinking or stop smoking pot. They tell the referring doctor if they're a woman, "I think I need to see a female psychiatrist'. If they're a man, 'they say I didn't like that psychiatrist, could you refer me to another'. The most popular psychiatrists prescribe the most clonazepam and ritalin to the addicts and alcoholics. They collude. Addicts and alcoholics love those who collude.Theres a great book called the Alcoholic Republic that gets down and dirty with the problem of collusion.
Alcoholics and addicts are nasty people in their disease. Dr. Jeckyl and Mr Hyde. They’re at first jolly but addiction is like making love to a gorilla, at first it might be cuddly but it’s not over till the gorilla says its over. So after the honeymoon the meanness of the addict or alcoholic comes on. And that’s any time but the increasingly briefer period of ‘okay’ feeling that the person gets with the abuse. The Chinese coined a term to describe searching for this elusive moment as ‘chasing the tail of the dragon’.
So the Government and the College and academics all spout ‘platitudes’ about not prescribing dangerous combinations of drugs with active alcohol or drug abuse( and there are countless measurement tools and assessment tools for assessing drug and alcohol abuse) but mostly people 'avoid' asking and 'cherry pick' and 'collude'. Everyone can then say they were 'well intentioned' even though the 'outcome measures' show this as often as not supports and even promotes'. It's a start though so better than nothing. Platitudes are sweet sounding at least. Like 'lifestyle disease'. Very PC. It’s not even easy to speak to a family member or friend about a person’s alcohol or drug abuse (given that the second question of the CAGE is ‘has anyone ever suggested you might have a problem with alcohol or drugs, has anyone "annoyed" you by suggesting you cut down). The Government and the Colleges of health care are by nature 'PEOPLE PLEASERS" so they are grossly in effective in addressing addiction because people with addiction (especially marijuana smokers) are so easily 'annoyed'.
Meanwhile the richest and most lauded and most successful psychiatrists are those who the drug companies reward for prescribing the most pills too. Addiction psychiatrists by their very nature, tell people to stop prescription drugs and abusing illicit drugs. We're poor by comparison and we're the ones who get the complaints not the 'drug pushers'. The police are beat up by the drunk, never the drug pushers. Drugs and alcohol impair the memory and protect the source. People rarely roll over on the drug pusher. Goddam the drug pusher!!!!
And today they tell people to stop smoking marijuana.
All doctors tell their patients that smoking mairjuania is unhealthy.
All doctors tell people to stop smoking.
Not very adamantly.
Not strongly.
But they're telling them.
I remember when we offered patients cigarettes in the office or bummed a cigarete from the patient or nurse in the hospital.
Addiction can be cured. Look at how addiction therapy has 'cured' smoking.
With all the gains we've made at high cost addressing tobacco smoke I'm sorry but I don't want to have the smoke epidemic start all over again with 'safe' 'herbal' 'medicinal' 'marijuana. Is every one stupid. Just look at the marketing of tobacco. It was sold as a means to have smaller easier deliveries because smokers babies were smaller. Women were encouraged by tobacco companies and their paid doctors to smoke during pregnancy.
Everything the marijuana crowd and their bully boys are saying is what the tobacco industry said 50 years ago.
But a day doesn’t go by in my office where someone smoking marijuana daily or weekly doesn’t tell me that I’ve got a problem suggesting they have a problem with marijuana.
Indeed any doctor who is being a healer in the western world of ‘lifestyle’ disease i.e. principal diseases are addiction diseases - gluttony i.e. over eating, smoking, over drinking, lack of exercise poor diet, workaholism etc, is going to get complaints.
Indeed when I ask doctors, have you had a complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and they say, “no’, I know that they are good businessmen, jolly good fellows, wearing rose coloured glasses, lying, playing it safe, but they’re not ‘healer’s and they’re not physicians in the true sense and they’re not ‘psychiatrist’ especially by any definition of the word. Or they have a very circumscribed practice where they can do medicine, like pathologists do, knowing all the ills of addiction but never having to face a living patient and tell them how to delay ending up in the morgue.
I'm PRO LIFE and condemned for it as a doctor today. The Euthanasia doctors and single government health care insurance with it's conflict of interest loves euthanasia. Euthanasia is good for you because it saves the government money.
First ‘do no harm’. The greatest harm that can be done other than actually killing a person is to watch, thereby, encourage, them, killing themselves. We call that ‘enabling’. Stop filming the terrorists. The media black outs of terrorist demands dramatically stopped terrorism campaigns of the 70's. Stopping advertising of tobacco stops it's sale. Stopping advertising marijuana and especially promoting 'safe heroin injection' ensures that there will be an eventual reduction in addiction. We are winning with stopping smoking tobacco. We have addressed the greatest public health concerns of the day. We are finding cures for HIV. To promote smoking today would be like say have promiscuous safe sex.
Yet so man individuals and most institutions in our society enable and encourage addiction.
It’s the elephant in the living room.
My friend who is one of the most successful and entertaining men in the field of gambling addiction gets millions of dollars of research money from the casinos and probably from the MOB. He laughs when he says his ‘mandate’ is not to ‘cure’ gambling but to find a way to ‘stop’ a gambler after he has lost his house, job and marriage, from coming to the casino and making a nuisance". His job is to address the ones who are bad for business. Indeed this genius recognizes that promotion of gambling is tied to the taxation system and may well be preferable to those who don't gamble as a means to fund bridge building. This doesn't say good things about the 'stigma' attached to addictions but it speaks to the reason why people want to be called 'stressed' or 'depressed' and diagnosed with 'PTSD" rather than "Addiction'.
No military doctor has ever advanced his career by suggesting that stupid military commanders shouldn’t waste their assets.
Indeed the most recent example of this was a brilliant loving caring wonderful human being of a military doctor who tried desperately to stop the wholly unnecessary ‘waste’ of ‘friendly fire’ only to be fined and pilloried by every official organization in the country. In my mind the man is one of the greatest heroes of the day and were our society not so sick , he’d be awarded the medal of honour for his courage and genius which surpasses mine and most of my colleagues.
Locally we have a ‘SAFER INJECTION Site” called “INSITE “ which I say should not be funded by ‘TAX PAYERS” but rather by the gangs like ‘allegedly’ the TONG and Hells Angels, who ‘allegedly’ are behind the distribution of heroin. Just like my gambling doctor friend the Insite crowd clean up the ‘mess’ caused by the addiction to Heroin. Insite makes Heroin look good, puts a pretty face on addiction and helps the gangs market their goods, protecting the industry of drug addiction just as my gambling friend is given money to stop the loser from returning to the casino when he’s lost his assets.
When I was a bar tend in England at 20 the pub owner threw the drunk without money out on the street. Now they call an ambulance. The cost of the health care system is exorbitant because of addiction.
10% of all people who abuse develop some level of addiction. Addiction is diagnosed by it's negative consequences at first to the individual and later to their society.
10% of marijuana smoker will develop addiction of some kind. The more available a substance is the exponentially higher rates of abuse occur. It’s not madness that had tobacco companies wanting to put cigarette dispensers in schools and it’s no surprise that the western world has an epidemic of obesity with all the carbohydrate ‘chips and nachos and chocolate dispensers’
Sabet in REEFER SANIETY shows very clearly that the taxes never pay the cost of addiction.
Indeed taxes are like the apocryphal proverbial Mexico City Police. When I was there I was told by locals if I was robbed I have to think twice about calling the police because they often apparently figured that since a ‘robbery’ had occurred and a gringo was putting in an insurance claim ‘anyway’ then they should help themselves to anything the thieves had forgotten to take. So the ‘taxation’ argument goes , since the ‘drug pushers’ have taken most of your money and life the government now can take whatever is left by ‘getting a cut of the action’.
Indeed in Canada in a famous referendum, all gambling and liquor and drug ‘revenue’ ‘sin tax’ was only to be allowed by government if the assets went directly only to health care and education because the corruption of government would occur when ‘sin tax’ went to the income of the politician and courts and bureaucrats. This is the case today which makes it hard for my patients to understand ‘what’s the difference between the RCMP arresting you and collecting tax for marijuana smoking” and the gangs charging you and beating you up a bit if you didn’t pay your debts.
A colleague psychiatrist, a favoured doctor-businessman, a great ‘corporate scion’ of medicine, says that the problem isn’t with heroin being sold on the street or cocaine being sold on the street or marijuana but rather that ‘we’re not selling it’. He sees no problem with ‘prescription drug addiction’ and indeed promotes speed, oxycontins and ativans and clonazepams better than any ‘street drug pusher’ I know. He doesn’t like the ‘competition’ which he sees as ‘unfair competition ‘ because the marijuania drug pushers ‘don’t pay taxes’ and ‘aren’t regulated by the College and Government’. Imagine the complaints department for The College of Marijuania Producers - every childs mother would be complaining daily to that place. But the College of Physicians and Surgeons is the enforcer of complaints by addicts about their doctors who have diagnosed their addiction with the negative consequences that has for their insurance or work or marriage. Stopping their addiction and getting in recovery would help everything especially their health but in the interim it's easier to complain and be nasty.
So Justin Troudeau says he smokes marijuana and smoked marijuana while working. Whats new about that. His father said he didn’t swear but said ‘fuddle duck’. The acorns don’t fall far from the tree.
But Clinton said he put a marijuan joint to his mouth and didn’t inhale and Obama said he smoked marijuana contritely.
The fact is, Clinton could well have done just what he said. When a joint is going around , to be part of the crowd, and to be a politician like Clinton became, you learn to ‘fit in’. You are kind of a Nazi among the Nazi’s and Kind of Communist among the Communists and Kind of a Jew among the Jews and Kind of a Christian among the Christians. This is the essence of political correctness. You are without ‘substance’ and as a new ‘opinion poll’ peace time politician you’re like the addled brained weak kings of the feudal world who had syphilis of the brain and were loved by all the powerful men until faced with an American Revolution. So Clinton caught in the act, with the photographic evidence, and testimony, not dissimilar to when he was caught with pants down, may or may not have ‘inhaled’ but he wasn’t ‘proud’ of his behaviour and tried like the marvellous Flashman of the Flashman novel series to weasel out of it. He knew right from wrong. Just like he knew it was wrong what he was doing on the job with Monica, his being married and collecting government funds for working but indeed was ‘distracted’ by Monica. We don’t hear much from her but Clinton today is the highest paid ‘speaker’.
Obama did drugs. He admits it and ‘apologizes’ for it. He ’s ‘contrite’. it's all in the attitude.
Justin Troudeau isn’t contrite. It's his attitude of entitlement that offends. That’s the problem. He ’s like Mayor Ford. They are two very entitled elitist white men who don’t seem to understand that this country is a ‘democracy’. We believe in laws for everyone. I'm waiting for an apology from Troudeau for breaking the law and essentially 'bragging' about it.
My friend got caught for smoking a joint. He went to jail. He didn’t like authority and was claustrophobic. 10 years later, raped and beatten and life changed irreparably he came out and joined a criminal gang. I met him years later. To the best of my knowledge he’d killed people by then. He’d been no different from me. We’d come from the same background. I smoked banana peels one day thinking it would get me high. He smoked ‘grass’. The police caught him. I got sick. He went to jail. I went to university. We met up in our 40’s. He deals marijuana.
I’m sure he thinks Justin Troudeau is a chump. He hates pompous poofs like the Troudeaus. Can’t stand them. To him they’re just feudal lords, ‘dandies’ is what he calls them. He reads a lot, was brilliant as a young man. Today he's rich. He could be the lead in Sons of Anarchy. He’s that sort of guy. He was only supposed to go to jail for ‘possession’ of marijuana. He was only supposed to do ‘6 months’.
Justin Troudeau wasn’t arrested for ‘possession’ and he would never have done time. As Animal Farm told us ‘some animals are more equal than others’. The communism of old man Troudeau, the great atheist religion, has turned out to have killed more millions in a mere hundred years than all the religious wars in the thousands of years before.
Communist countries have devolved into gangster run states and the democracy of Canada continues to muddle along despite the ubiquitous corruption of Quebec. The satire of the recent Quebec investigation, had one of the leading politicians of the province saying ‘I only took 5 million dollars, I could have taken millions more, everyone else was taking millions more’. That’s the moral relativism of this ‘class’ of characters. What might have been called in Casblanca, ‘todays’ cast of ‘usual suspects’.
My other patient was caught with a few joints and put in jail. He was young and blond and it was before the drug courts. So he was supposed to just do a few months and leave. He was gang raped and died of HIV Aids.
Everyone wants decriminalization. Decriminalzation makes the problem a health care problem and addiction and alcoholism ‘disease’. Legalization is what the gangs want. Already people like Emory are counting their millions. These pothead promoters are the new CEO’s of Tobacco Companies. They are addicted to power and money. No one cares about the addict. No one cares about the 10% - the losers.
The marijuiana smoker is toast.
Most medications were tested in non alcoholics and non addicts. If my colleague called the pharmaceutical company that made the drugs he prescribed they’d say they were not tested in combination with 2 bottles of wine a day or 1 to 6 joints a day of BC Bud. If there were justice, my colleague would be faulted for 'lack of due diligence'. All manner of patients have difficulties with combined pharmaceutical drugs and street drugs. It's a common cause of "side effects' and 'death'.
Most of my colleagues don’t know that Amsterdam after 40 years of experience with marijuania has lifted the standard famed ‘BC Bud’ marijuana to the most dangerous drug category, alongside Heroin and Cocaine. The Dutch 'experiment' with drugs has been a failure and is being reversed. Pot Cafe's are now highly regulated. Portugal decriminalized drugs but made treatment of addiction central. Everyone except Canadian Teen Agers and Children, are getting off drugs.
Most of my colleagues and Canadians in general seem ignorant that the marijuana that the Beattles smoked in the 60’s had a THC content of possibly 1 whereas todays BC Bud is as high as 15 to 30.
When a person comes into the office and says that they are irritable and having trouble sleeping and feeling negative and have self pity and negative ideations and maybe even are suicidal, the first thing I wonder is, are they drinking or doing drugs. My colleague would say, I think they’re depressed. Yet I was in charge of a suicide ward and was a supervisor in a psychiatric emergency and reviewed all the completed suicides I’d known and lo and behold they were almost all associated with drugs and alcohol.
Suicide is under almost all conditions a severe brain disease. If you see a mouse running repeatedly head first into a wall trying to kill it self you don’t at first consider Nietze and philosophical things. Even a veterinarian thinks, Brain Disease, meningitis, brain timor, etc.
So similar real doctors are taught when they see a person with symptoms, especially of depression, to think first a foremost of ‘organic’ causes, especially if the disease is so severe as to be ‘life threatening’ as suicide is.
Just as a person could have lung cancer without smoking almost all lung cancers especially the horrid oat cell carcinoma were found in tobacco smokers. My famous Califorinia respirologist friend says, 'there would simply be no department of respirology were it not for cigarette smokers'. We now learn that hypertension and heart disease are diet and alcohol diseases, diabetes most a diet disease. Once called mental illness, most departments now are called "Mental Illness and Addiction". There's less and less mental illness and more and more addiction but we can't 'blame the victim' and the rich doctors never tell the emperor he has no clothes.
Yet, just because depression is common and increasingly with the increasing drug (specifically marijuana) abuse and alcohol abuse, suicidality is ‘common’ .
But today patients who are diagnosed with addiction or alcoholism may face consequences.
1) They lose the ‘sympathy’ of the ‘depressed’ patient. “Just Say NO” campaign, while being true, and helping countless people, also minimized the difficulty that addicts and alcoholics have stopping drugs and alcohol.
Most people who have come to me with ‘depression’ and ‘alcohol or drug abuse’ have indeed tried to stop. The CAGE Screening Test, the simplest 4 question test of all, asks ‘have you ever considered cutting down’. Not surprising people who don't use or even don't abuse drugs and alcohol have never considered 'cutting down' but some 80% of those who have turn out to have the disease of addiction. It's a marvellous red flag.
Most patients referred to a specialist like me for depression who also have alcoholism or addiction have indeed ‘tried’ and are ‘defeated’. They have ‘hopelessness’ because their lives are ‘unmanageable’ with their addiction. Yet they don't like the name 'alcoholism' or 'addiction' and were 'alcoholics anonymous' called 'stress stop' they'd go their in a minute. It's just that 'honesty' is lost early in the addiction cycle, for the addict and alcoholic, and for the enablers and for society. Everyone avoids talking about the 'elephant in the room'. Especially if they've seen an angry elephant. Historically addicts and alcoholics excelled young in the navy and army early in their disease. The air force began to have a problem with addiction when they got into jets and today alcoholism and addiction are identified early in the military but very late in politicians and others farther from the 'front'. Artists rarely get diagnosed as alcoholics and whole generations of artists have been influenced by pedophiles, just as an example, likening sex with infants to an 'addiction' and showing how it can be promoted as 'okay' and 'normal' especially by 'addicted' artists. But when I asked marijuana smokers if they wanted their neurosurgeon on marijuania they said no. Today I prefer artists who aren't intoxicated. Tiny bubbles is very passé.
Chemical addictions, like alcohol and marijuana ‘short circuit’ and ‘disrupt’ neuropathways. It’s like splashing a circuit board with water. The computer screen will show all manner of entertainment and flashes and gibberish just like the ‘delirium’ state caused by intoxication.
Here I note, a person can have 1 to 3 glasses of wine without ‘intoxication’. Note the word ‘toxic’. Drug experience is ‘on or off’. One can drink without getting ‘drunk’ but one smokes marijuana and gets ‘stoned’ . Drug addiction is ‘digital’. It’s on or off.
The ‘state’ has been described as ‘dissociated’ , two personalities, and over time the ‘dissociated self’ can ‘consume’ the well person, in the Doctor Jeckyl/Mr Hyde way all of us see who work in addiction. Recovery is to a very large extent the recovery of the authentic self and the expansion of the potentiality. The addict person is a very abbreviated reduced person with limited access to higher brain function and major loss of control.
The ‘sympathy’ component of addiction was associated with traditional ‘disease’ categories. A person had a ‘heart attack’ and it was thought to be ‘involuntary’ whereas a person showed up drunk in the Emergency and that was ‘voluntary’.
The ‘rage’ in ‘pharmaceutical medicine’ is the treatment of ‘involuntary’ disease. Fundamentally there is ‘fate” and “free will”. In our society we ‘take credit’ for our good deeds and ‘blame’ others or the universe for the ‘negative’.
Insurance companies excluded alcoholism and addiction (because they could get away with it and knew they’d save fortunes in the insurance lottery) but kept ‘heart disease’ and ‘lung disease’ as ‘involuntary’. Today we know that those who had heart attacks and lung cancer more often than not got them as a consequence of drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco.
Today we call them ‘diseases of lifestyle’. Life ‘style’ is such a politically correct ‘fashion favourite’. In the Bible they said the ‘sins of the fathers and mothers will be passed on to their children’. In the East they called it ‘Karma’. But in Consumer Corporate society it’s just called “marketing’. More often than not my alcoholics had parents who were alcoholic and the smokers had parents who smoked.
But nobody wants to be ‘honest’ and no one including the doctors, government and corporations want to do anything but ‘collude with the dying customer’. Indeed when the smoker gets lung cancer the covert aggression of the manufacturer and friends was to offer him a cigarette. Alcoholics on their death bed are given more to drink. It’s comforting.
So my ‘johnny come lately’ junior colleague has a wholly ‘addiction’ practice so that only ‘addicted’ patients are sent to him. This ‘selection bias’ ensures that he not only doesn’t have to make the diagnosis he’s politically correct and leaves the heavy lifting to the first doctor who says, “I think your diagnosis is alcoholism or marijuania addiction."
The beauty of heroin addicts and crack addicts is that the ‘prohibition’ society makes everyone’s life easy because these people know what they are doing is ‘wrong’ and no one has to ‘convince’ them they have a heroin or crack addiction. They just may or may not be ready to address the problem. Drug addiction and alcoholism are ‘fun, fun and trouble and trouble.’ The sooner you get off the train bound for institutions, early death, disease, jails, the easier the fall, but as that train speeds up and descends deeper and deeper it’s more frightening to jump off and much harder to crawl back to where you are no longer down.
Chemicals such as alcohol and marijuana and eventually all drugs of addiction, which mostly over stimulate and damage the dopamine (happy, think ‘dopey’) circuits are ultimately depressing.
The initial euphoria is a product of the ‘disinhibition’ of the loss of the frontal lobes which are the latest and most human structure of the brain associated with judgement and editorializing, delayed gratification, planning.
The buzz diagnosis in the pharmaceutic industry for the 'mood swings' of addiction is 'Bipolar II" disorder. Addiction and alcoholism are the 'great chameleons of mental illness because ever 'symptom' of mental illness can be seen in the addict, from the usual 'anxiety' to the final states' early 'dementia' or 'schizophrenia' like' psychosis. All intoxications are 'delirium like 'or 'cognitive impairments' and 'mood disorders'.
Spiritual teachers recommended a once a lifetime or once a year ‘drug experience’ to have this experience of being aware of the more primitive ‘childlike’ thinking but especially the notion of ‘time’ as a critical factor of ‘assumed’ thinking. Meditation is a ‘timeless’ experience but so is ‘drug abuse’ and ‘drunkeness’. Immediately in the altered state one loses ‘time’ awareness. In the proper ‘context’, historically and culturally established by tribes and medicine men one could have an induced religious experience. This ‘dangerous’ rite of passage, as described in Huxley’s Perennial Philophy and known to Indians in the “Peyote” experience is wholly different from the ‘abuse’ of substances seen today. For one these 'religious drug experiences' are a cultural and community and 'controlled and regulated by elders 'experience. But mostly they are just 'once' or at most 'once' a year. There's nothing 'religious' or 'spiritual' about daily or weekly 'intoxication'.
It’s all in ‘dosage’. To the addict or alcoholic ‘more’ is better whereas in fact the value of alcohol to ‘enhance’ a meal as often encouraged by gourmands is at most a glass. Two glasses of wine ‘dulls’ the palate’ just as with the heart, which is made better with 1 glass of wine is made toxic with three. Huxley suggested it would be beneficial for people to have an hallucinogenic experience once in their life. Not to live their life as Mr Hyde.
Whereas alcohol biological effects wear off in a matter of days, marijuana or cannibis last weeks to months. A person’s perception and interaction with others, relationships being most sensitive to drug and alcohol abuse, as with higher tasks of work and play, are not just affected in the ‘intoxicated’ phase but also in the ‘withdrawal’ phase. Weekend binge drinkers are in ‘withdrawal’ in the middle and end of the week.
One wonders about jokes about being careful with work done by governments and union workers at the end of the week. The ‘withdrawal/craving’ cycle is all part of addiction. With the classic white collar martini drunk Judge his ‘decisions’ made late in the day were commonly less favourable as opposed to those mid day. Astute lawyers timed their clients cases against the judges daily evening drunkeness.
The WHO has long held that one is only clear of drugs and alcohol if one has been abstinent for one year. The DSMV says a person is in 'remission' if one is one year abstinent. All 'harm reduction' strategies are only 'valid' scientifically and culturally if they are leading and directed ultimately to 'abstinence.' Otherwise they may well be enabling, and a doctor takes an 'oath to do no harm'. Enabling is harmful. If one is only providing 'palliative care' one should indeed tell the patient that they are being treated as if there is 'no cure'. Abstinence is a 'cure' for addiction. So it's ironic that people are so often offered 'harm reduction' sometimes even first offered 'harm reduction' rather than given the true facts especially those that say that the people working in predominantly harm reduction are usually the most negative about their clients potential.
There is no ‘healthy’ or ‘medical’ smoke. All smoking is ‘unhealthy’ and ‘not medical’. When a person tells me they use ‘medical marijuana’ I routinely ask them if they ‘smoke’ it, knowing that the estimate that 95% of British Columbia ‘medical marijuana’ establishments were for pleasure purposes. Smoking marijuania is 'recreational use'. The cost/benefit medicinal value of any marijuana is negated by smoking it. Only marijuana consumed without smoking is potentially of 'medical benefit' given the burden of disease associated with marijuana.
2) The patient who has been diagnosed as having addiction or alcoholism is suddenly fased with not being told to take ‘a pill’ as alcoholics and addicts have been pharmaceutical industries greatest friends. The last alcoholic drug addict that died whose pill cabinet I went through, had every prescription and over the counter mood altering substance known to man. Indeed if one was cynical one would consider that the ‘drug doctors’ avoid asking about addiction with any care, concern or ‘due diligence’ because they know they run the risk of losing a very valuable customer. These ‘prescription pad’ doctors would rather throw another drug into the mental soup of the insane patient than ‘make the diagnosis’ of alcoholism and drug addiction because this could ‘anger’ the alcoholic and drug addict. Freud considered alcoholics and addicts to be 'orally addicted' He thought these people were fixated on the 'breast'. He thought the damage psychologically was done in the developmental phase when one is being 'weaned'. He was probably right. However sex addiction and gambling addiction are not oral fixations so addiction to alcohol and smoke might well follow Freuds observations but overall addiction appears more a behavioural disorder of impulse dyscontrol and regulation failure. Cognitive therapists see marijuana and alcohol as potentially like 'computer viruses'. We know now drug addiction and alcoholism are 'contagious' but better still we know that 'recovery' and 'abstinence from drugs and alcohol' are equally if not more 'contagious'. Groups get better whereas those who isolate are the least likely to recover.
Why doesn’t anyone want to ‘anger’ the alcoholic and drug addict? Ask a wife or husband what their response was when they told their partner they thought they were drinking too much or smoking too much marijuana. It's not usual a Rockwell moment. There's nothing cuddly about an addict or alcoholic who is questioned or even criticized. The whole development of the 'motivation' interview was to avoid questioning or even' addressing' the addict or alcoholic in the 'denial' phase of addiction. Alcoholics Anonymous told people to come when they reach their 'bottom'. A bottom could be anything from loss of marriage or loss of job or just feeling stupid on marijuana and having had 'enough' . It's said you can get off at any floor , you don't need to take the elevator all the way down.
Note, I have had a dozen complaints to the College of Physicians and Surgeons solely by making the correct diagnosis. I have had my car windows broken by alcoholics. Marijuana smokers have murdered my dog. My life has been threatened repeatedly and my windows have been shot out.
Judges, probably drunk, agreed that it was okay if a man killed another ‘under the influence’ , the courts being the prime enablers in the country for drug addiction and alcoholism and the best friend of the tobacco companies. Ask Mothers Against Drunk Drivers who their greatest enemy is. For years it was the judge and the courts. Doctors working against the widespread promotion and sale of tobacco especially to children literally fight the government and courts to stop the killing.
When I last diagnosed a marvellous old chap with alcoholism and refused to give him ‘valium’ for his ‘nerves’ and indeed told him the ‘combination’ was dangerous and that I couldn’t in good conscience prescribe him more drugs for his ‘anxiety disorder’ and ‘depression’, he wrote scathing ‘rate your doctor’ comments for 2 weeks after the visit. The difficulty with rate your doctor is that when I fired a secretary who had relapsed on crack she too wrote a number of ‘comments’ about my character, practice.
Alcoholics never say they don't want to go to alcoholics anonymous because they want to continue to drink. That would be a very politically incorrect thing to say to a boss, for instance. They always say they don't want to go 'because of the God thing'. That's because the 'god thing' works today. 30 years ago they said they didn't want to go because of fears of anonymity. My favourite complaint is that they don't like the colour of the wall. Everyone knows that Alcoholics Anonymous membership would sky rocket and be as popular as the pubs if they served alcohol. No one complains about picture of the Queen in the pubs and no one complains about drinking in Christian establishments and the very best drinking goes on at religious funerals.
I had one pothead complain that I was a man. They never said that I'd told them to quit pot. No one ever tells family what the doctor said truly when he tells them to stop watching porn, stop drinking or stop smoking pot. They tell the referring doctor if they're a woman, "I think I need to see a female psychiatrist'. If they're a man, 'they say I didn't like that psychiatrist, could you refer me to another'. The most popular psychiatrists prescribe the most clonazepam and ritalin to the addicts and alcoholics. They collude. Addicts and alcoholics love those who collude.Theres a great book called the Alcoholic Republic that gets down and dirty with the problem of collusion.
Alcoholics and addicts are nasty people in their disease. Dr. Jeckyl and Mr Hyde. They’re at first jolly but addiction is like making love to a gorilla, at first it might be cuddly but it’s not over till the gorilla says its over. So after the honeymoon the meanness of the addict or alcoholic comes on. And that’s any time but the increasingly briefer period of ‘okay’ feeling that the person gets with the abuse. The Chinese coined a term to describe searching for this elusive moment as ‘chasing the tail of the dragon’.
So the Government and the College and academics all spout ‘platitudes’ about not prescribing dangerous combinations of drugs with active alcohol or drug abuse( and there are countless measurement tools and assessment tools for assessing drug and alcohol abuse) but mostly people 'avoid' asking and 'cherry pick' and 'collude'. Everyone can then say they were 'well intentioned' even though the 'outcome measures' show this as often as not supports and even promotes'. It's a start though so better than nothing. Platitudes are sweet sounding at least. Like 'lifestyle disease'. Very PC. It’s not even easy to speak to a family member or friend about a person’s alcohol or drug abuse (given that the second question of the CAGE is ‘has anyone ever suggested you might have a problem with alcohol or drugs, has anyone "annoyed" you by suggesting you cut down). The Government and the Colleges of health care are by nature 'PEOPLE PLEASERS" so they are grossly in effective in addressing addiction because people with addiction (especially marijuana smokers) are so easily 'annoyed'.
Meanwhile the richest and most lauded and most successful psychiatrists are those who the drug companies reward for prescribing the most pills too. Addiction psychiatrists by their very nature, tell people to stop prescription drugs and abusing illicit drugs. We're poor by comparison and we're the ones who get the complaints not the 'drug pushers'. The police are beat up by the drunk, never the drug pushers. Drugs and alcohol impair the memory and protect the source. People rarely roll over on the drug pusher. Goddam the drug pusher!!!!
And today they tell people to stop smoking marijuana.
All doctors tell their patients that smoking mairjuania is unhealthy.
All doctors tell people to stop smoking.
Not very adamantly.
Not strongly.
But they're telling them.
I remember when we offered patients cigarettes in the office or bummed a cigarete from the patient or nurse in the hospital.
Addiction can be cured. Look at how addiction therapy has 'cured' smoking.
With all the gains we've made at high cost addressing tobacco smoke I'm sorry but I don't want to have the smoke epidemic start all over again with 'safe' 'herbal' 'medicinal' 'marijuana. Is every one stupid. Just look at the marketing of tobacco. It was sold as a means to have smaller easier deliveries because smokers babies were smaller. Women were encouraged by tobacco companies and their paid doctors to smoke during pregnancy.
Everything the marijuana crowd and their bully boys are saying is what the tobacco industry said 50 years ago.
But a day doesn’t go by in my office where someone smoking marijuana daily or weekly doesn’t tell me that I’ve got a problem suggesting they have a problem with marijuana.
Indeed any doctor who is being a healer in the western world of ‘lifestyle’ disease i.e. principal diseases are addiction diseases - gluttony i.e. over eating, smoking, over drinking, lack of exercise poor diet, workaholism etc, is going to get complaints.
Indeed when I ask doctors, have you had a complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and they say, “no’, I know that they are good businessmen, jolly good fellows, wearing rose coloured glasses, lying, playing it safe, but they’re not ‘healer’s and they’re not physicians in the true sense and they’re not ‘psychiatrist’ especially by any definition of the word. Or they have a very circumscribed practice where they can do medicine, like pathologists do, knowing all the ills of addiction but never having to face a living patient and tell them how to delay ending up in the morgue.
I'm PRO LIFE and condemned for it as a doctor today. The Euthanasia doctors and single government health care insurance with it's conflict of interest loves euthanasia. Euthanasia is good for you because it saves the government money.
First ‘do no harm’. The greatest harm that can be done other than actually killing a person is to watch, thereby, encourage, them, killing themselves. We call that ‘enabling’. Stop filming the terrorists. The media black outs of terrorist demands dramatically stopped terrorism campaigns of the 70's. Stopping advertising of tobacco stops it's sale. Stopping advertising marijuana and especially promoting 'safe heroin injection' ensures that there will be an eventual reduction in addiction. We are winning with stopping smoking tobacco. We have addressed the greatest public health concerns of the day. We are finding cures for HIV. To promote smoking today would be like say have promiscuous safe sex.
Yet so man individuals and most institutions in our society enable and encourage addiction.
It’s the elephant in the living room.
My friend who is one of the most successful and entertaining men in the field of gambling addiction gets millions of dollars of research money from the casinos and probably from the MOB. He laughs when he says his ‘mandate’ is not to ‘cure’ gambling but to find a way to ‘stop’ a gambler after he has lost his house, job and marriage, from coming to the casino and making a nuisance". His job is to address the ones who are bad for business. Indeed this genius recognizes that promotion of gambling is tied to the taxation system and may well be preferable to those who don't gamble as a means to fund bridge building. This doesn't say good things about the 'stigma' attached to addictions but it speaks to the reason why people want to be called 'stressed' or 'depressed' and diagnosed with 'PTSD" rather than "Addiction'.
No military doctor has ever advanced his career by suggesting that stupid military commanders shouldn’t waste their assets.
Indeed the most recent example of this was a brilliant loving caring wonderful human being of a military doctor who tried desperately to stop the wholly unnecessary ‘waste’ of ‘friendly fire’ only to be fined and pilloried by every official organization in the country. In my mind the man is one of the greatest heroes of the day and were our society not so sick , he’d be awarded the medal of honour for his courage and genius which surpasses mine and most of my colleagues.
Locally we have a ‘SAFER INJECTION Site” called “INSITE “ which I say should not be funded by ‘TAX PAYERS” but rather by the gangs like ‘allegedly’ the TONG and Hells Angels, who ‘allegedly’ are behind the distribution of heroin. Just like my gambling doctor friend the Insite crowd clean up the ‘mess’ caused by the addiction to Heroin. Insite makes Heroin look good, puts a pretty face on addiction and helps the gangs market their goods, protecting the industry of drug addiction just as my gambling friend is given money to stop the loser from returning to the casino when he’s lost his assets.
When I was a bar tend in England at 20 the pub owner threw the drunk without money out on the street. Now they call an ambulance. The cost of the health care system is exorbitant because of addiction.
10% of all people who abuse develop some level of addiction. Addiction is diagnosed by it's negative consequences at first to the individual and later to their society.
10% of marijuana smoker will develop addiction of some kind. The more available a substance is the exponentially higher rates of abuse occur. It’s not madness that had tobacco companies wanting to put cigarette dispensers in schools and it’s no surprise that the western world has an epidemic of obesity with all the carbohydrate ‘chips and nachos and chocolate dispensers’
Sabet in REEFER SANIETY shows very clearly that the taxes never pay the cost of addiction.
Indeed taxes are like the apocryphal proverbial Mexico City Police. When I was there I was told by locals if I was robbed I have to think twice about calling the police because they often apparently figured that since a ‘robbery’ had occurred and a gringo was putting in an insurance claim ‘anyway’ then they should help themselves to anything the thieves had forgotten to take. So the ‘taxation’ argument goes , since the ‘drug pushers’ have taken most of your money and life the government now can take whatever is left by ‘getting a cut of the action’.
Indeed in Canada in a famous referendum, all gambling and liquor and drug ‘revenue’ ‘sin tax’ was only to be allowed by government if the assets went directly only to health care and education because the corruption of government would occur when ‘sin tax’ went to the income of the politician and courts and bureaucrats. This is the case today which makes it hard for my patients to understand ‘what’s the difference between the RCMP arresting you and collecting tax for marijuana smoking” and the gangs charging you and beating you up a bit if you didn’t pay your debts.
A colleague psychiatrist, a favoured doctor-businessman, a great ‘corporate scion’ of medicine, says that the problem isn’t with heroin being sold on the street or cocaine being sold on the street or marijuana but rather that ‘we’re not selling it’. He sees no problem with ‘prescription drug addiction’ and indeed promotes speed, oxycontins and ativans and clonazepams better than any ‘street drug pusher’ I know. He doesn’t like the ‘competition’ which he sees as ‘unfair competition ‘ because the marijuania drug pushers ‘don’t pay taxes’ and ‘aren’t regulated by the College and Government’. Imagine the complaints department for The College of Marijuania Producers - every childs mother would be complaining daily to that place. But the College of Physicians and Surgeons is the enforcer of complaints by addicts about their doctors who have diagnosed their addiction with the negative consequences that has for their insurance or work or marriage. Stopping their addiction and getting in recovery would help everything especially their health but in the interim it's easier to complain and be nasty.
So Justin Troudeau says he smokes marijuana and smoked marijuana while working. Whats new about that. His father said he didn’t swear but said ‘fuddle duck’. The acorns don’t fall far from the tree.
But Clinton said he put a marijuan joint to his mouth and didn’t inhale and Obama said he smoked marijuana contritely.
The fact is, Clinton could well have done just what he said. When a joint is going around , to be part of the crowd, and to be a politician like Clinton became, you learn to ‘fit in’. You are kind of a Nazi among the Nazi’s and Kind of Communist among the Communists and Kind of a Jew among the Jews and Kind of a Christian among the Christians. This is the essence of political correctness. You are without ‘substance’ and as a new ‘opinion poll’ peace time politician you’re like the addled brained weak kings of the feudal world who had syphilis of the brain and were loved by all the powerful men until faced with an American Revolution. So Clinton caught in the act, with the photographic evidence, and testimony, not dissimilar to when he was caught with pants down, may or may not have ‘inhaled’ but he wasn’t ‘proud’ of his behaviour and tried like the marvellous Flashman of the Flashman novel series to weasel out of it. He knew right from wrong. Just like he knew it was wrong what he was doing on the job with Monica, his being married and collecting government funds for working but indeed was ‘distracted’ by Monica. We don’t hear much from her but Clinton today is the highest paid ‘speaker’.
Obama did drugs. He admits it and ‘apologizes’ for it. He ’s ‘contrite’. it's all in the attitude.
Justin Troudeau isn’t contrite. It's his attitude of entitlement that offends. That’s the problem. He ’s like Mayor Ford. They are two very entitled elitist white men who don’t seem to understand that this country is a ‘democracy’. We believe in laws for everyone. I'm waiting for an apology from Troudeau for breaking the law and essentially 'bragging' about it.
My friend got caught for smoking a joint. He went to jail. He didn’t like authority and was claustrophobic. 10 years later, raped and beatten and life changed irreparably he came out and joined a criminal gang. I met him years later. To the best of my knowledge he’d killed people by then. He’d been no different from me. We’d come from the same background. I smoked banana peels one day thinking it would get me high. He smoked ‘grass’. The police caught him. I got sick. He went to jail. I went to university. We met up in our 40’s. He deals marijuana.
I’m sure he thinks Justin Troudeau is a chump. He hates pompous poofs like the Troudeaus. Can’t stand them. To him they’re just feudal lords, ‘dandies’ is what he calls them. He reads a lot, was brilliant as a young man. Today he's rich. He could be the lead in Sons of Anarchy. He’s that sort of guy. He was only supposed to go to jail for ‘possession’ of marijuana. He was only supposed to do ‘6 months’.
Justin Troudeau wasn’t arrested for ‘possession’ and he would never have done time. As Animal Farm told us ‘some animals are more equal than others’. The communism of old man Troudeau, the great atheist religion, has turned out to have killed more millions in a mere hundred years than all the religious wars in the thousands of years before.
Communist countries have devolved into gangster run states and the democracy of Canada continues to muddle along despite the ubiquitous corruption of Quebec. The satire of the recent Quebec investigation, had one of the leading politicians of the province saying ‘I only took 5 million dollars, I could have taken millions more, everyone else was taking millions more’. That’s the moral relativism of this ‘class’ of characters. What might have been called in Casblanca, ‘todays’ cast of ‘usual suspects’.
My other patient was caught with a few joints and put in jail. He was young and blond and it was before the drug courts. So he was supposed to just do a few months and leave. He was gang raped and died of HIV Aids.
Everyone wants decriminalization. Decriminalzation makes the problem a health care problem and addiction and alcoholism ‘disease’. Legalization is what the gangs want. Already people like Emory are counting their millions. These pothead promoters are the new CEO’s of Tobacco Companies. They are addicted to power and money. No one cares about the addict. No one cares about the 10% - the losers.
The marijuiana smoker is toast.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Commercial Street
The Friday rush hour traffic was too backed up to sit for long in the hot sun. Gilbert in his fur coat was glad when I pulled off Hastings opting for a coffee and cookie at the esteem able Continental Coffee. A veritable blue white tattooed Viking goddess served me while Gilbert sheltered in the shade.
Reading the latest Science magazine I learned of the STEM the science,technology,engineering, and mathematics educational push to reboot North America all too long mired in flakey politics and self celebrating arty stupidity. Even the greatest artists of their day were scientists whereas today so much revolves around fatuous fashion. Having had straight A's in arts and science I appreciate the value of both but know that far too many in the arts crowd have developed severe entitlement. Meanwhile true scientists are bypassed for the pseudoscience that is stupid enough for the ignorant to grasp.
Justin Troudeau meanwhile is promoting marijuana use in Canada where the greatest number of teens smoke dope. I smoked my share of dope when it was the strength of beer rather than the 100 proof acid dope today. Not a bad election strategy given the billions of dollars in illegal returns looking to protect their criminal past in the whitewashed future.
I don't think the aging baby boomers are so keen to have their increasing non English speaking care givers stoned out of their gourds and armed with catheters. Quebec, least science literate of the provinces and recently most corrupt of city halls has the most dope smoking in the country.
There really are alot of beautiful people on Commercial enjoying the fabulous sunshine.
Aim and Marc are getting married tomorrow in traditional Thai wedding. Marc is a very astute French Canadian with a great sense of humor and Aim is a brilliant and beautiful Thai scholar. They make a great couple and they'll make gifted babies.
Gilbert is invited.
I'm looking forward to motorcycling on Sunday. God is good. Thank you, Hallelujah! amen!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Reading the latest Science magazine I learned of the STEM the science,technology,engineering, and mathematics educational push to reboot North America all too long mired in flakey politics and self celebrating arty stupidity. Even the greatest artists of their day were scientists whereas today so much revolves around fatuous fashion. Having had straight A's in arts and science I appreciate the value of both but know that far too many in the arts crowd have developed severe entitlement. Meanwhile true scientists are bypassed for the pseudoscience that is stupid enough for the ignorant to grasp.
Justin Troudeau meanwhile is promoting marijuana use in Canada where the greatest number of teens smoke dope. I smoked my share of dope when it was the strength of beer rather than the 100 proof acid dope today. Not a bad election strategy given the billions of dollars in illegal returns looking to protect their criminal past in the whitewashed future.
I don't think the aging baby boomers are so keen to have their increasing non English speaking care givers stoned out of their gourds and armed with catheters. Quebec, least science literate of the provinces and recently most corrupt of city halls has the most dope smoking in the country.
There really are alot of beautiful people on Commercial enjoying the fabulous sunshine.
Aim and Marc are getting married tomorrow in traditional Thai wedding. Marc is a very astute French Canadian with a great sense of humor and Aim is a brilliant and beautiful Thai scholar. They make a great couple and they'll make gifted babies.
Gilbert is invited.
I'm looking forward to motorcycling on Sunday. God is good. Thank you, Hallelujah! amen!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Saturday, February 18, 2012
National Post and Andrew Coyne
I never seem to have the luxury of lying in bed reading the newspaper. Gilbert licks my face. If I'm not at Laura's or awake before Laura I have to get his bladder and bowels outside. Then I'm usually downing a morning coffee, showering and shaving and rushing off to work. On weekends there's as many chores and activities that follow the slobbery dog tongue to face alarm clock.
This weekend we are at the Ramada Executive Hotel in Harrison's. I'm fighting a cold and my back is still recuperating from rolling an ATV. Rest and relaxation has been forced on me.
After the slobbery tongue alarm clock I walked the dog across the street to the cafe and returned with life refining coffee and delicious egg and bacon breakfast sandwiches. The Ramada had a complimentary National Post newspaper. I don't usually read the newspaper. I've taken to getting the news via the Economist, BBC on line, CBC driving to work though that as commonly angers me, and word of mouth leading to google searches.
With sandwich done, still drinking coffee I "read the newspaper'. Who would have known?
I was blessed to grow up in Winnipeg and read the Winnipeg Free Press. Travelling in my 20's overseas I fell in love with the Manchester Guardian weekly. Living in San Francisco I read the Chronicle and actually enjoyed a weekly diet of Hunter S. Thompson in the raw. Back in my University heydays and former luxurious marriages I even lay in bed weekend mornings reading newspapers from around the world I'd picked up on the way home Friday night from news sellers. I always read news magazines, The World Press Review a favourite when it lived, the Economist a mainstay, and Manchester Guardian Weekly, with Le Monde and Washington coverage thrown in. But living in Vancouver I was more likely to appreciate news written in the Georgia Strait than the Sun or Province.
Nationally the Globe and Mail floundered and occasionally I'd glance at the Post but never really read it. Like my father read the newspaper, cover to cover. Dad read the Winnipeg Free Press as a ritual and today at 93 remains perhaps the wisest man I've ever known not because of arcane knowledge and bits of pieces of jargon or celebrity names but because his remarkable critical thinking.
The Winnipeg Free Press was really an education in critical thinking and probably explains alot about the sometimes brilliance of Winnipeggers when it comes to understanding and assimiliating diverses topics from politics to law, religion and medicine.
I've just read 2 full days of the National Post and damn if it didn't take me back to the halcyon days of the Winnipeg Free Press. The spread of information was encyclopedic but the relevance was profound. Every one of the stories I'd heard this week were touched on but expanded on in a way that radio sound bites simply cannot do.
I don't know who the editor is but he's obviously a genius. Some of the best writing I've read in years was represented. Fascinating story about a white guy whose family history from DNA turned out black and jewish because of grandparents who fled persecution. The Vic Toews case. The Saudi funded Missassauga Iman who spews anti Canadian rhetoric to promote a narrow 'fundamentalist' Moslem viewpoint that inflames youth to acts of violence. A great discussion of the discrimination against mentally ill in media. The fall out from the Squamish alpinist purist taking garbage (Italian spikes) off an Argentine mountain top causing international furor. All really captivating stuff.
But the creme de resistance is this fellow " Andrew Coyne".
In a discussion of Justin Troudeau's rant and retraction Coyne made this comment that really captures the problem of the New Canada. "the seeming inability of many members of the Liberal party in particular to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Conservative government. They are not merely a government whose policies some find disagreeable - they are beyond the pale. They are quite literally, anti Canadian. This is what comes of spending time with people who think in exactly the same way as you. It becomes impossible to imagine how any rational person could think otherwise."
How perfectly Andrew Coyne has captured the new Canadian mindset of psychotic paranoia masquerading as intelligent dialogue.
Andrew Coyne has speaks to the balkanization that lost the liberals the election and stole it from the grasp of the NDP despite the profound efforts otherwise of Layton. It gets down to 'shame'. If you disagree with me your 'opinion' isn't just wrong 'you are wrong'. This was the cornerstone of the radical feminist movement and central to the gun registry folk who profiled anyone who owned a gun as a white male and a baby killer. Meanwhile Canadian women are takin all the awards for marksmanship around the world while their bitching sisters don't acknowledge them because they don't fit their 'profiles'.
Piagetian psychologists studying adults found that few had progressed to the 'abstract thinking' that Piaget noted in his very bright children by early adolescent. Most in fact stayed in 'concrete idealization' black and white categorization without any comprehension of the range of possibilities. That said 'relativism' the 'whatever' of today's pot head teens is not evidence of critical thinking. Acknowledging diversity doesn't mean everything is 'equal' but rather that differences exist and are to be celebrated. However, Goreski remains the best hockey player not the best baseball player.
Now I learn that the great anti tobacco lobbyist Dr. Mark Segal who cost that satanic industry 10s of billions of dollars has pulled away from the extremism of the anti tobacco lobby because it has gone beyond science denying people the individual right to smoke outside. There's no science to saying your smoke outside is hurting me yet there are those people who would argue that 'difference' is dangerous and deny any difference. They want us all to believe as they do and have no respect for diversity. If you are conservative then you are the anti christ. If you are Christian you should be shot. The odd thing about this rhetoric is that 77% of Canadians are Christians and some 95% of Canadians believe in God. Those whose 'religion' is 'aetheism' would claim this is 'secular' when to be 'secular' is not to be aetheist by any means. The vast majority of Canadians decidedly spiritual collectively operate in a secular society but are wearied by the aetheists, materialists and the stupid bullies who batter with shame and rhetoric as logic and critical thinking seem quite beyond their primitive adolescent tribalism.
The Winnipeg Free Press taught a province how to think and I personally would today have Andrew Coyne required reading in all Quebec. I fear that would cause more scandal than asking the belabored Quebec intellectual romanticists to read about transexualism on Valentine's day.
I may just subscribe to a newspaper again, the National Post, for the first time in a decade. Admittedly I prefer the delete button on my iphone and ipad to carrying old newspapers out to the garbage. Gilbert however would prefer we make more outdoor excursions so perhaps it's the least I could do to read more Andrew Coyne. Critical thinking does come at a cost.
This weekend we are at the Ramada Executive Hotel in Harrison's. I'm fighting a cold and my back is still recuperating from rolling an ATV. Rest and relaxation has been forced on me.
After the slobbery tongue alarm clock I walked the dog across the street to the cafe and returned with life refining coffee and delicious egg and bacon breakfast sandwiches. The Ramada had a complimentary National Post newspaper. I don't usually read the newspaper. I've taken to getting the news via the Economist, BBC on line, CBC driving to work though that as commonly angers me, and word of mouth leading to google searches.
With sandwich done, still drinking coffee I "read the newspaper'. Who would have known?
I was blessed to grow up in Winnipeg and read the Winnipeg Free Press. Travelling in my 20's overseas I fell in love with the Manchester Guardian weekly. Living in San Francisco I read the Chronicle and actually enjoyed a weekly diet of Hunter S. Thompson in the raw. Back in my University heydays and former luxurious marriages I even lay in bed weekend mornings reading newspapers from around the world I'd picked up on the way home Friday night from news sellers. I always read news magazines, The World Press Review a favourite when it lived, the Economist a mainstay, and Manchester Guardian Weekly, with Le Monde and Washington coverage thrown in. But living in Vancouver I was more likely to appreciate news written in the Georgia Strait than the Sun or Province.
Nationally the Globe and Mail floundered and occasionally I'd glance at the Post but never really read it. Like my father read the newspaper, cover to cover. Dad read the Winnipeg Free Press as a ritual and today at 93 remains perhaps the wisest man I've ever known not because of arcane knowledge and bits of pieces of jargon or celebrity names but because his remarkable critical thinking.
The Winnipeg Free Press was really an education in critical thinking and probably explains alot about the sometimes brilliance of Winnipeggers when it comes to understanding and assimiliating diverses topics from politics to law, religion and medicine.
I've just read 2 full days of the National Post and damn if it didn't take me back to the halcyon days of the Winnipeg Free Press. The spread of information was encyclopedic but the relevance was profound. Every one of the stories I'd heard this week were touched on but expanded on in a way that radio sound bites simply cannot do.
I don't know who the editor is but he's obviously a genius. Some of the best writing I've read in years was represented. Fascinating story about a white guy whose family history from DNA turned out black and jewish because of grandparents who fled persecution. The Vic Toews case. The Saudi funded Missassauga Iman who spews anti Canadian rhetoric to promote a narrow 'fundamentalist' Moslem viewpoint that inflames youth to acts of violence. A great discussion of the discrimination against mentally ill in media. The fall out from the Squamish alpinist purist taking garbage (Italian spikes) off an Argentine mountain top causing international furor. All really captivating stuff.
But the creme de resistance is this fellow " Andrew Coyne".
In a discussion of Justin Troudeau's rant and retraction Coyne made this comment that really captures the problem of the New Canada. "the seeming inability of many members of the Liberal party in particular to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Conservative government. They are not merely a government whose policies some find disagreeable - they are beyond the pale. They are quite literally, anti Canadian. This is what comes of spending time with people who think in exactly the same way as you. It becomes impossible to imagine how any rational person could think otherwise."
How perfectly Andrew Coyne has captured the new Canadian mindset of psychotic paranoia masquerading as intelligent dialogue.
Andrew Coyne has speaks to the balkanization that lost the liberals the election and stole it from the grasp of the NDP despite the profound efforts otherwise of Layton. It gets down to 'shame'. If you disagree with me your 'opinion' isn't just wrong 'you are wrong'. This was the cornerstone of the radical feminist movement and central to the gun registry folk who profiled anyone who owned a gun as a white male and a baby killer. Meanwhile Canadian women are takin all the awards for marksmanship around the world while their bitching sisters don't acknowledge them because they don't fit their 'profiles'.
Piagetian psychologists studying adults found that few had progressed to the 'abstract thinking' that Piaget noted in his very bright children by early adolescent. Most in fact stayed in 'concrete idealization' black and white categorization without any comprehension of the range of possibilities. That said 'relativism' the 'whatever' of today's pot head teens is not evidence of critical thinking. Acknowledging diversity doesn't mean everything is 'equal' but rather that differences exist and are to be celebrated. However, Goreski remains the best hockey player not the best baseball player.
Now I learn that the great anti tobacco lobbyist Dr. Mark Segal who cost that satanic industry 10s of billions of dollars has pulled away from the extremism of the anti tobacco lobby because it has gone beyond science denying people the individual right to smoke outside. There's no science to saying your smoke outside is hurting me yet there are those people who would argue that 'difference' is dangerous and deny any difference. They want us all to believe as they do and have no respect for diversity. If you are conservative then you are the anti christ. If you are Christian you should be shot. The odd thing about this rhetoric is that 77% of Canadians are Christians and some 95% of Canadians believe in God. Those whose 'religion' is 'aetheism' would claim this is 'secular' when to be 'secular' is not to be aetheist by any means. The vast majority of Canadians decidedly spiritual collectively operate in a secular society but are wearied by the aetheists, materialists and the stupid bullies who batter with shame and rhetoric as logic and critical thinking seem quite beyond their primitive adolescent tribalism.
The Winnipeg Free Press taught a province how to think and I personally would today have Andrew Coyne required reading in all Quebec. I fear that would cause more scandal than asking the belabored Quebec intellectual romanticists to read about transexualism on Valentine's day.
I may just subscribe to a newspaper again, the National Post, for the first time in a decade. Admittedly I prefer the delete button on my iphone and ipad to carrying old newspapers out to the garbage. Gilbert however would prefer we make more outdoor excursions so perhaps it's the least I could do to read more Andrew Coyne. Critical thinking does come at a cost.
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