Good Government

I am thoroughly in favour of good government. I totally understand and appreciate the need for leadership and beurocracy. I love that there are those people who will deal with the complexity of managing the vast mechanical organism of civilization with the aim of helping the most. I love democracy though know the value of enlightened benign dictatorships. Dictatorships like communist leadership are unfortunately rarely benign.

I believe that people can be individually and collectively be  wrong and the more wrong they are the more they will attempt to persist.  I think there are lessons to be learned from history and from my own life. I’m not a saint. Why would I expect others to be and why ever would I believe something like ‘ trust me I’m a politicians. ‘  History also teaches me that a few bad apples can ruin a whole country and turn it into the night mare religious dictatorship that is Iran today or the horrible nation of Venezuela, once so hopeful. 

There are major checks and balances in the world to stop Naziism and Communism, the fascists and the extreme left wing from ruling the world. Marxist ideologies  are terrifying as fascist one are, Stalin and Hitler happy to be allies though neither was trustworthy.   We have police and military and various organizations in place to reduce the risk of another WW1 or WW2.  We have a supposedly free media and freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of association to help keep government serving the majority not a few corrupt cronies.  In Canada that’s supposed to be the rule but there is a major divide between the rich and the poor and there are serious double standards and extreme hypocrisy in place.

Being a whistleblower in Canada is not only unrewarded it’s highly dangerous. That said it’s not nearly as dangerous as telling the truth is in China or Saudi Arabia.   Yet speaking up against abuse of power and even responding as did Gandhi and others less disciplined have maintained the balance of power.

There is a fear that those who work will be disenfranchised by those who speak pretty and steal ugly.  There have always been con men and thieves.  We don’t want a government of conmen and thrives. Our parliamentary system is supposed to thwart this. 

There has been a movement away from parliament and government by the elected to increasing government by bureaucrats and courts.  Also individuals in corporations and protest organizations have felt right about taking the law into their own hands. There’s a sense that the police aren’t able to manage matters because they are undermined by the courts that increasingly are undermined by special interests. There’s the sense that the lobbyists are able to buy undue power in parliament.  There are similar concerns in other commonwealth countries and in the US.

All this may just be paranoia.  We have survived 1-2 years now of both Trudeau and Trump and never were two politicians considered more vile by half the population.  The country survives despite the daily complaints of the direst outcome.  We were told there would be war and we were told their would be economic collapse. There’s been a whole lot happening but mostly business as usual.  Obviously Pierre Trudeau moved Quebec into the centre stage of Ottawa and sidelined the English, the west and rural people in general.  Now Justin Trudeau continues the undermining of Canada as a whole using identity politics to divide and conquer playing everyone against each other like a Game of Thrones. Canadians are aborted en mass to be replaced by immigrants which Trudeau called ‘irregulars’ There is no law and order and in the US Trump is not supporting the EU Brussels.

Yet trains run and planes fly. There is running water. Hospitals are staffed.  There are wait lists. There are increasing doctors policing doctors with fewer and fewer doctors seeing patients and more and more patients complaining about the failure of the once great medical care system in Canada. But there are medications and breakthroughs and cures  and the system muddles along.  There may be 20 men and women doing the job of 1 administrator necessary with all the graft and corruption and duplication involved but the military industrial complex and the education complex and the business complex and the Health care complex all have their inherent flaws. The point is that the men and women in all these systems are serving some purpose even if it is as a useless seat filler. We are at least not in collapse or at war and despite the constant whine of the Global Climate Lobby the sky hasn’t fallen. 

I just worry they get in the way. like Bed blockers and all those people at rush hour who would be better employed driving at a different time. There’s all this irritating construction but it’s all keeping the goods moving in and out of the city. The roads and highways are all another complex that persists.

I’m critical of the waste and inefficiency and individuals who are ignorant and arrogant and drunk, stoned or dementing.  The point remains that the present government and system and beurocracy are managing things. I’m critical and know critics are generally the most useless. I’m in the midst of the work so I’m at least talking about things I know and seeing the mismanagement up closes nd real.  Yet today we’re still passing. Fail is when the whole shebang goes to hell in a handbacket like Venezuela and all the socialist/communist countries that couldn’t even let the people work and make sure their children were fed. FAiling is all the war lords and gangs and tribes fighting each other. 

There’s a lot that can be improved but its still needs to be said,government is good as it keeps the roads open, and violent crime continues to reduce.  There are simply so many things that government, the politicians, bureaucrats and leadership are doing extremely well. I want to acknowledge good government and the good people in government who are not being lead astray by bribes, ideologues or simple garden variety megalomania insanity. These are the wholesome ones who aren’t mislead by  the Agenda 21 recommendations of the incredibly corrupt and mismanaged UN.  I like that there are warehousemen driving motorized vehicles stacking food in the late night and early morning so that when I go to the grocery there are groceries there. I think all of this government, corporate, private and public is too often not acknowledged. I’m not presently being tortured or watching my loved ones get beheaded and yet to listen to Canadian media and American media all of are presently undergoing genital mutilation and flagellation and the world is about to implode because of poor government. The fact is my genitals are intact. No one is being beheaded in my immediate circle. The sun is shining. My neighbours are barbecuing. There’s no AK47’s being stacked in my Church.  It’s all pretty mundane and boring and frankly I thank our government and the bureaucrats for this.  Mediocrity needs to be maligned but really I must remember this is not so bad and things could be a whole lot worse. Personally I thank the Lord for this but believe God has a sense of humor and that’s why he has given us some of our present politicians.  

I’m really thankful for good government and good leadership and especially all the good people that make things work despite the stupid people in our midst. 

Emotional Problem Solving

I always wondered why my parents talked about the weather so much but now I know.  Grandad was a rancher and dad was an engineer.  Grandmother was a farm woman and mom was a journalist home maker.  They had a whole lot of experience between them.  They paid attention to the world around them and people.  They drew on this  vast wealth of ‘traditional’ and ‘conventional wisdom’ .

When something wasn’t right with them they first considered the WEATHER.  They didn’t think that they should kill themselves, divorce or change their jobs.  They just knew that commonly people are affected by the Weather.  It’s even been shown that on Wall Street trading increases on sunny days and decreases on rainy days.  It’s really not rocket science.
Next thing the old people talked about was the GOVERNMENT. Whenever anyone felt badly and were uncertain of the cause they considered the influence of Government on the overall well being of people.  Government decisions can make or break a country and can destroy individuals lives with their wars, tax programs, corruption, graft and deceit.  Throughout history next to the natural catastrophes caused by Weather, Government is the greatest source of catastrophe and illness.  That said we all know that if the Government is good and respectable and responsible there really can be peace and love in the valley.  When Governments are mature and thoughtful and productive not wasteful the society as a whole improves with general well being spreading through the land.
Old people also realized that FINANCES were a major source of anxiety and depression.  Not only research but common sense tell us that the poorer one is the more one is at risk for negative events and the more negative events one encounters.  This was truer before the social ‘net’ of modern societies which ‘catch’ people when they fall.  There’s loans, disability, welfare, food lines and charity, all manner of resources that protect one from the ravages of starvation and ‘debtors prisons’.  In some Moslem countries slavery still persists so it’s really not in some distant past that financial problems lead to really bad outcomes.  We really take this granted often simply because our education has been basically shoddy and substandard.
Naturally most of these social security developments in the First world are not present in the Third World. Their development also did not occur in a variety of cultures and historical societies but are increasingly taken for granted in the present day democratic societies most of which began in the enlightened Christian cultures which believed in ‘second chances’.  By contrast this was not a part of the ‘law of the jungle’ or ‘social darwinism’.  It’s a whole separate history to follow the rise of ‘charity’ for ‘strangers’ not just family and tribe but ‘outsiders’ and consider this by culture and religion because again it’s something most simply take for granted not realizing how unique and extraordinary this is.
That said there’s a serious issue of ‘relative wealth’ in that people adapt to certain ‘incomes’ and ‘financial capacities’ and experience loss of ‘status’ with any reduction in FINANCIAL SECURITY.  So old people had savings and made sound investments and recognized that ‘bad times’ could come. Farmers had to save for bad weather years, the droughts, and families ‘saved’ for sickness as sickness was commonly associate with loss of work capacity.  When a person felt badly they commonly recognized that they were fundamentally anxious because of FINANCES and set about remedying this by reducing unnecessary spending and looking for ‘extra work’ to increase savings and security.
HEALTH is commonly discussed by middle aged and older people. Young people are generally healthy unless they have chronic illness from childhood. Most take their ‘good health’ and lots of energy and ability to go without sleep or meals for granted yet as they get older commonly they don’t realize that their well being is directly related to their overall physical HEALTH.  When a person sees a psychiatrist the first thing the psychiatrist considers in investigating a person’s anxiety or depression is whether there is a physical cause for negative change, how long that negative change has been developing and if this might not just be a product of a temporary illness, like a flu or ‘something that’s going around’.  Old people with a variety of chronic illness, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, bowel diseases, lung diseases will simply consider that a bad day or week or month may be because their physical illness is worse. Chronic physical illness, like all psychosomatic illness responds to external stresses but can be it’s own source of stress.  When I’m well a hemorrhoid might not bother me but when I’m already anxious or depressed the bleeding hemorrhoid, a really minor health problem, may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It’s because of this that people faced with general malaise, anxiety or depression, or just a lack of well being and a sense they’re not happy as they might be, commonly go to their general practitioner and discuss their health concerns with them or talk about their HEALTH with their friends and family.  Maybe an antibiotics which cures a urinary tract infection is all that is necessary to right the problem. Maybe a change in diet or exercise or an increase in an anti inflammatory medications is sufficient.
Successful people faced with lack of happiness, a sense of feeling that they are not enjoying life, feelings of emptiness, or too much anxiety and maybe a sense of depression consider early their RECREATIONS.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The World Health Organization took Freud’s simple definition of Mental Health, ‘the ability to work and love’ and extended it over two full pages but really only added that Mental Health is the ‘ability to work, love and play”.  A lot of people have really barren personal lives yet somehow expect they should be happy. The adage is ‘Misery Loves Company’ and as we are ‘herd animals’ we need social outlets. Maybe our work is not that social or our family just not enough. A major proportion of todays’ divorces occur because young people want their partners to be their ‘all’, (friend, parent, therapist, lover, cook, parent, cheerleader, etc ,etc).  We all come from a tribal society where everyone was interconnected and all had close to dozens, a hundred or more people to turn to.  Today often people’s lives are sterile.  They work and eat and sleep and wonder why they suffer anxiety or depression.  Really , they need to get involved, take up some ‘sport’ even if it’s just, walking with a group.  There are countless clubs, activities, ‘MEET UPS’ on the Internet, and community organizations, and schools, churches and temples.  Really, commonly a person’s life is ‘boring’ because they are ‘boring’ and don’t have any activities in their life because of their narcissism and selfishness and unwillingness to ‘SHARE THEIR TIME”.  These people are time hoarders but like most entitleed people want something for nothing.  Yet a problem shared is a problem halved and loneliness in modern society is so often described as ‘anxiety’ or ‘depression’.
FRIENDS are either as source of joy or a drain. Some are down right ‘soul suckers’ and others are chronic ‘kafetches’.  Many are ‘takers’ and ultimately one has to seriously consider how much time one has to be an emotional cheer leader of those who haven’t a minor or occasional problem but have a chronic recurrent unrellenting series of crisis.  In life saving the lifeguard is taught to swim out to help but not let the drowning person pull them down with them.  Whole communities are alcoholic or drug addicted and frankly some people need to get right out of these hell holes to get away from those who would drag themdown.  In Canada and in communist countries in general there is a phenomena called the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome which means that the ‘group’  because of some ideology actively stop those around them progressing.  They chop down the ‘tall poppy’ or ‘chop off the heads of others to make themselves look taller’.  In some tribal communities those who are doing well will have their homes broken into and wealth stolen or even have their house burnt down.  Many communities of ‘friends’ are gang like where the expectations of the ‘group ‘ is for the ‘individual’ who succeeds to ‘share ‘ his success yet this ideology destroys initiative.  Why should one person ‘work’ at an extra job and then share the reward with those who didn’t put out the effort.  A lot of individual lack of success is associated with ‘friends’ who are negative and ‘belittling’.  Being around people who say ‘nothing is going to change’, ‘life suck’s’ and various other ‘depressive statements’ is Depressing.  By contrast those who succeed and are happy commonly are surrounded by positive people. People who are enlightened are generally encouraging and supportive of those who wish to learn and excel but shy away from those who live by stealing and fawning relationships.  It’s often that we don’t have to  ‘end’ a relationship but rathe that we need to ‘distance’ ourselves or ‘spend less time’ with people who are ‘wallowing’ in their negativity
WORK is often a source of anxiety and depression but few throughout history had the LUXURY of NOT WORKING or even CHANGING THEIR JOBS.  So many accepting that work is principally to pay for the physiological needs, and provide fundamental food, clothing, and shelter simply accept their work.  They stay in less than perfect jobs because they see that those who jump around from job to job commonly ‘take their own selves ‘ with them.  PERSONALITY DISORDERS are primarily identified by the inability of an individual to stay at one job for a year. A red flag goes up with those who are workers when a person can’t last a year in the ‘class’.  Our school system was supposed to provide this basic capacity.  4 seasons, one job.  Admittedly there’s many factors to be considered but there is a direct correlation of “success’ and ‘happiness’ and ‘general well being’ for those who ‘stay’ at a position. There’s even a thing called ‘position authority’ which gives status to even a bull frog in one pond that stays rather than jumping from pond to pond.  Work is not only associated with activity which by itself is healthy but its a place of socialization which is also healthy. Buddhists even designate ‘RIGHT LIVELIHOOD” as essential to enlightenment recognizing that a lot of jobs intrinsically are depressing, risky, unhealthy or simply dehumanizing.  Prostitutes collectively are unhappy even though many ‘chose’ the job for quick wealth  It just doesn’t have the long term benefits that teaching children has.  Survey a hundred prostitutes and a hundred school teachers and the evidence is overwhelming that prostitution isn’t a very ‘high quality’ job.  The whole job world is laid out in terms of education, financial reward, risk, and effort.  Entrance level jobs have the real advantage they need low education but they commonly lack security and rarely have long term financial reward.  One has to seriously consider their work in light of what they want and what their present and future desires and needs are. All too often people have been satisfied with a particular job and had a whole lot of short term benefits from that job only to find that one day the job didn’t have longevity. This occurs with athletes and commonly with dancers.  If one doesn’t have a fall back plan or a plan to progress then it’s not uncommon for crisis to arise which could well have been foreseen and prepared for.  In today’s world it is expect that people will have three careers minimum in a lifetime and those who are “coasting’ will likely encounter job problems. While the ‘coasters’ are blaming everyone and everything for their loss of work, the rest have been upgrading their skills and taking extra training at night anticipating that their job as a ‘steam engineer’ is less than permanent.
FAMILY is a fixed ingredient. Those who are fortunate are born in loving families and learn the ART OF LOVING (see Erickson) and know that LOVE Is not something that just “HAPPENS” but needs to be nurtured and maintained.  Successful happy families pass on the SKILLS for happiness to their children and commonly this learning leads to generations of success whereas the poor believe the success is only a product of the individuals in this segment of society starting with a ‘financial nest egg’.  If this were true then those who won LOTTERIES would be similar examples of personal and societal success.   However,  commonly those who ‘win lotteries’ lose them just as quickly.  One of the reasons AID works so poorly is that it doesn’t ‘teach’ people how to produce more successfully but only cares for their needs that one day. Often what a family teaches is the cornerstone to the success of the members whereas equally so a family can be perpetrating ‘self defeating’ ideologies.  It is important to remember if we had sent Einstein to a tribe of Cannibals they would have thought him a tough rooster at best and learned nothing about energy and relativity because they were simply not capable of appreciating the genius of the man.
 Therapy was not about ‘rejecting family’ or dishing parents but about sorting out the useful teaching from the commonly once useful but now outdated ideas.  A mother might teach her daughter to avoid black men because when she grew up black men were migrant and poor but today that very statement might be a limiting ideology if the majority of black men in the community were hard working successful individuals.  If a person is a live today it’s thanks to the parents simply not killing them when they were vulnerable.  Since life if fundamental and without it all else is nothing all parents are 50% good.  Fish eat their eggs and reptiles leave them to fend for themselves.  Therapy isn’t supposed to be about ‘blaming’ but rather about understanding and learning from the past to make the present and future better.  Therefore each individual must recognize the contribution of history and not dish it outright.  Further today people commonly judge the past by the yardstick of their own limited understanding.  Dickens said, “it was the best of times and worst of times’ and this is true for all times. The trick is to be selective, learn from and make valuable alliances. Family are the main stay of society and the STATE is threatened most by family. Alone individuals are likely to perish but the capacity to form networks and communities is central to the happiness of individuals. This begins with the family.  When I worked with the most mentally ill they commonly had the worst family relationships and least social skills.  If the family can be strengthened most commonly success for individuals follows.
The LOVED ONE, the PARTNER, the most intimate sexual partner has through all cultures and classes been associated with the greatest joy and happiness at some time.    Many a person has said that their life is made by the finding and nurturing of their soulmate.  This is the person they marry. This is the person we have sex with. Sexual relationships are limited to those who we are willing to be most intimate with, most vulnerable with, closest too.  A ‘casual relationship’ is never truly casual but marriages and long term sexual relationships define emotional landscapes for all.  The Loved One is the most important person in a person’s network of relationships. That person is commonly the father or mother of the children, the most important person in the family, and the one who can most affect a person’s emotional life positively or negatively.
IF mental health is the ability to love, work and play, then it follows that a person without work or school, without a Loved One or Family or Friends would at most register ’30’% generally on a happiness scale. Those who lack that most important cherry on the happiness cake , the loved and loving one, at best might only approach a “B” grade  in the overall likelihood of general well being. There are clearly exceptions, saints, heroes, hermits but generally speaking our sense of well being follows from this simple analysis.
Now the must successful and mature people do not ‘change’ their ‘loved one’ or their ‘job’ first but progress through an analysis of what is lacking in their lives by starting at the outside.  Maybe it’s just a bad hair lousy weather day and that one could consider buying and umbrella or taking a vacation to the hot spot or improving the use of sunscreen.  There’s a whole lot of solutions to the ‘weather’ problems. I took up cross country skiing when the ‘weather’ was forcing me to curtail outside activities and I felt a prisoner in the winter city.  My general well being improved immensely. My friend has made a point of cycling and winter swimming at Wreck beach at least twice a week ‘getting outside’ and ‘facing the elements’ and their sense of well being and decrease in anxiety is amazing to see.
Recently a whole group of people rioted because they didn’t like the government but studies showed that 70% hadn’t voted.  Most of these government activist complainer types commonly don’t even join a political party.  A friend is a professor of political sciences and I watched her acquire her wisdom and generally amazing calmness around matters political by gaining in depth knowledge about the mechanisms of government, anthropology, sociology and the misinformation of media and propaganda.  When she was a student government most upset her but today she’s probably the least ‘upset’ person I know in this regard because she is actively participating in government, making things better for herself and other individuals.
Countless times I’ve seen people’s general malaise and depression a product of something so simple medically as hypothyroidism.  Depression and anxiety are commonly the presenting symptoms of countless treatable illnesses. Increasingly most depression and anxiety I see has it’s roots in addictions, substance abuse, alcoholism, pornography, eating disorders.
Work problems arise in every job and in every life but rather the ‘take this job and shove it’ over the years mature individuals have formed unions, discussed the negatives of their job with co workers, counsellors and even the boss.  These minor changes in a person’s life can reap amazing results in solving emotional problems
Obviously spending less time with a ‘soul sucker’ , that constantly ‘needy’ , person always bitter and always complaining, will lead to less stress and more room for positive relationships.  Maintaining contact with family but modulating the time and distance of the relationships is a sure fire way of improving one’s happiness simply because these are the template of all relationships that follow and the source of so much joy for those whose lives are most successful.
Finally the most mentally ill commonly admit to having their longest intimate relationship as under a year, under five years, or under 10 years.  Relationships are like vehicles and if you keep crashing or trading in your primary vehicle for relational happiness then you really would benefit from seeing a psychiatrist not to discuss what the partner is doing wrong but to learn what others do right and what you are doing wrong.  The Gottman Institute “love labs’ studies successful happy couples and unhappy couples and scientifically came up with a set of rules that are simply not rocket science but really do give a decent basis for  setting up or repairing broken relationships before they get trashed by this ‘throwaway unhappy society’
The main reason I wrote this though was to simply encourage people to consider problem solving from the weather inward to work and loved one rather than dumping the job and life partner only to find it El Nino was all that was wrong and if you’d waited a year the weather would have improved and you could have saved the cost and pain of trashing work and love.
Finally spirituality is associated with the greatest happiness and joy for most people.  Research shows that spiritual people are overall happier and more prosperous with greater security and success. This doesn’t mean any one religion or any one moral prescription is right but it does tend to challenge atheist political idealogies that reject the spiritual community lives of the most successful individuals in society.  Perhaps when all else fails or earlier ,one might consider, as Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Auswitch, encouraged, asking yourself "what is the meaning of life”.  What is your relationship to God   Or  perhaps change the word, God, to  the GOOD.  What is the Good to you or what is the GOOD LIFE.  Often emotional problems solving follows ‘reframing’ the question'.
In the end it’s your life.  Enjoy.

Gratitude, Resentment, Grief and Aging

I am thankful for my fingers, Lord.  The knife cut I did to my index finger did not severe a nerve.  The joint capsule may have been penetrated but there is no more infection.  Daily iodine  with hydrogen peroxides and bandaid changes has saved the finger.  How come I was not so careful initially when I was washing the knives.  But thank you Lord if there was any lesson I was to learn from my injured  ‘pointing finger’.  I have not had to at least have it removed. I’m grateful for that.  Help me always to see more my own faults than the faults of others, or the faults of the world.
Thank you Lord for the health of my dog.  I was so devastated when he was paralyzed that day. I was in fear all day as we drove back early from the north. Thank you for X-rays and Oak Animal Hospital and the lovely Indo Canadian veterinarian who did a thorough examination of him and found his nerves had not been injured, that he would walk again with medication. Thank you for his slow recovery. Thank you for science and medication.
Thank you for the end of elections. Help me to recover from all the hatred and shame I experienced again for standing up for what I believe in.  For years I have taught people ‘love the person’, don’t accept the behaviour.  I have taught that guilt was what we felt when we did something wrong but shame was what we felt when we felt we were wrong fundamentally as a person.  I have experienced so much shaming.  Throughout the election and even now I am told by so many that I am not a Canadian because I do not believe as the victors do.   Always shaming. Always ‘ad hominem’. I have never been ‘good enough’.  I have always been ridiculed and condemned.  Meanwhile I serve like an untouchable, treating unclean bodies and unclean minds.  Men and women get rich off the sales of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, poor lifestyle, unsafe practices, yet I am there serving, healing and helping and I am told I am not worthy to live here.  I am unwanted.
I treat many old men like me.  Some old ladies too.  There is sadness in aging. There is sadness in a whole variety of poverties yet some poverty takes precedence.  The single mothers go to the front of the line while us men whose children were aborted are shunned.  We stand in lonely groups sometimes touched by the men and women whose children were killed in crime.  I huddle next to them.  Their sons and daughters murdered or killed in war or by accident Somehow we face dying together in the greatest of loneliness. I have no tie to this world, no illusion of immortality.
And so much I gave in taxes, taken from me, voluntarily though, I had no choice, to pay for education and children and I supported the children of others knowing my own were killed.  I am a laughing stock.  Worse than a cuckold.  The women jeer at us men whose lovers killed our being and say ‘you deserved it’. Man. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
I am shamed for being a man. And I’m not even a very good one.  The heterosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a man and the homosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a woman. I’m divorced and divorced men are the scourge of the earth.  Divorced women were obviously done wrong by men but divorced men get what they deserve.  They’re contemptible.  I was punished and condemned in the courts, laughed at by the judge whose eyes did not look at me but instead focused on the loosely covered breasts of the one who had once said she loved me.  As I once said I loved her.  In the end I paid her all I had financially. She was smug in profit.  The courts made their money too. The judge looked like he wanted to have a tryst with her.  He ogled her. She looked coy.   I was thrust aside. Loser. Fool.  Shame and humiliation.
50 shades of grey.  The billionaires are worshiped.  The women read with lust what girls are willing to do for the monetary winner. Eva Braun ruled all of Germany.  Only her man is condemned.


My mother is dead.  She didn’t do drugs or drink.  She insisted we go to school. She loved education.  She insisted we go to Sunday school and church. She loved the Lord.  She insisted we play hockey. She and my father loved hockey.  So I fished with Dad and hunted and fixed cars with my brother and my father. I learned cooking from mom and mixing cement from Dad and I helped him build buildings and boats.  My parents had lost so many friends in WWII.  Dad had served in the RCAF. A spitfire mechanic and a bombardier.  My parents met in the war.  Dad and Mom weren’t racists. I didn’t know racists till the government began dividing and conquering the people by calling everyone racists.  My black doctor didn’t even know he was black in those days like I didn’t know I was white.
Dad didn’t know that being a man and being white was wrong.  He didn’t think of himself as coloured.  My mother and her sister had black friends.  They were Baptist.  She didn’t have Catholic friends.  Dad had Catholic friends and Jewish friends and Buddhist friends and Hindu friends and secular friends.  Our family were as coloured as everyone. Mom joked about us having freckles.  My brother and her had red hair.  
Dad liked smart people, people who did things, ‘made something of themselves’.  Always growing up I heard my parents say, “It doesn’t matter where a person has been it’s where they’re going and are they building things up.”  Mom and dad most admired people who were working and taking care of their children.  They didn’t like people who were ‘living off of the government because they were too good to do a honest day’s labour’.  They didn’t like people who weren’t willing to ‘get their hands dirty’.  They especially didn’t like people who stole and criminals.
 “I didn’t fight for this country so I had to put a lock on my own doors,” my father told me.  The judge who lived a couple of houses over was a rip roaring falling down drunk and my parents didn’t have any time for drunks. They especially didn’t like drugs.  “Wasting their lives.  Caring for their own pleasures when they should be caring for others.  Not caring how much their behaviour hurt others. That’s their problem."
They both said, “You always were too smart for your britches.”  “I don’t care if the teacher is wrong, you’ve got to learn to not tell them that because they’re hurt you for it. The more wrong they are the more they hurt people who are right.” My aunt was Indian. My Baptist aunt was the executive assistant (we called her his ’secretary’ back then) to Canada’s ambassador in Washington DC during WWII. My grandfather arrived as a poor immigrant from Scotland and homesteaded northern Canada to become a great rancher and lumber man.  My other grandfather arrived from Ireland. Both poor, the “made something of themselves.’  They “didn’t take handouts’.
My aunts and mother told me the history of things.  The teachers told me lies. I was strapped by the principal for correcting them. The same occurred in chemistry when the teacher had the equations wrong.  But he didn’t have me strapped. He corrected his equation and thanked me.  That’s probably why I liked science.   We were caned in gym class, our buttocks bared.  I got my first ruler in kindergarten.  The female teacher undressed me in front of the class and held me across her knees smacking me hard over and over again on my naked bottom.
Much later I was punished for stopping men and women killing people. The people whose job it was to ensure the safety of the children hated and shamed me for stopping the killing. The provincial enquiry years later vindicated me but a half dozen babies more were killed before that occurred.  I never received an apology. I was never returned the money and time I lost for doing the right thing. I was suspect then. I didn’t keep quiet and mind my own business when I saw people being killed and raped.  I wasn’t a ‘team player’ they said in the government.  There is no “truth and reconciliation” for ‘whistleblowers’.
I’m surprised I don’t like S and M.  So many boys have come out of school spanked so many times like me that they at least got some pleasure sexually later from their twisted education.  I just got this twisted idea I’d stop people being abused. I try mostly to stop people from ‘turning anger inward’.  They continue to hurt themselves after being hurt so much by others.
Now the government tells me I can’t touch people.  Standing helpless in my office men and women cling to me and their tears run down my suit.  I cannot hug them.  All over the province men and women physicians are being publicly threatened fines and loss of license if they touch a patient, especially if they hug a patient.   I eventually push them away and tell them the government says that doctors can’t touch their patients even when they are grieving. There are so many laws today.  I am afraid of everyone and everything.

Thank you Lord for these moments of peace. Thank you Lord for bringing me safety this far. Thank you for the light. Thank you for the coffee and the cream and the porridge. Thank you for this computer. Thank you for letters and language. Thank you for the opportunity to learn. Thank you for the chances I’ve been given to make something of myself.  I am still walking upright. I’m still able to help others.  I am so thankful that my finger still works. I am always in pain, Lord.  I am just so thankful that it’s not as bad as it has been. I am so thankful that I can get out of bed and get to work and have some work.  I look back and remember the abject poverty of those years of being a student, giving blood for books, not having food because I paid the rent, eating at family and friends because I had no money. We were in love then. We lived so simply.  Years and years of hand me down clothing, hand me down furniture.  We pooled our resources for a party. I studied from 6 am to 12 pm and saw formulas in my sleep.  I lived in hospitals.  I went for years without sleep.  Plane crash. Polar bear chasing me.  Deadly diseases.  Old people dying in my arms alone in the night giving me their last words as gifts.  I thought I’d never get clean. The lice, the bacteria, the virus, the sickness. I was sick for so many many years.  Tuberculosis. I was treated for a year.  She condemned me for going where no one else would go. “You’re not a Christian, you’re a fool.” she told me when I wanted her nakedness and she was angry that I flew away to serve the aboriginals because, “no one else would’.  Now no one cares.  The government regulator sneered at me and said, “It’s just a job.”  I’ve never got my back pay. There never was a bonus.  Everyone said I had status but ever shopkeeper raised the price and stole from me.  All the while the government took in taxes and paid themselves fat salaries and froze my income.  Among ourselves we laugh if we make minimum wage.  7 days a week for how many years is it I worked and was on call. No overtime. No on call. No danger pay.  I fell asleep in an operation.  I wet myself too.  An adult man peeing dribbling unable to hold it. all night with an unforgettable bowel after a shot gun wound.  I wake with nightmares screaming lost in guts that are perforated seeing faces of suicides. It’s a good week when I don’t remember, when I get a full nights sleep.  This morning I woke at 5 am.  Now I know it’s just the rain.  It’s the darkness and the rain. It’s that season. I remember the rains coming and the palm trees flying over my car, my windows knocked out.  The rains and the darkness. I’ll get used to it again.

Thank you Lord for the memories. When I smoked pot and drank wine I forgot.  I don’t remember my holidays. Those brief weeks when we’d get away from the ‘front’ and escape to beaches.  I drank wine and smoked weed and now don’t much remember those days while the horrors of guns in offices and knives and the angry faces fresh from jail in withdrawal demanding valium and more valium or narcotics and more narcotics threatening shouting.
She said I ’sexually harassed her’ when I asked her to leave because she was stealing and smoking crack. She ‘d been raging and shouting at the Indo canadians in wheelchairs.  She hated Indo Canadians.  I didn’t know when I hired her. I didn’t even know she was a drug addict. I didn’t know she prostituted. I took others words. She lied. I didn’t know her johns had been her references. I didn’t know that her minister was her bisexual lover. I’ve never known anything when the shit hits the fan. I’ve been so focussed on saving a life that I didn’t know that I was being stolen from. Only when the bank balance didn’t match did I know something was wrong.  Only when I saw the receipts from the store did I realize that she was a thief.    Everything she said and wrote didn’t match. Lawyers showed that.  A hundred lies but it was never about truth.  I told the truth and was condemned for it.  Government’s don’t want the truth.
The government woman said, “Women don’t lie about sex.”
I learned there was no ‘justice’ and went to work pro bono with my friend who was killed when he said that only the rich could afford justice in Canada.  I still think it was a hit.
Thank you Lord for the lifting me up. These moments come and go. The set backs. Reflecting on people saying I’m not a Canadian.  People telling me to leave Canada and that I’m not wanted here.  It took me back to the time when I was getting death threats, when my windows were shot out by 22’s, when my cars was keyed over and over.  I had been diagnosing alcoholism and addiction and saying that people were unfit for work. The management thanked me for halving the accidents on the job. Men and women thanked me for making their workplaces safe but the cost was high. Drug addiction changes a person.  The pot heads were just as violent as the alcoholics and cokeheads when it came to wanting revenge.  Here there were having this good thing, the doctor before me saying they were depressed and giving them a week or two in hospital to dry out before they went back to work to wreck havoc on management and their fellow workers.  He was the loved doctor.
"The other psychiatrist  never asked about alcohol and drugs but this knew little shit doctor did and he fucked me up. The fuck cost me my job writing down what I told him I smoked and drank. It was supposed to be confidential. When the insurance company saw it they said that I had to go to treatment. I didn’t want to quit.  I just wanted the other psychiatrist to keep writing a note saying I was sick because of my bipolar disorder.  I didn’t want this fucking asshole to fuck me up.  I talked to everyone about him.  I didn’t think it was relevant to tell anyone how much weed I was smoking when I was working.  It’s medicine. It’s a herb.  It’s not like the pharmaceutical’s that little shit puts people on.  The boss is just like him. A fuckking shit. Keeps telling me I’m forgetting and not concentrating on the work.  Claimed I caused their multi million dollar machine to break down.  All the stress he was giving me made me do coke. I needed it to concentrate at work after I started the day with a few shots and a doozie or two.  Then I go to the hospital for my normal break, like we all did with the old doctor and this shit blows the whistle.  Of course I hate him.  Fucking boy scout.  Little do goober.  Of course my friends and I made his life miserable. After what he did to us he’s lucky he didn’t have an accident."

Now I’m just sad, now , alone.  Thinking how many lives I must have ruined drug testing.  If I’d just backed off, turned a blind eye like my colleague, these guys might have gone on to be Prime Minister or at very least headed the company. Instead they probably left regular work and went into growing dope full time and becoming part of the multi billion dollar BC industry that now has essentially been pardoned as well as getting to take the money and run.
I’ve never been “pardoned" in my work.  I’m just scrutinized, regulated, criticized,  shamed and threatened. They call the punishment different names like ‘re-education.’  It’s still punishment.  The hitters get paid and the victims get framed.  When I was doing so much pro bono work, about 20% of that years income, because the parents didn’t pay their premium they and their  kids couldn’t see private doctor and they were told to go to government clinics where they didn’t want to go because everyone their judged them and put them down, I saw them.  I didn’t get paid.  May e $20,000 loss of income a year. I thought like any business I should be able to declare it as a loss so I did.  Revenue Canada sent out three people to audit me. It wasn’t an audit. It was harassment. They went through all my books.  At the end of a week, this thug said, “No doctor sees patients for free. We haven’t caught you yet, but we’re watching you and we will.”  Every private doctor I know works for free but we’re not allowed to declare our ‘losses’.  Even today people miss appointments and I  don’t pay but I can’t declare my losses against my earnings like all other businesses can.  The reason is that psychopaths think others think like they do.  Lizards think other think like lizards.  So our government doesn’t do anything for free.  And they can’t understand a physician any more than an insect can understand a bird.
It’s not good to stew. It’s better to help someone. I am so thankful. When my mind wasn’t working I used my body to carry folk. When I couldn’t lead I followed. Today I know the people I’ll see are hurting more.  I have so many people with cancer and surgeries and all I do is provide relief.  The heroin addicts are far gone but here and there one awakes and wants to live.  I’m happy to provide solace. I love to see people cured. But now we’re all getting older and the only cure for life is death.
I think of that too much these days.  Kierkegaard, “Life is suffering unto death’. I think a lot about my buddhist days.  I’m praying and meditating.  I miss rejoicing.  I miss dancing.  I have to have a shower and get to work. Everyone is always angry that I’m late. Some days I’m afraid to leave my office. A day of my life has not gone by that someone hasn’t been angry with me. A year in my life has not gone by that some official hasn’t hated me and tried with all their power to destroy me.
 For so many years the friends of the man I stopped killing people haunted my life. They were in so many high places and their loyalty to their drunken dangerous friend was admirable.  They were more afraid than me.  I saw that but now a couple of them have died and the others are retired.  They’re rich and have young wives and their children visit them.  They tell war stories like we all do.  They’re victors.
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a victor. Maybe if I’d set my eyes higher. As long as I can remember I've just wanted to survive and help others survive.  .  Thank you God for letting me survive. Thank you for the easing up of my back pain and the healing of my finger and my dog. Thank you that I can type.  Please banish my anger, my self pity, my negativity, my comparison, my jealousy and envy and my resentments. Help me rid myself of these character flaws so I can better celebrate this new day and be grateful for all that you have given me.

Black Market, Taxes, Politics, Elections

Our government has grown like a cancer.  There is an absolute need for bureaucrats just as there is an need for doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers, ranchers, miners and all manner of trades.  There is a need for lawyers as well.  Unfortunately the ‘administration class’ in the present burocracies has multiplied with no evidence that layer and layer of administration has in any way improved performance.
This is the fundamental flaw in socialistic/communistic governments.  The ancient feudal system involved a war lord getting in power and by brute force maintaining a relative slave class, serfs, ruled by him and his cronies.
Mr. Harper has made powerful enemies by trying to reduce the upper levels of this administrative class. He has attempted to maintain the front lines yet has been demanding evidence that layers and layers of bureaucratic cronyism are necessary.
Prior to the Conservative capitalist leaning government we were faced with years of increasing taxation and increasing layers of administration in government.  We had regulators regulating regulators.  Under Chretien and Mulroney we had the massive advertising scam with every aspect of government getting glossy photos and booklets that spawned more and more paper.  Recently we’ve had the internet with the necessary map upon map to navigate through the layers and layers of government administration.
“Keep it simple” is not a slogan developed in government.  The legal profession are masters at obfuscation.  The more words the more money the more confusion the more need for more judges and more court rooms.
On a farm I plant x amount of wheat and sell it and because of demand I plant more and sell more to a point where the ‘market’ is ‘saturated’.
There is ‘no saturation’ point in the ‘service’ market.
I worked on a Indian reserve where the nurses hired to serve a thousand individuals were expected by the Aboriginal “Sultan" Chief of the tribe to provide daily massages. Beautiful young women were providing him this service once sometimes twice a day because he ‘liked’ it.  I couldn’t get the nurses to provide respiratory care to child if it conflicted with the chiefs ’need’ for a soothing massage that day.  The division between need and want has never before been so obscure.
There has always been taxation.  But taxation was once related to providing roads and buildings and water and sewage disposal.  There was a collective agreement of the needs for the community at large.
The beauty of architecture and the grand churches of medieval time was that architecture was the ‘art of the people’ . Everyone enjoyed it and the pyramids, castles or cathedrals were of benefit to all. Taxation served public works and it served to maintain armies that provided defence.
Now we have an endless ‘imposed’ legal system with laws upon laws governing and controlling every aspect of life.  It’s Confuscean.
Maybe everyone would benefit from a massage.  But Mr. Harper and the Conservative government showed that taxpayer money going to the First Nations was bottlenecked at the level of so many chiefs who had palatial homes, off shore accounts and took millions of dollar salaries while the lowest people, the sick and old and marginal in the reserve communities went without running water and heat.  This was directly a consequence of poor monetary management of resources. Yet when the ‘transparency’ laws showed the tremendous nepotism through the north and in the Indian bands, the criticism of the government became focused where it truly belonged.  Mr. Harper and the Conservatives had dared to do what no one else before for fear of political fallout. He shone a very bright light on the Jenny Kwans and the Mike Duffies of the Aboriginal people showing who was stealing money and where the slush funds were.
He made powerful enemies.
The executive of the CBC and his cronies make hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than doctors and more than parliamentarians. These leftist ‘marxist flag carrying’ hypocrites have long given up on journalism and used their office not for the benefit of truth and the people but solely for their own protection. Not a News item for months has presented a sound piece of journalism when it comes to the upcoming election. Yet CBC can produce the best of radio with Tapestry and White coats Black art and other world renowned programming.  The News is worse than the worst of Pravda. It is pure disquised peckish retaliation against the gpvernment for questioning the administrations high salary and endless perks.
Mr. Harper and the Conservatives have made powerful enemies.  Majority governments always do.
He has stood firmly behind American trade policy.  We have a fighter plane deal with the US and countless NATO countries. The United States is our principal trade partner accounting for 80% of our exports.  They take natural resources, meat, farming products and manufacturing. Our greatest musicians are marketed by their powerful industry. Our actors rise to world fame with their industry. We make movies with them here and there.
I remember when we had a childish government that essentialyl told our biggest contributor to piss off and tried to make a sweet deal with France.  Yet France accounted for only a few percentage points of trade.  And their leader came to Canada and screamed “Vive le Quebec Libre! Meanwhile the present boy Troudeau’s father had declared martial law and brought tanks into the city of Montreal pointing artillery at all the people of Canada because one terrorist had kidnapped a bureaucrat.  Today Mr. Harper and the Conservatives are criticized by the pot smoking Liberals for ‘security’ concerns despite the fact that it was the son of a Tunisian Jihadist who shot the Engineering women en mass and recently a terrorist actually shot up people in our parliamentary buildings.
Meanwhile terrorism is on the rise around the world and is occurring in the very nations with the greatest gun restriction laws.  And when the son of the Tunisian jihadist shot up the Engineering women we never heard about his racism and moslem origins but instead the Liberals turned their attention on ‘disarming’ women and outlawing guns as if ‘guns’ were the problem.  All the while all the nations with the least guns in citizens hands have rising problems with terrorists.  Criminals are always armed and they are today better armed than our RCMP who were shot en mass by one terrorist in the maritimes.
Mrs. Campbell as Conservative PM brought in the toughest gun sales and licensing law. The Liberals at a promise of a million dollars instead spent 2 billion dollars creating a massive bureaucracy for Liberal cronies to essential spy on anyone who had seen a psychiatrist. What the general population was not told was that ex girlfriends and ex boyfriends and divorcees and psychiatrists were being canvassed by droves of police like bureaucrats treating anyone who owned a gun or wanted to buy a gun as a criminal and an insane one at that. All of this travesty of justice was perpetuated to protect people from ‘suicide’ whereas I as a psychiatrist knew that countries without guns had equal suicide stats to countries with guns. Worse I’d worked in countries where people jumped out of coconut trees to kill themselves.  These lies upon lies were perpetrated because people like the Liberal Mr. Ignatieff had never known a westerner or lived in the north or in rural regions to know that everyone owns a gun ,usually an old shot gun, or 22 simply because of animal pests.  The Liberals with their history of alcohol association and now their pot for votes have always appealed to the uptown city crowd and well heeled elite not the rural and northern parts of the country where the NDP and Conservatives are better represented.  The gun registry was just targeted taxation.
The taxation was the issue. Taxation gets jobs for party friends. It’s the horror of the senate at it’s worst but it’s seen in the courts upon courts and law school turning out masses of lawyers far beyond any societies need. In a civilized world they would be ‘philosophers’ and teach freely ‘enlightened thoughts’ but as lawyers they are another layer of social control. There’s the military that defends our borders and the police that maintain law and order within the borders. The courts no longer serve but have been wholly coopted as purely an instrument of taxation.
The pot legalization issue isn’t about health care but instead it’s purely about taxation, short term gain and long term loss. Taxation on cigarettes and alcohol has never recouped more than 10% of the cost to society that they have caused.  Yes, we will get tax money from marijuana sales. Whoopee. But the cost in accidents, health care, motivation, and loss of youth will cost 90% in long term loss.  The simple law of drugs of abuse, established in elegant research a quarter century ago at Harvard and always confirmed is that the more available, the more abuse.  There’s a saturation point.  10% of the population consume 80% of the alcohol.  10 % of people roughly have major problems with drugs or alcohol. The same holds true with gambling.
Gambling is a major form of government revenue today.  Canada is a casino, a booze hall and soon will be a drug haven.  Already we have ‘drug pubs’ paid for by tax dollars at a million a year. The Hells Angels sell junkies heroin and occasionally they shoot up in the classy facility with nurse waitresses.  It’s better than what Molsen’s provides their customers, only we pay for it.
Now all this leads to the Black Market.  Years ago McGill University did a study that showed that the higher the taxes the more Black Market. It didn’t surprise me. I’d read the history of Scottish Culloden.  I knew that the more the English demanded when they were rapacious war lords and killing my Scottish and Irish forebears, my greats took to hiding their potatoes.  The English didn’t care if the Scottish and Irish starved in the winter.  There will be no Truth and Reconciliation Commission for us.  The Maga Carta was only for the nobles.  It took the French and the Americans to free the word ‘equality’ from within the ranks only of those who were allowed to bear arms.  The peasant classes throughout medieval times could not.  Massacres occur en mass by the government when the citizens are disarmed.  Russia killed 60 million in a few winters.  China has killed a hundred million in recent past.  The Pol Pot wiped out half of Cambodia in the 5 years of killing fields and millions dead.  The United Nations has proposed Agenda 21.  Atheists are the greatest killers of all time. Statistically the chance of me being killed by a rampaging lone gun man is next to nil but historically the likelihood of government greed stealing, starving and killing is a sure bet.  Hence the American constitution.
Now in the US they take their constitution to mean that the local neighbourhood church and synagogue and temple can have howitzers and militias and the police there have tanks.  In Canada no one cared because the country people had a 12 gauge shot gun for hunting.  The vast majority of ammunition sales in Canada is for birdshot. Rural Canadians aren’t en mass waving AK47’s.  So when our government gets its knickers in a twist about boys with bb guns, smart people wonder what the hell is going on.  The answer is taxation.  Targeted taxation.
And overnight I learned that Aboriginals and rural folk were burying guns and very very anxious about the urban government’s agenda targetting them. Because a gun is a necessary ’tool’ in the north and rural Canada.  The 3 year old girl was killed 2 doors down from me by a cougar.  I chased a hungry bear away from my dog.  City activists love wolves but 4H country kids don’t like to see their calves killed by packs in their back yard so we all have guns.  The city with it’s parking lots and high rises is the centre of waste and cause of climate change.  The “hot air” problem is not just politicians but the density of people.  Dispersion is a solution but stupidity grows in proximity.
And criminality.
Right now the taxation is at a cancerous high and as McGill said, the more taxation, the more crime. It pays more to break the law than to be a good citizen.  All around me I know criminals who have broken the law.  In fact the Liberals marijuana laws has as a secondary goal ‘sanctification’.  All the drug dealers and growers overnight will become ‘right’ and all those who followed the law ‘wrong’.  All those who made fortunes from ill gotten means will be safe. All those who paid the taxes that made the criminal life so attractive with health care and good roads and schools will be the duped ones.
So that’s what it comes down to.  Taxes and the black market.  I’m frankly libertarian.  My friends are angry at me because I’m voting Conservative.  The Liberals and NDP literally promise more government, more taxes and more crime.  I don’t know who they’ll tax more. The government gets in by giving jobs to friends.  In the old days it was giving a job to the slow cousin.  Now we know that the health care system has 20 times the administration as Germany’s health care system.  So we’ll get more bureaucracy and less actual product.  I saw a very expensive advertising booklet and realized this was where the health care dollars went.  Nobody read this silly book but ti cost a million or so.  Meanwhile no one got to see doctors and nurses which is what health care was once about before the political spin turned it into something else.
My friends are all earth huggers and civil libertarians and ex hippies like me.  But I’m a self employed businessman. I know the actual cost of things. I’ve always spent a lot of time fighting corruption and deceit and people that kill people in government.  I’ve front line experience.  I’ve seen the corruption daily first hand.  I am burnt out and jaded.  I am voting conservative because I want less taxation and less government.  I know that whatever government does these days they do at premium cost.  It’s like the department of defence in the US where a wastepaper basket cost $700.  When government is going to pay for something the price goes up and the quality goes down. Yes some people benefit but I’m not one of them.  I don’t benefit from the Black Market.  I’m not on the government pay roll. I’m not in a union.  I just pay more and more taxes and see that more and more people are getting free government hand outs while working under the table tax free.
I don’t trust government with my money and I don’t trust them not to turn guns on their citizens.  I don’t trust that I won’t have to move north and live off the land as my friends told me they did in the last depression.  “I fed my family with venison with a 22 rifle.  Everyone else was starving.” he told me.  I’m old enough to remember the tales of my grandparents.  I think the young are naive and trusting.
Thankfully most people I know are good and good is mightier than bad.  So Canada survives despite government because most of the people in government and elsewhere in Canada are good people. It’s not that way in the black market. Our criminal population is as bad as any.  I know. I’ve worked in the jails.  I think our judges are more afraid of the criminals than they are of citizens.  I think judge cowardice these days explains why violent offenders have been repeatedly given light sentence.  Increasingly the risk of crime is from a ‘repeat offender’.
Most of my friends also have never changed their votes. My communist friends have been communist since teen agers. My socialist friends have been socialist since teen agers.  My liberal friends have always voted liberal. My NDP friends have always voted NDP.  Even my Conservative friends have always voted Conservative. I’ve voted Liberal NDP and Conservative. I actually was a staunch liberal for years until I saw the corruption in that party.  I felt deeply betrayed by the gun registry lies and the destruction of health care under the liberals.  I was most disturbed when Paul Martin said he’d not register his boats in Canada and wouldn’t hire Canadians.  I thought I’d like to be an elite Liberal. It’s what I heard when Troudeau was smoking pot and hanging with Mark Emory. I ‘m a doctor and I can’t do that.  Every doctor has a political party regulator called by the pseudonym College of Physicians but here is their boss smoking pot and no one is urine testing him.  Excuse me!!!!!
And Mulcair is a lawyer.  I’ve seen parliament stripped of it’s power year after year by the courts making laws. yes. making laws.  They call it ‘interpreting’ but the courts are making the law now in Canada and it’s principal function has been to serve them and increase taxation.  So Mulcair frightens me.  But if I was a union member I’d vote NDP because unions in Canada have become so strong.  Government unions and private unions are Big Unions.  They have clout. I envy them but I’m not in a union.  So nothing the NDP are offering helps me. I want less taxes and less government , not more.
Mostly I want less Black Market Economy and less crime.  The only way I can see moving in that direction is less governnment and less taxation. It’s a little twisted, I know, but government is a pretzel these days.

Morning Pages

Julia Cameron in Artist’s Way encouraged people to write, without censorship, ‘morning pages’. This was her exercise to help people get their ‘creativity’ ‘flowing’.  She felt ‘creativity’, especially as a writer, was a spontaneous childlike process that had been stymied by years of criticism and restriction.  So she said, ‘write each morning, whatever comes to mind’.
In Recovery, it seems that often the twin vultures of fear and resentment are sitting on the bedside ready to begin their days attack on our peace of mind. Hence, for me, morning pages, when I practiced this process seemed a kind of way of ‘squeezing the shit out of my mind’. I wrote down whatever was troubling me first.  Today that’s change of staff and a contractor making a mistake that will not only cost me thousands more dollars but lose me thousands and require me to conjure up a half day of my time out a week already squeezed full by the 8 or 9 days expected out of 5 work working days available.
I’d really like to wallow in self pity. I’d like to whine and blame someone else for my troubles but frankly no one cares.
That raises it’s whole other sort of issues. I’m in the last third of my life and feel like I’ve let everyone else through the door, actually helped them, and now chivalry is dead and I’m left standing at the rear in a culture of agism and misogyny.  So there’s a whole new source of self pity.
I”m normal. I liked to suck on the tit of self pity. I want to cry to my long dead mother. I want someone else to shoulder my burdens.  I want Jesus to get down off the cross and make me breakfast. I mean, really!
I was happy to hear these last few days that when a man 100 years old was asked how he felt, he answered 20.  I don’t feel my age.  Like my still gorgeous friend who told me in her 40’s she was leering at a young man who wasn’t paying any attention when she had the insight that she was looking out at this young hulk from the inside of a corpse. She had this realization halfway through life with a body and beauty many would die for. I’m there now.  I describe myself more and more as the ‘fat old white guy’.  This is in a hip slick world of self help talk gurus who says things like ‘it’s a privilege to be getting old’.
Sure, but it doesn’t seem to help getting laid.
I’m a master of the quick retort when anyone wants me to get off the nipple of self pity or better still the other nipple of fear and resentment.  Notice how the metaphors of vultures and breasts intertwine.
It came up when a patient told me that the Conservatives had passed a bill outlawing men seeking to pay women for sex while making it legal for women to sell sex.  Meanwhile I answered that I thought it remiss that last year there was no laws against prostitution in Canada and somehow I’d missed that memo.  It all brought to mind the famous comedian joke which went, when I was a young man I was disgusted at the idea of paying for sex, but now that I’m in my 50’s and begging is no longer working so well, I don’t think the idea is such a bad one.
Meanwhile the proponents suddenly began talking about teenagers (young women) being ‘exploited’ and evil male ‘pimps’ abusing ‘women’. And I found myself involuntarily retching like I do when I hear the Quebec separatists get on their soapbox.  This is when women are in fact the ones who are confronting this ‘bill’ because they say it will ‘interfere’ with their ‘business’.  But these ‘older women’ who are indeed the ‘madames’ must be stopped because they’re ‘obviously exploited’ by some as yet undiscovered ‘men’. I used to ask radical feminists how can they actually believe their rant about women having nothing when Queen Elizabeth was our monarch. I just listened to an Australian woman going on and on and on, the way they do, when I asked her if she happened to know that the richest most powerful 'person' in Australia was a woman.  These people seem truly gender blind to Hillary Clinton while they ignore the 20 year old male hookers offering blow jobs at half the price of their female co workers in a tough street market.
I guess, sitting at the Red Square last week in a MacDonalds enjoying a Mc Cafe and egg Mc Muffin I kind of hoped that “social communism’  might eventually fall like the Berline wall.  All this  “I”m the poor proletariat and you’re the bad bourgeoisie”  rant should somehow end. I hoped that seeing a shopping mall in the Red Square might shut up all the 'rhetoric' of that old dead 'regime'.  I'd seen the phoenix rising in the church revival in St. Basils. I'd seen the new life infused in the very heart of the death culture of the old communist world.  Yet I came home to Canada to hear this old debate still couched in the old language of the 'victim' and 'victimizer'.  Meanwhile it's just 'me and them".  I'd just listened to the song 'ding dong the witches dead' and watched the children running about the village playing again and the bells ringing only to return to the Conservative Government of Canada spouting communist rant about 'exploited women' while wanting us to buy their 'market approach to the world' .  This is insane!!!
One day, in the 90’s, it was recognized that those who were always ‘helping the exploited’ were, well, like Hitler who went to the ‘rescue’ of the poor Austrians, or Stalin who invaded his neighbours to ‘help’ them.  The 'exploited' never get better with the activists and the hand outs but rather they get better with community and helping each other. I don't even want to talk about this anymore because the world is 'caregivers and victims' and the 'caregivers' will kill me if I even question their corruption. I just watched the millions of dollars of government corruption called the 'Portland Hotel Society' and the major benefactors who stole the milk right out of the babies mouths got off with a handshake.   MP Jenny Kwan actually blamed her 'man' .
So, forgive me, but I see the people ‘protecting adult women’ from ‘evil men’ as essentially ‘exploiting’ the prostitutes.  The legislators want a cut of the action. They're the 'dirty men'.  I remember too well when the women prostitutes of Paris marched through the streets and shut down the city because they didn’t want these pompous ‘daddies and mommies’ to interfere in their ‘business’.
In the ‘metaphor’ of ‘capitalism’ , “my body is my own’, means I can be a mercenary or a prostitute.  Historically men risked their bodies in work or war whereas women risked their bodies in sex or childbirth but today men and women die in war and men and women work the sex trade. Men and women ‘sell their bodies’ but all the language of the 'bill' about prostitution was disgusting gender biased so there was little talk of 'men' and no mention whatsoever about the most outcast in todays society, the 'transexuals'.
There's always been a 'trade' in 'blood'. I sold my blood to pay for my tuition to medical school.   Right now everyone is up in arms about ‘sale of body parts’. Meanwhile just like health care, the 'local's' are denied services whereas  the elite 'shop for health care globally'. The 'elite' go overseas for postitution and buy babies they bring back to Canada where women are told "your body is your own' but the fact is the 'state' and the 'courts' especially ,own your body.  There is supposed to be ‘suppy and demand’ but the ‘law makers’ and ‘judges’ in this business world are introducing sanctimonious stupidity into an area where all acknowledge the need for ‘regulation’ not ‘censure’ ,because ‘censure’ simply doesn’t work.  It drives the industry into the black market and removes it from taxation and medical attention.
The next three people I spoke to about the Conservative government’s prostitution bill immediately mentioned ‘young girls’.  Girls and boys are not considered men and women in Canada until they are 19 and maybe even 21 or 25 because they can look older but until they’re about 25 or 30, men can go to jail for having sex with them because our child protection laws are the most stringent in the world. So the prostitution bill has nothing to do with ‘girls or boys’ but says instead we will put adult women out of work who are in the sex trade by arresting their johns because ’women’s bodies in Canada are not their own’ but rather a woman’s body is the ‘property of the state’.  Meanwhile a national woman's magazines carries an article by a new executive woman complaining about the lack of gigalows available for her sexual needs at the end of a work day when she is travelling. And a major Vancouver newspaper carries the several page story of the 50 years prostitute who finds that the 'money' makes the 'work attractive' because she can 'set her own hours' and only bemoans that fact that the younger' competition' can get 10x the rate of pay. The story sounds as much like any aging sports athlete that I thought it would do well to be in the sports pages where the 'body worker's' get paid and complain about the 'young talent' put them out of work middle aged. Meanwhile brain workers like me complain about different shit but try to sound more intelligent about it than they do on the sports pages.  Meanwhile pole dancing, a wholly different matter, is showing up as the latest medical solution to an increasingly gluttonous and slothful generation all the while old men and old women in parliament are devoting their attention to lust in what was once considered a place where the state had no business, i.e. 'the bed rooms of the nation'.  Now the State , which reads your every email, wants to shake down the man who leaves some money under the pillow while claiming that they're really not interested in shaking down the woman that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid the gay man or lesbian that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid even more a 'transexual' that leaves money under the pillow. The language of the bill is so 'sexist' it should cause an adult to retch. No wonder we have "Wrecking Ball" songs.
So the whole feminist ‘my body, my own’ argument goes out the window. Right? Really?
Which may be okay because that was  the pillar that ‘abortion’ was built on. So if the state doesn’t allow women to ‘control their vagina’ and it certainly is already against women being ’surrogate mothers’ for hire in Canada there is no longer any ‘basis’ any longer for "personal' abortion.
Hence from the perspective of ‘pro life’  todays ‘prostitution law’  is truly revolutionary.
Seen otherwise, it would just be more post communist ‘rant’ in an age that is so far beyond bourgeoisie and proletariat.  While these old tenured London School of Economics red  ’sillies’ were squabbling in another centuries debate, usually smoking dope and wearing paisley bellbottom flower power earmuffs, the world moved back to the medieval days with the ’super elite’ new world order. We're no longer in the Beougeoisie and Proletariat wrong ideology but rather we're in the Emperor, Senate, Citizens and Slaves reality.  There’s no proletariat and beougeosie. We’ve devolved politically to a pre Marx reality, all the while the irrelevant ’separatists’ and their other 'ist' die hards, are being used by those who always benefit from ‘divide and conquer’ for their own ends and the stupidity of scaredy cat tenured fat cat academics with their Marxist rhetoric.
Personally, I’m certainly not the emperor and I’m not even a senator. Further my pay cheque excludes me from being a ‘citizen’ because today’s ‘citizenship’ isn’t defined by ‘landowner’ or ‘vote’ but rather a more ‘elaborate’ ’status’ indicator. It’s obviously about ‘money’.  To be a citizen I think one needs first to be a millionaire or multi millionaire but at least a ’net’ millionaire.  I think if you even have to ’think’ about the cost of any purchase you wish to make short of lear jets and rocket ships, you’re not a citizen.  Further, a real 'citizen' can't 'work' in a Marxist sense. They're rather more likely the 'Wolves of Wall Street'. A citizen should 'gamble' for money, perhaps or buy and sell slaves or something but not actually 'make' anything.
I’m a wage slave, myself.  In Russia a ‘worker’ was a person to be admired. Work was admired and skills and talents were admired.  Slaves, like monkeys, are ‘cute’ when they do things but the Chinese emperor had long fingernails because long fingernails are the outward manifestation and symbol of not needing to work.  The elite don't 'work'. They don't 'sweat'.  They 'play'.  In the movie Elysium they were so far above us they lived on space stations.
Corporate leaders today are not ’national’ but ’transnational’ which is why the word ’nation’ has become an adjective.  Corporations can be good or bad but the best make the most money for their stockholders so as Robert Hare says they are judged little differently than we judge snakes and other reptiles. Corporations aren’t ‘warm blooded’. Nations once were or at least aspired to be.  Nations were 'tied' to land and history.  Corporations are unearthly and make history. There is no ‘idealism’ surrounding the ‘brand’ whereas the very word ‘culture’ in its highest form derived from the very best a nation state had to offer. There is no need for 'locality' to corporations. Indeed right now all the wealth of the world is to some extent 'offshore' or 'off world' but specifically 'off the grid'.  There is no privacy in the bedroom but there continues to be no end to the privacy of banks and the elite whoever they may be.
One world order is empiric. Intrinsically it’s digital and paranoid. It’s us and them.
Unfortunately for me, I always feel like a ‘them’.  Indeed even when I’m an “us’ I feel for the ‘outsider’ and working as a physician give myself and my services to everyone irregardless of whether they are ‘us or them’.  Indeed I've been told over and over again by various authorities especially in government that I should treat 'them' in such a way as keep my distance and 'select' the most 'profitable' relationships as opposed to working in the 'old fashioned way'.
The Syrian government and other governments are now arresting doctors who don’t agree with the master race paranoia. Neitze is in and St. Paul is out.   The new fascism says not only Jews require extermination but we all need ‘euthanasia’ because we’re doing the ‘jews’ a favour. Would you want to be a jew, or an ‘outsider’?  Aren’t we being kind to kill them.  Like aborting babies, isn’t this ‘good’. Aren’t we doing the child ‘good’ by protecting it from entering this ‘cruel’ world. Don’t we have to ‘protect’ the ‘planet’ like we would ‘protect the fuhrer’.  The language has shifted but it's still the same old same old. Today the Jew is still the Jew but the Jew is also the gypsey and anyone else who disagrees with, well, you know, disagrees.  Is disagreeable. Doesn't pop a pill to 'feel' good about the 'group think'.
In the end I guess I should be thankful that with the economic crisis continuing my government, in it's wisdom, with these new prostitution laws has perhaps, in it's generosity, offered me the right to prostitute my ass, legally.  Perhaps looking on the bright side, I can hope that they're done with my ass.  They won't even prosecute me for trying to sell my ass, at my age, but if some poor John or, god forbid, a Jane, offers me money for my ass, they're protect me from being 'exploited' by those bastards.
So the trinity of fear, resentment and self pity disturb my peace. I write them down and then hopefully my humpty dumpty ego will feel I ‘listened’ and I heard’ all the fine intellectual arguments that the ‘sky really is falling’ and this ‘really is a steep wall’to fall from.
But gratitude in contrast is all. God is great. So thank you lord for this day. Thank you for my breathing. Thank you for my fingers. Thank you for my dog. Thank you for my life. Thank you for my work. Thank you for my refrigerator with food for breakfast there. Thank you for my shelter this day and my rent being paid this day and all the taxes paid this day in all the hidden and convoluted ways that I am taxed. And thank you for my enemies and thank you for my friends. Thank you for my enemies so that I might better appreciate my friends. Thank you for the rain because the sunshine is so much better. Thank you for the art and industry and technology and all the solutions to all the apparent problems that exist in this ever loving always growing expanding metaphysical spiritual space of coexistence and temporary adventure. Thank you for the sunshine. Thank you for my stomach. Thank you for the coffee I’m about to make.
Thank you for morning pages. Thank you for all your blessings.  Thank you Lord.  Thank you especially today for my ass and my government.  I am so thankful that my government is protecting it from future potential exploitation by scaring away whatever customers I might possibly have ,at my age. I hereby let all and sundry know that I am a prostitute and that if you interact with me, especially younger nubile women, I will expect token financial payment, for which you will be duly rewarded but unfortunately you will be considered a 'john' and subject to prosecution, even if your name is Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie or Ellen Degeneres.  
Now I'll get back to prayer and meditation.  Thank you Julia Cameron for 'morning pages.'  I can  focus on God and Jesus and Creativity and Love and work and gratitude. Thank you.

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.