Guatemala is a faraway country about which we know not a lot about, apart from the fact that its government has assumed leadership of the global anti-war-on-drugs movement.
 
Foreign Minister Fernando Carrera appeared on BBC New24’s HARDtalk on February 13 and startled the usually unflappable Zeinab Bedawi by explaining that his country is serious about wanting cannabis legalised everywhere and a fresh look at drugs laws generally.
But that would mean cannabis farms, spluttered Zeinab. Yeah, like tobacco farms, shrugged Carrera.
Wouldn’t going soft on the weed lead on to hard drugs? Carrera waved the question away: everybody knows the main ‘gateway’ drug is alcohol.
Carrera is a former CEO of multi-billionaire currency speculator George Soros’ Guatemalan operation. Government chief President Otto Perez Molina Perez headed military intelligence during the horrendous repression of the ‘80s. Not a pair of pinkos, then.
In the US, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap) now counts more than 100 retired judges and 2,000 former drugs squad officers and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in its ranks. Not many hipster Trots there either, I imagine.
The latest poll across the water shows that more than half of voters want cannabis decriminalised. More than two thirds of Conservatives favour a ‘comprehensive review’ of drugs policy.
Here, the clusters of cigarette-smokers outside pubs provide cover for sensible people to share spliffs and encounter no aggro except from tobacco and alcohol addicts, when you rightly refuse them a toke. But there’s only one TD known for straight-talking about marijuana and he now prefaces each statement by declaring that, personally, he doesn’t use the stuff any more. I know what he’s saying: me neither.
So the notion that calls to free the weed would scare off voters in droves is well wide of the mark. The more you ponder the matter, the madder the law against cannabis seems.
Why, then, the adamant widespread refusal to follow the Guatemalans and a handful of others along the road to sanity?
Ignorance. Moral cowardice. Social control. And protection of the power and profits of tobacco barons and alcohol pushers.
 
David Cameron has been taking stick for the half-heartedness of his apology, during his visit to India, to the victims of the Amritsar massacre in 1919. A contrast has been posited with his supposedly unequivocal apology to the victims of Bloody Sunday.
In fact, the fulsome praise for his Bloody Sunday remarks reflected a determination to put the killings in the past rather than the actual content of his Commons declaration.
Cameron loaded all the blame for Bloody Sunday onto a dozen squaddies and one undisciplined officer. Their actions, he maintained, had been entirely atypical of the British Army generally and nothing whatever to do with politicians in London. He didn’t so much apologise for the perpetrators as disown them.
No mention, for example, of General Sir Michael Jackson, on the ground as second in command of the killers on the day, later Britain’s top soldier, the Chief of the General Staff, who was busy preparing the cover-up before the smoke had cleared from Rossville St.
Had Jackson’s role been acknowledged, Cameron could not have exonerated the army and its political masters. He couldn’t have claimed that Britain’s number one soldier was a disreputable maverick.
All this is plain as can be from facts in the public domain. But no major party in Britain or Ireland will insist on the facts being acknowledged. Part of the price we pay for keeping the Stormont show on the road.
 
Bruce Springsteen was named ‘Person of the Year’ by MusiCares at the Los Angeles Convention Center on February 9. His brilliant acceptance speech can be accessed at brucesppringsteen.net. And then skid your eye along the set-list: Alabama Shakes, ‘Adam Raised A Cain’; Patti Smith, ‘Because The Night’; Ben Harper, Natalie Maines, Charlie Musselwhite, ‘Atlantic City’; Ken Casey (Dropkick Murphys), ‘American Land’; Zac Brown and Mavis Staples, ‘My City Of Ruins’; Mumford & Sons, ‘I’m On Fire’; Jackson Browne and Tom Morello, ‘41 Shots (American Skin)’; Emmylou Harris, ‘My Hometown’; Kenny Chesney, ‘One Step Up’; Elton John, ‘Streets Of Philadelphia’; Juanes, ‘Hungry Heart’; Jim James and Tom Morello, ‘Ghost Of Tom Joad’; John Legend, ‘Dancing in the Dark’; Sting, ‘Lonesome Day’; Neil Young & Crazy Horse, ‘Born In The USA’; Bruce Springsteen, ‘We Take Care Of Our Own,’ ‘Death To My Hometown’, ‘Thunder Road’, ‘Born To Run’: Ensemble, ‘Glory Days’.
If I’d been in the vicinity I might even have dropped in myself.
 
They say we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but The Pope hasn’t died. More later.

The pro-choice side in the abortion debate is mistaken in allowing the anti-choice brigade to confine discussion to the legal implications of the X case. Convoluted exegesis on the Constitution, suicide ideation or the proposed wording of a new law is stock-in-trade for ‘pro-lifers’. The last thing they want is the debate to shift onto the solid ground of a woman’s choice.
Choosing is part of the human condition. If we cannot choose, if our actions are determined by instinct, abstract morality or surrounding circumstance, then we have no agency, no right to consult our own conscience.
This is never more true than when it concerns our own bodies. A woman’s right to choose is fundamental. If this isn’t proclaimed at every turn, the argument will be forfeit and all women will lose.