Things to do in Denver when you are dead lucky: land the critical pot post.

The Denver Westword – circulation 100,000 plus – has advertised for a critic to write a weekly column, “Mile Highs and Lows”, checking out Colorado’s hundreds of legalised cannabis dispensaries.
“More and more people are having the opportunity to use marijuana for whatever illness they have,” says editor Joe Tone. “We want to be a place they can come to find out which place is the best, the cleanest and the closest.
“The reviewer will be expected to rate the service, and ambience in the outlets, and help readers negotiate the often bewildering variety of marijuana products on sale.” A Pub Spy for pot-heads, then.
Colorado voters passed Amendment 20 allowing the use of marijuana to treat specific medical conditions in 2000. Initially, licence applications came in a trickle. Now there’s a torrent. In September, the Department of Health’s Medical Marijuana Registry was processing 400 applications a day.
Interest had rocketed in June when the Department rejected a move to cap at five the number of people a licensed medical-marijuana caregiver can supply. Said a Board official: “What happened then was that the average Joe was seeing it discussed on the news, and saying maybe I should go to my doctor about this, it isn’t just for crazy people.”
Bucking the national post-sub-prime trend, there is now a land rush under way in downtown Denver, as entrepreneurs search for properties for refurbishment as pot emporia. “It’s astonishing,” says real estate broker Wayne Bridgeman. “I am taking three, four calls on this every day. Some are stoners, others are straight business types. I suppose some could be both.”
The Colorado regime has the implicit support of the federal authorities. Last month, Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, declared that, “It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana.”
 Where are the Irish politicians who hailed Obama just months ago as a perfect political role-model? Who’ll be the first to speak the truth about the safe pleasures and curative qualities of a herb which has been used to enhance the quality of life for at least 6,000 years?
Or shall we continue along the path of danger by cultivating ignorance instead?
 
The main reason the wretched reactionary Benedict XVI has made space within his organisation for married Anglican priests is that he wants some at least of his clergy’s offspring to have been born within wedlock. But will that save them from abuse by his unmarried priests?

On October 16, a delegation of Native Americans joined anti-poverty activists and climate-change campaigners to disrupt British Petroleum’s annual recruitment jamboree at Oxford’s Randolph Hotel in protest against BP’s role in “the most destructive fossil fuel project on the planet.”
The Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, span an area bigger than England. They contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Extracting the oil from saturated strata beneath the surface requires the obliteration of forests and the creation of toxic ponds so vast they will be visible from space. The development poses an immediate threat to the ancient lands of the Mikisew Cree and Athabasca Chipewyan peoples and a (slightly) longer-term threat to the planet. BP is already on site and lobbying hard for the go-ahead to start gouging. The chairman of BP is former Irish Attorney General Peter Sutherland.
Sutherland is also chairman of global banking giant Goldman Sachs International (“A vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” – Rolling Stone). Two days before the Oxford protest, Goldman Sachs announced that it had set aside £14 billion for bonuses for its top managers in 2009. Responding to widespread outrage – it’s less than a year since the company was front of the queue, begging bowl in hand for bail-out money – a Goldman Sachs spokesman declared that the public would just have to “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all.”
Sutherland is among an Irish quartet who over the past 10 years have been awarded honorary knighthoods by the English Queen. The others are Tony O’Reilly, Bono and Bob Geldof.
On October 25, O’Reilly’s Sunday Independent gave generous coverage to a function at Dublin’s Mansion House at which Sutherland was honoured with a Humanitarian Achievement Award. Guest of honour Geldof flew in specially for the occasion. The Indo quoted Geldof paying tribute to Bono for working “extremely bravely and dangerously” on behalf of the world’s poor.
Could double-bellied parasites like Sutherland get away so easily with their ruthless exploitation of the riches of the earth and campaigns for toleration of grotesque inequality if it weren’t for the PR efforts on their behalf by pop-star propagandists like Geldof and Bono?
 
Slouched at the upstairs bar at Sandino’s with an alumnus of Skruff and the blond bit from Cork that I’m shacked up with as we waited for Furlo (the most distinguished musical product to emerge from Limavady since Jane Ross picked up Danny Boy) I happened to comment on the way the Q’s lead guitar-line interwove its sinuous way through the maelstrom and mesh of the Clashified assault, using words like melodic, lovely and such.  
“I won’t tell them you said that,” she promised.
But they were, you know. Although maybe not as such.