The straight dope

The 80th anniversary of The Sabin Women reminds me that when my former partner Mary Holland was dying of scleroderma a few years back I used to travel to Dublin about once a fortnight, bringing marijuana. Usually 20 or so ready-rolled joints. It somewhat eased the pain of her last days.

It was Mary who had first alerted me to The Sabin Woman: the appropriateness didn’t occur to me at the time.
Bowling down through Tyrone and Monaghan, neat joints nestling in an Old Holborn packet snuggled in the inside pocket, I’d marvel at the fact that my mission could be accounted a criminal enterprise. Robert Holding probably felt the same when the cops called to his door.
Mr. Holding, 72, is the Lancashire milkman who delivered marijuana to fellow-pensioners on his daily round. Customers placed orders through a note on the doorstep in a milk bottle. The typical order was a pint of gold-top and an eighth. He was sentenced to nine months suspended at Burnley Crown Court on February 6th.
“It was for elderly people who had aches and pains,” he told the court.
Cannabis has been used in medicine for at least 3,000 years. Apart from its proven effectiveness as a palliative, it is more efficient than any other readily-available treatment for nausea or loss of appetite from chemotherapy. The fact that it’s illegal to obtain for even these purposes is absurd.
And yet to make the argument for change is still to invite a torrent of ignorant abuse. Cannabis is “addictive” (untrue), “poisonous” (untrue), “leads on” to harder drugs (untrue). Virtually everything negative said about cannabis is untrue and arises not from the nature of the substance but from its illegality. Which is why we would do well to mark the anniversary of The Sabin Women.
The Sabin Women – more properly, the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform – were founded in New York on March 9, 1929 by Pauline Sabin and a group of friends. By the time they went public two months later, they were a thousand strong. By early 1931, they boasted a million and a half members.
The founders were rich, politically savvy, well-connected, elegantly at ease in the social swirl of downtown Manhattan. They had become persuaded that the prohibition of alcohol was the cause of much of the gangsterism, political corruption, broken homes and other evils encroaching on their world. Lift the ban and the link between booze and a range of social vices will be broken, they argued. In return for their support in the 1932 presidential election, Franklin Roosevelt included repeal of prohibition in his programme. He delivered in 1933. After which, everything that The Sabin Women said would happen, did happen.
The same would be true of the decriminalisation of drugs – not just cannabis – today. It’s the illegality of drugs which leads to violence, misery and death. Politicians and editorialists who refuse to acknowledge this fact serve only to compound the problem.
This is the beginning of wisdom with regard to armed violence on the streets of our cities.

Great excitement in Sandino’s when news came through that, “Irishman Becomes First-ever Mr. Gay World”. So our lad James Smallman had triumphed!
Bogsider James had been given a raucous send-off a few weeks earlier when he set forth for Canada as Irish representative at Mr. Gay World in Whistler, British Colombia. Why they opted to hold the event in a ski resort in the Canadian Rockies rather than in, say, Strabane, which would have been far more convenient for James, is a mystery to me.
Anyway, we were all, naturally, chuffed more than somewhat to learn that he was coming home with the trophy.
Except that it turned out it wasn’t James at all but Max Krzyzanowski who had been crowned Mr. Gay World! Mr. Krzyzanowski, it emerged, had been representing Southern Ireland. James had been representing “Ireland”.
A bit like the way the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin is Primate of Ireland while the Archbishop of Armagh is Primate of All Ireland, I suppose.
This is what happens when partitionism infiltrates the gay world.
Was it not a dispiriting waste of time, I asked James, forced to spend 10 days in the company of 1,500 gay activists from around the world, attending fashion shows, photo shoots, treks into the high-mountain wilderness, balls, banquets, receptions, a galaxy of showbiz stars, a smorgasbord of Speedos and a climactic ceremony hosted by Olympic Gold Medallist Mark Tewksbury against the spectacular backdrop of the soaring Canadian mountains, and nothing to show for it at the end?
Wasn’t too bad, he murmured.
Always the uncomplaining sort, James.

I saw many reports of marchers on the Big Demo saying that they were willing to take a hit but wanted the pain fairly shared. 
Not the citizens I was marching alongside, who were of the view that they’d been battered, robbed and lied to for years and could see no reason to share any pain we manage belatedly to inflict on the perpetrators.
Somebody kicks your teeth in, you offer for the sake of fairness to do half their sentence?
Don’t think so.
The slogan which took the prize for artistic merit was scrawled on cardboard and held aloft by a scrawny adolescent with the look of a music-lover about him: “Make Bono Pay Tax”.
Could be a unifying slogan in these dangerously divisive times.