"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Friday, December 21, 2012

EXTRACTBut at the end of the day drinking a pint of beer or smoking a joint poses no unacceptable dangers, either to yourself or society as a whole. Any more than horse-riding, rugby, mountain climbing or driving a car. You will not automatically die a horrible death nor will civilisation collapse. Hence for communists the crucial struggle is for the socialisation of drug-taking, whether it be alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy - you name it. Far more harm and social destruction has been caused by ‘anti-drug’ laws than by their actual use. Something no royal commission study will tell you, no matter how long the deliberations. Logically then, all drugs should be fully legalised - not just decriminalised or grudgingly tolerated. At a stroke, the gangsters’ lucrative businesses would be wiped out.

There is another very important point to be made. The UK government, like many others, propagates the absurd viewpoint that all users are pathetic addicts enslaved to drugs due to some fatal flaw in their personality - maybe due to a lack of moral or intellectual fibre. Or bad parenting when young. Yet we know that, even with the most addictive drugs (heroin, crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine), most users do not actually become addicted, even under today’s conditions of severe alienation. And, of course, in the beginning nobody is addicted, with almost everyone who tries out a drug doing so through personal choice or a desire for experimentation, rather than having it imposed upon them by an ‘evil’ pusher - a largely imaginary villain found in mainstream Hollywood films and suchlike. The guy you buy your bit of weed off in some London pub or from a friend of a friend is also probably a user like you who deals purely in order to subsidise his own ‘recreational’ drug-taking. No Mr Big, that is for sure.