Why don’t we just legalise the production of methamphetamines in Northern Queensland? After all, there’s a strong demand and I’m sure we could make a lot of money and provide jobs for all those unemployed people…
I know what you’re thinking. Drugs are bad and we don’t want our young people using them. I agree and I’m not proposing legalising the use. We can just export them and content ourselves that our methamphetamines are of better quality so we’re actually helping people by giving them ours instead of some poor quality ones made in a third world country.
Ok, I guess you know that I’m using an allegory to compare the production of methamphetamines and the Adani coalmine.
And yes! I do know that there’s a very real difference. One is certain to cause the deaths of a large number of people and the other is illegal.
All right, all right. Drugs cause deaths too. It’s just likely to be on a much smaller scale than the selling of coal.
Most drug problems could be solved by legalising them and treating them as a health problem rather than a criminal problem, whereas I don’t think anyone can find a way of fixing the problems of mining and burning coal by simply considering that it’s a health problem… And yes, if you consider the health of the planet a concern, it IS a health problem, but that doesn’t help us solve it. You can’t just take your planet to the doctor in the hope he/she will tell it to stop smoking…
All right, I do realise that the whole idea of drugs being solved by legalising it’s a rather controversial statement and most of you haven’t read Hari’s “Chasing The Scream”, but the simple truth is that we spend billions locking people up because of drug problems and stopping us from being able to afford the money we need to treat drugs as a health problem…
Damn, I was intending to write something about Andrew Bolt and his defence of the magazine that confused the picture of that black model with a picture of some other black person which wasn’t a problem because don’t they all look alike and that’s not racist. I was intending to label a photo of Joseph Goebbels and then apologise by saying that it’s an easy mistake to make because all Nazis look alike to me.
But of course that’s a cheap and pathetic shot. Andrew is not a Nazi. Neither does he have the capacity of Goebbels for clever sophistry, so I’d be wrong on two counts.
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