“given the close knit nature of TT society, wealthier or politically affiliated persons would seek or send family members to treatment in Antigua, Barbados or the United States.”

On Instagram, you will find thousands of pictures documenting cannabis use in all its fascinating glory. Such subtle hashtags as “cannabis”, “marijuana” and “weed” flag up photos of buds, bongs, towering home-grown plants, joints the size of baseball bats (obligatory, obviously), and scores of dead-eyed weed enthusiasts in the act of partaking.

As a result, two things have happened. First, a whole knuckle-headed subculture has grown around the snaps, perfectly crystallised by a scintillating blog entry from back in March titled The 20 Hottest #Girlswhosmokeweed on Instagram I’ve found (so far) and tweeted over 7,000 times. Second, there have been threats from the authorities in Victoria to somehow pursue anyone who has posted such images – which, predictably enough, have only accelerated the craze further.

At which point, it is worth pausing for thought, and marvelling at the stupidity of it all. Of course, the state getting in such a lather about cannabis use only underlines the lunacy of its prohibition – as with this week’s Guardian story about weed-trade-related violence and shootings, complete with a senior cop in Merseyside advocating harsher sentencing for those who grow and sell it. Both stories flag up much the same organised idiocy: the Melbourne-based Herald Sun quotes police warning that “anyone who posts images of this nature may find themselves subject to a criminal investigation”; assistant chief constable Andy Ward thunders that “the amount of money being made by criminals should be reflected in the sentencing”. Shades, as always, of Chicago circa 1925, a colossal waste of human effort – and, all too often, utterly needless gangsterism.

That much surely ought to be accepted by anyone even halfway rational. 

From the post:

When we hear of a bank caught money laundering there is a tendency, gently encouraged I think, by the banks and the media, to think of it as we would if we heard of someone in our street having been caught fencing stolen goods.  We would think – ‘Ah, so there is the crook among us’, and by unspoken extension assume that since he’s the crook the rest of us aren’t.  Not unreasonable when dealing with people, but entirely misplaced when thinking of banks.

That might seema little sweeping a generalization but it isn’t.  The drugs business is huge and mostly in our countries. The drug producing nations are relatively minor players in the financial side of the drug business. Most of the drug money is made , moved and stored/banked/invested outside the producing countries but inside ours.

Latest official figures estimate,

 In the 2005 World Drugs Report the UNODC put the value [of the global drug trade] at US$13bn at production level, $94bn at wholesale level and US$332bn based upon retail prices.

The critical thing to note here is not the figures, large as they are, but the careful break down of the trade into production, wholesale and retail. There is the tendency in the news and newspapers to talk just about ‘the drug trade’. This piece of laziness is useful because it conjures up pictures of Mexican murders and Colombian jungles.  Rather than what it should conjure up, images of smart bankers in London and New York.

U.S. government studies consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks or Latinos.  Yet, in large cities and counties throughout the United States, young blacks and Latinos are arrested and jailed for marijuana possession at much higher rates than young whites.

In New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites.  Usually, the people arrested were not smoking in public. Police typically found the small amount of marijuana when they stopped, frisked, and searched the young people, often in their own neighborhoods. 

Marijuana-Arrests.com is an on line library of materials about the huge numbers of racially-biased marijuana possession arrests, their consequences, and the law enforcement policies and operations which produce them.