Posts by Russell Brown
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I guess the bottom line for me is, if it's banned, I'm not that fussed, and if a roadside test - which is accurate and relevant - is used (I'm not holding my breath on that one), I dont see a problem with it. Driving while messed up on anything is not a good idea - legal or otherwise.
Yeah, I agree. My concerns about abuse notwithstanding, I don't want to share the road with munted people either.
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Righto - keep posting by all means, but the results are in, and Manakura is the winner of the Flying Nun box set, and t-shirts go to Tim Darlington, Michael Ribas and Grant MacDougall. Details in today's Hard News post. Winners, click reply at the bottom of that post and tell me your details so I can get Warners to send out your goodies.
Thanks to everyone who contributed. I'm sure the National Library will harvesting this one for digital posterity.
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It should be said that Stephen Cogle still has the most fantastic, booming voice that still creates chills everytime. Don't take my word for it, listen to 'Native Waiter' by the VDB, lovingly included on the fancy new boxed set.
I've wondered if that song's about the pair - rich man's daughter and "coloured manservant" who lived, and apparently died, in a murder-suicide - at the Knowles St house in Christchurch profiled here
The funny thing about the VDB is that they were utterly obscure at the time. But I think they were one of the bands that Roger originally figured he'd set up the label to release.
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I'm still a bit sceptical about the badness of BZP. According to the lit review I have in front of me, there is a grand total of ONE recorded death in the entire world.
I was told (by a party pill manufacturer) that people in New Zealand have unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide on BZP. It seems quite hard to do - although, of course, there's no telling what the result might be without access to emergency care for overdoses.
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I went in today for a chat and a look. The revamp is by Shift, but it's part of a general expansion, with new staff etc.
They're ticking a lot of the right boxes: the whole front end is CSS-based, with feeds up the wazoo - including feeds for specific topics, based on a pervasive system of tags.
The tags are interesting. The funny thing is that they're useful because the Herald site, whatever its failings may have been at various times, has always had really good metadata. They just didn't use it very well - did anyone ever use the "search by subject" option in the onsite search?
Now you get relevant subject categories listed at the top of your search results. eg: a search for "Labour" yields the Department of Labour, Labour Day and Labour Party categories.
I think they've done a good job of appearing to open up more white space, while getting more on the page: Sideswipe on the home page for example (people trying to find Sideswipe were accounting for about half the search activity from the home page). It's also better set up for display advertising. Wish we had some o' them iPod ads. (There still seems to be a bug in the code one of the companies serving ads that makes the ads load very slowly in Safari. Bah.)
So they're doing some pretty cool stuff. Still no blog or forum functionality, but I'd expect Nigel Horrocks to get some of that going.
Downside: Premium content is still there. Now it's marked with little gold stars. Usual workarounds apply, afaik.
BTW, the Herald folks admired the quality of our discussions here ...
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no...its all yours Russell...it will cost you a link to my blog on your site :)
I'm shamed!
The Opinionated Diner is now well up my blogroll and I'll link to you tomorrow.
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And unlike most beer barons Mr. Bowden is a jolly good chap to have a drink with as well.
Yep, if it came down to Matt Bowden or Doug Myers, I know who I'd pick ...
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I'm certainly not pushing for a ban, just saying that party pills are just as/more dangerous than E. And the 'no reported fatalities' line might be true, but it masks all the harm happening underneath.
I don't particularly disagree. Was it Switzerland that decided E wasn't bad enough to ban? (Although I've seen Bowden's documentation, where he makes what seems to be a reasonably sound medical case for the relative safety of methylone vs. E.)
On the other hand, I personally know several people who've gone badly troppo on P. Funny thing about that is that you almost never heard about that until people started smoking methamphetamine - that's when the nastiness really started.
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Tom: something to keep in mind: BZP is illegal in most (I think all?) other countries. eg dont take it on that holiday to OZ, US, UK et al.
Illegal in the US and several Australian states, and not that many other places, I think. Mr Bowden has done quite well producing BZP for export.
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I love how middle-class people talk about erosion of civil rights whenever the Government restricts any of their pleasures, but talk about necessary public health measures whenever the simple pleasures of the poor (fags, booze, fatty foods) are restricted.
Oh, tosh, Paul. You can't be arrested and charged for eating a Big Mac, and the "restrictions" on the other two are no more than would be appropriate for any similar recreational drugs (selling party pills in dairies is stupid).
And I think the "simple pleasures of the poor" in New Zealand certainly include such illicit drugs as marijuana - and that those hit hardest by the justice system in such cases tend to be poor and brown.
The reason why behavioural tests for drugs are being introduced is that there are no roadside equivalents of alcohol tests at present. The reason why tests are needed is that there are too many stoners on the road. Being stoned makes them a danger to other road users.
No debate there (although the official figures seem to suggest that that alcohol accounts for the overwhelming majority of drug-related road accidents, much is it is by far the most commonly problematic drug of abuse). It's just that the proposed methods are open to abuse and, in the case of the time-perception test, little more than junk science.
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