Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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I've just taken delivery of a shiny new copy of Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul.
Sounds like you need one of those 'No Pamplets' stickers on your letterbox.
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The great thing about banning all these drugs is the ridiculous abundance of 'gold top' mushrooms freely available in and around parliament between march and may of every year. Look out for trench coat wearing BA students out side the reserve bank at 7am on a Monday morning. They're not searching the shrubberies for inflation figures.
They grow in incredible numbers on the hills just behind my house. How sad is it that I haven't found time to head up there once this autumn?
After visiting a Big Hospital in San Francisco 3 years ago I had to go across the road to the chemist to fill my prescription. I was dumbfounded to see that they were selling over-the-counter pseudo-ephedrine based cold tablets in cartons the size of large Weetbix boxes.
A couple of months ago I found myself in a pharmacy in India where they were selling massive boxes of diazepam over the counter.
Unfortunately I had problems of my own at the time and didn't pick up a box or two. -
So you admit you know nothing about it, but take the opportunity to have a crack at the journalist anyway?
I know often the media grossly inflate the dollar value of drugs (I think the police do too, so it's all a lot more scandalous) but in this case she's roughly correct. In fact, given that most dealers will put a lot less than a point (0.1 of a gram) into the average point bag, you can probably get a bit more than 10 x $100 point bags from each gram.
I thought - and still think - the price sounds implausible and uneconomic especially given the ease of manufacture and apparent widespread use of the drug. How could a drug that is at least twice as expensive as cocaine become endemic in New Zealands poor and rural areas?
So I (discretely) asked a couple of grad students in my lab how much they bought it for - they said they wouldn't pay over $40 a point.
Maybe there's an Auckland bubble.And I thought the rest of the story (which was amusing, I'll give you that) was about pointlessly persecuting a small business owner who hadn't broken any laws. Supermarkets also sell large quantities of solvents and other drug precursors no questions asked, but they also have large legal teams and spend a lot of money advertising during One News, so best to give them a free pass.
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'Pure crystal meth' is what you get before you dilute your product with caffeine or glucose, or whatever.
You can make it with commonly available over the counter cold-pills so long as they contain pseudoephedrine but if you've bought any of these in the last couple of years you know you have to provide your address and drivers license.
Since this makes it hard to obtain the main precursor in bulk (and cold medication is also very expensive) manufacturers smuggle in raw pseudoephedrine and then cook it into speed in country.
They import the precursor instead of the drug because you can legally buy it in bulk in India and China.
The Australian drug information sites suggest that pure speed sells for about $200 AUS per gram which sounds a bit more realistic - I can't see any reason it would be five times more expensive over here.
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I've been wondering for years what that stuff I took in Amsterdam was and now I know. Cheers Russell.
Speaking of drugs, did anyone else watch Lisa Owens rather hysterical drugs story on TVNZ last night in which the outraged wrath of the TVOne news crew was visited upon a witless rural dairy owner who was selling (perfectly legal) speed precursors?
I'm pretty sure I heard Owen claim that P sells for $1000 dollars a gram. Now I have little to no experience with the stuff, but since cocaine retails for about a third of that price and has to be smuggled in from the western hemisphere while P can be mixed up by anyone with a bathtub and a rubber hose I'm not sure Ms Owen has the facts on her side this time.
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I got the revolution blues,
I see bloody fountains,
And ten million dune buggies
comin' down the mountains.
Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon
is full of famous stars,
But I hate them worse than lepers
and I'll kill them
in their cars.Neil Young
Revolution Blues -
*skeptical.
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Gordon Campbell: Clinton's last chance to go gracefully.
I was massively sceptical when scoop signed him on a couple of weeks ago but I gotta admit I've been reading his stuff almost every day. It's nice to have another intelligent voice out there in the blogosphere even if it is a hopelessly partisan one.
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Andrew Sullivan, Mathew Yglesias, Michael Tomasky.......the list of males that have demonised so irrationally is a long one. Their venom is quite disturbing..
Pft. Big Media Matt? Sully? That's not venom. This is venom
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On the other hand, I see no reason why she shouldn't fight to the wire. Isn't that what a male candidate would do? And be lauded for it?
That's any easy one - how many of the (male) GOP candidates are still scrapping it out against McCain?