Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Nasty mixtures | Feb 20, 2007 10:34

I guess one should avoid the obvious, but flippant, response to yesterday's claim in the Herald that ESR has found actual ecstasy and methamphetamine in party pills and concentrate on what the story actually says.

Which is:

Keith Bedford, ESR forensic programme manager, added: "Tests conducted by ESR scientists have quite clearly shown that two of the more common 'ecstasy-type' pills being distributed in the party drug scene contain methamphetamine and MDMA plus other potentially harmful, illicit active ingredients.

"The tests have also revealed pills that contained BZP plus a variety of other ingredients including MDMA and other harmful illicit active ingredients".

Police warned there were heavy penalties for people caught and found guilty of distributing pills containing illegal substances.

What ESR doesn't say - although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you read the first paragraph of the story, apparently quoting police - is that branded party pills for sale in the shop around the corner from you contain these illegal substances. If they did, the police would be around promptly enough.

The Dominion Post went even further with the original police press release, claiming that "Party pills marketed as being legal have been found with illegal drugs in them, police say," and spawning a discussion on "banning BZP party pills".

Radio New Zealand actually got the story right later in the day:

Mr Bedford says the pills that were tested were not the BZP-based drugs that can be bought from shops, but pills obtained by police from people making their own illicit substances.

So it's not illicit drugs finding their way into legal party pills, but the BZP from legal party pills finding its way into illicit drugs, along with other, unnamed substances. It would appear that there are some nasty little mixtures circulating in clubland.

This isn't trivial. It is just as important that illicit drug users have some idea of what they're taking as it is for consumers of any legal variety. It's possible that both the young man who collapsed last week in Greymouth - it still seems unclear just what he took - and the man who died in Levin after taking "unknown pills" (any other contributing factors have not been reported) took one of these grey market mixtures.

Last week's study in the New Zealand Medical Journal of BZP-related emergency admissions to Auckland hospital found nowhere near the degree of acute problems as a similar one in Christchurch. The incidence of BZP overdose doubled from 2002 to 2004, from 0.7% of all overdoses to 1.58%. (By comparison, 60% of overdoses in 2004 involved alcohol, 6.4% were GHB, 3.69% amphetamines and 2.86% ecstasy.) Most people who came in with BZP problems basically needed reassuring.

What's the difference? It may be that Aucklanders were taking the branded, retail party pills of known potency, and Christchurch party people were necking the home chemistry version. In this light, it's hard to disagree with STANZ's call for better regulation.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has been quick to claim credit for a new study suggesting that cannabis is going out of fashion. It was a bit quieter a few months ago when another survey found Australia to have the world's highest rate of Ecstasy use.

The summary of the new report has some interesting parts: parents object to pot as much because it's smoking as because it's drugs, and they favour a public health approach over a criminal justice approach. On the other hand, the first comment in a news forum on the report is actually quite alarming: speed has replaced marijuana as the weekend drug of choice in Australian mining towns because it clears the bloodstream swiftly enough to beat workplace drug tests on Monday morning. That'll end in tears.

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You can't moan | Feb 19, 2007 10:15

Such were the batting heroics yesterday, it would be easy to forget how magnificent was Shane Bond's opening spell. Those six overs reaped him but a single wicket, and Tuffey was going for heaps at the other end, but damn that was good.

Yes, the Black Caps' fifth bowling option was a bit of a 'mare, but Australia's was worse. Having for so long enjoyed the luxury of a great legspinner keeping out a very good one, the Aussies now suddenly don't have a genuinely good spinner at all. And 47 overs were bowled by their best available lineup - the one that, pending notice on juries, they'll have to put up at the World Cup. Ouch.

So you can't moan. You can't wish that we'd beaten their best, because that side was the best they could muster. The batting was good enough to pull off a ground-record innings batting first. And our lot were good enough to overhaul it with eight balls and five wickets to spare. That folks, was one of New Zealand cricket's greatest days.

Something you can moan about: the Auckland City Council's jihad against business signage and billboards. Does anybody care about this as much as stuff as Bruce Hucker seems to?

Commercial activity represents a good part of a city's vitality, and while no one likes, say, booze barns that function as giant beer ads, the degree of the council's proposed crackdown doesn't seem to make sense. I'm put in mind of Penny Sefuiva's crusade against café seating on the footpaths of Ponsonby Road, which also seemed to lack for a public outcry to justify it (quite the reverse, in fact). If those City Vision councillors want to be one-term wonders, they're going the right way about it.

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Watch your step? | Feb 16, 2007 11:56

Juha has found a "special mention" notice from the International Intellectual Property Alliance about our new Copyright Amendment Bill, which is apparently not strict enough by half. It's notable for both its naked hostility to the public good of New Zealanders and its apparent urging of the use of trade policy as a weapon. It does demonstrate the kind of lobbying our lawmakers are up against.

In a related vein, some of the presentations from this week's Internet NZ Copyright workshops are now online.

I found a couple of interesting reports relevant to this week's unfortunate Unicef findings on New Zealand's child safety record. It would be easy to believe that things were so much better 10 or 20 years ago. Actually, they weren't - they were a lot worse. The problem is that the rest of the developed world has improved faster than we have. No Right Turn has a bit to say about the ranking of liberal economies and The cost of capitalism.

Aaron offers a link to a rather jolly cartoon about Wikipedia, and his own musings on New Zealand children's author Amy Brooke laying into her peers, including Margaret Mahy, in the pages of Investigate magazine. Amy Brooke is in fact mad old Agnes-Mary Brooke under a different name, which basically explains everything.

Some music clips on the internet in flagrant breach of copyright: The Abyssinians in 1977.

Gregory Isaacs doing 'Night Nurse', Sunsplash, 1983. I saw him play live once. He hypnotised everyone in the place.

A very good video of Lee Scratch Perry at the controls, with Jamaican narration.

A clip of Tenor Saw performing (what else?) 'Ring the Alarm' that makes me wish I was there.

And one of your more unusual YouTube contributions: guy has a collection of classic reggae sides - and he videos each record while it's playing.

This is wonderfully weird: Patti Smith singing 'You Light Up My Life', a la Debbie Boone, on a kids' TV show. WTF?

And Motorhead playing 'Ace of Spades' live in 1980. Just because.

PS: The Cakekitchen, featuring Graeme Jefferies and Robert Key, have reassembled and are playing Bacio (which is clearly no longer a cheesy dance vene) at 309 K Road, tonight.

PPS: Also, I'm among the fine minds set to tell dirty jokes and abuse the opposition in the Great Auckland Central Hero Debate on Monday evening. I also participated in last year's even, and it was really good fun. Tickets and details are available from the website.

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The Report Card | Feb 15, 2007 10:07

"Undistinguished" would be a fair, even generous, word for New Zealand's showing in the Unicef report An overview of child well-being in rich countries released yesterday. The New Zealand Herald's story sums up our shabbiest performances:

New Zealand was the worst on two items (children killed in accidents and injuries, and 15- to 19-year-olds in education) and second-worst on another two (teen pregnancies, and 15-year-olds eating their main meal of the day with their parents).

And the indicators of which we can be mildly proud:

New Zealand scores best on educational achievement, ranking sixth-best in the world on an indicator of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy and eighth-best on the proportion of children living in homes with at least 10 books (94 per cent).

Simon Collins has also written a more detailed analysis, which includes this interesting observation:

The number of babies dying before their first birthday has fallen dramatically in New Zealand from 7.6 per cent when the Plunket Society began in 1907 to just 0.6 in this report and 0.5 per cent last year.

But it has fallen even more dramatically elsewhere, so New Zealand has slipped from among the best in the world to fourth-worst among 25 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Only 0.2 and 0.3 per cent of babies die in the best-performing nations, Iceland and Japan.

And …

New Zealand scores even worse - worst in the developed world - on the number of children under 19 killed in accidents and injuries, including violence, murder and suicide. We lose 23.1 for every 100,000 children every year, compared with 22.9 in the second-worst nation, the US, 15.1 in Australia and an OECD average of 14.3.

You may note a reasonable correlation between countries with "smacking" bans and countries at the other end of the scale from us. It's probably not the day to be firing out a press release demanding the right to smack.

Children's Commissioner Dr Cindy Kiro was quick out of the blocks yesterday with some thoughtful commentary and a wish for better data. Today's Morning Report discussion will presumably appear soon on the Radio New Zealand website (still not sure what I think of the re-design).

Internationally, the story is the dreadful performance of two rich countries, the US and the UK, which are ranked bottom overall in the survey (there were not enough data to include New Zealand and Australia in the overall results, but both countries would have come in the bottom half and probably the bottom third). A BBC analysis also finds that:

European countries dominate the top half of the overall league table, with the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland claiming the top four places …

No country features in the top third of the rankings for all six dimensions of child well-being, although the Netherlands and Sweden come close to achieving this.

British newspapers have almost all gone big on the Unicef story, demanding change, while the US papers have run agency stories and devoted their banners to their president defending his latest claims about their war. It's a bit tragic.

As is this award-winning photograph of a US Marine, returned from Iraq, at his wedding.

Just to cheer you up after that, Adolf at Sir Humphreys rides forth against the evil MSM and, as usual, totally gets the wrong end of the stick. Priceless.

I'm still loving Instaputz.

Yet another stadium idea. Interesting and attractive, but I can't tell if it's viable and it's almost certainly too late in the piece.

And, finally, I attended and participated in InternetNZ's Auckland copyright workshop yesterday. I was struck by what seemed to be a general feeling - even amongst the IP lawyers - that the Copyright Amendment Bill errs much too far towards the interests of copyright owners and needs some significant work. Peter Gutmann gave an excellent presentation that I'll try and either link to or post here. Meanwhile, Nat Torkington, who presented in the same slot as Peter, has a useful wrap-up of the day on his O'Reilly Radar blog.

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Lying liars again | Feb 14, 2007 10:07

The Washington Post had a story yesterday quoting Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, declining to echo the White House claim that the Iranian government is directing from "the highest levels" the supply of weapons to Shia insurgents attacking US soldiers in Iraq. It's quite a remarkable piece.

Pace does not contest the fact that Iranian-made weapons are being used in Iraq's chaotic killing fields. But he makes it clear he has no evidence for the incendiary claim that Iran is, effectively, at war in Iraq.

The story gets yet more interesting further down. Cameras were banned from the briefing on Sunday where the claims were made. No transcripts have been provided. The WaPo reporters were bounced around a series of government agencies as they sought verification of the most serious claims, but could get no one to verify or even officially repeat those claims, even though they have been widely reported. Can you say, "deniability"?

While most leading newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, have been circumspect to the point of sceptical about the claims, the New York Times reported them as uncontested fact.

The Sunday briefing was supposed to have been held last month, but appears to have been delayed by internal wrangling as to exactly what case it could properly state.

Juan Cole points out that the unsourced claims in the NYT story don't seem to make any sense. This column, noting that "Iran is allied with the Iraq's Shiite government and wants it to succeed," comes to a similar conclusion.

Anyone else getting a major déjà vu here?

Meanwhile, Joe Galloway at Military.com has a stinging column on the $US12 billion - 363 tons of cash money - that was shipped to Baghdad in the early days of the war and given to, well, who knows? The sad thing is that this money belonged to the Iraqi people. Galloway harks back to another war:

During the dark days of World War II, Congress established a Committee on War Profiteering and put a little-known senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, in charge. Truman, a veteran of combat service in World War I, was a bulldog.
His committee went after not only those who stole money but also those who provided shoddy or worthless equipment and supplies for our troops. He had the power to shut down an offending company or contractor, and he used it.
Where's our Truman Committee today? Where are the righteous representatives of the people charged with standing guard over our troops and our money?

Quite.

Anyway, I'm sure that I'm not the only one relieved that Helen Clark has finally bitten the bullet and expelled Taito Philip Field from the Labour caucus, even at the cost of a crucial legislative vote. I don't think Field's disloyal murmurings on 3 News changed the Labour leadership's view of the MP - he's been stinkin' up the place for a while now - so much as they were a tactical error that provided an opening for an expulsion that wouldn't allow Field to play the martyr. (For the sake of tidiness, you can discuss this in our Politics 08 thread.)

There's a really nice photo of the neon-suited dancers from Peter Vosper's Vivid Performance Group, who concluded Sunday night's Great Blend, and Robyn has bloggage.

And there's a company called (I think) Net Lifestyles that currently has people making bogus "lifestyle" surveys about saving habits and attitudes that are actually cold calls for their financial advisory services - I got one yesterday, which concluded with a pitch to send a financial manager around to my house. I'd rather put my money in a big pile and torch it than give any business to a company that lies to me. And I'm warning these dicks that any information associated with our phone number was obtained on false premises, and keeping it in any way is a breach of the Privacy Act.

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