Turns out the Aussies are as big on criminalizing grannies and granpas as Texans are. So they're taking a granny to trial for having a baggie of weed in her purse, just like Texas is taking Willie Nelson to trial for having a sack of weed on his tour bus. Australia is like Texas, except bigger and with a stranger accent. Who coulda know?
But we must protect the children from the horrors of pot-smoking grannies and granpas or... or... they might get mellow! (Because to smoke enough pot to OD on it, you'd have to smoke your body weight in pot within a 12 hour period, and it turns out pot is less carcinogenic than 100% legal cigarettes, so clearly there's no health reason to make it illegal). But of course Puritans everywhere labor under the fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time, and insist that this must be stopped. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Have I ranted on your blog before about how wack Aussie attitudes about pot are?
ReplyDeleteIt amazed me when I lived there, that in a land of serious drunks, where my fellow nurses -- often the young women -- would talk casually about how they got SO pissed that they were chundering on their Crocs on the kerbside, they considered marijuana to be disgusting. It's common "knowledge" Down Under that marijuana causes schizophrenia. When a patient was admitted who unwisely copped to toking when he was interviewed by the doctors, he would be tagged as a "cannabis abuser" and nurses would be nervous about working with him because he might go schizo. Even young nurses!
Then there are the police policies. Australians are congenitally horrified about "the road toll" -- deaths in traffic accidents. The coppers regularly set up roadblocks on major thoroughfares with "booze buses" where they breathalyze drivers at random. No probable cause, just a dragnet. Different view of citizens' rights. When we were living there, they also started doing mouth swabs that would pick up THC and meth. This was a major fear for someone who lived in our household (I'm not sayin' who, just that it wasn't me) and led to someone's dissatisfaction with Oz, which is a large part of why we're living in the land of B.C. bud.
At the same time, Australia is home to Nimbin, which is a sort of pot freak these village in the hills of New South Wales where they have a big dope festival each year. We visited, of course. Kinda grungy and feral. I shall not comment on the (lack of) quality of what we might or might not have sampled, eh?
I thought Queensland was more civilized than a lot of places Stateside. I was in a Surfer's Paradise casino and tried chasing my losses with money from a credit card. Nanny state regulations (thankfully) defeated my efforts. Those transactions would have proceeded in the States.
ReplyDeleteBut Aussies can be wacky too. At one point, I inadvertently associated myself with a British rugby club, and was nearly clubbed onto the pavement.
Remember, the puritans came to the new world not to escape persecution but to practice it.
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