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Last week, reminds The DrugSpot: Anniversary of the Opium Exclusion Act, was an anniversary (though not quite centenary yet) of the start of one of the most destructive and baseless wars the world has seen - the "War on Drugs".

I recommend anyone with a vague interest in it to go read the blog article. It highlights how prohibition was, by turns, a muddled policy led by a few evangelical campaigners (think the Temperance Movement in the UK) on moral rather than medical grounds, a racist policy aimed at people of far eastern origin where missioinaries were trying to do that imperial thing "civilise them", and a measure sponsored by the vested interests of the pharmaceutical companies (recall for example that Merck acquired a patent on MDMA - Ecstasy to you and me - as early as 1912).

It highlights that the principal effect of prohibition was a flight to using as yet uncontrolled substances like morphine and heroin and the birth of the junkies' love affair with far more dangerous forms of what had been relatively benign narcotics.

And the cost of that continuing "war" in money and lives is a tragedy of enormous scale. Do we have time to call a truce before it reaches that centenary?

I seem to collect these. Why can't I find a few that pay though! I have just been elected a director of the SE² Partnership Limited (Social Enterprise South East) which takes over from a SEEDA funded project supporting and promoting social enterprise in the South East region.

If a councillor almost anywhere in England at least made the sort of statements Iris Robinson's been coming out with about homosexuality, I would have thought that a complaint to the Standards Board would at least be entertained and investigated. Even her "retraction" is disgusting and compounds her guilt:

When the Good Friday agreement was developed into a constitution for Northern Ireland, it had, I seem to remember, quite exemplary equalities provisions. Northern Ireland was, for example, as a result, the first place in the UK to equalize the age of consent for gay and straight sex.

I realise she has parliamentary privilege when in the House of Commons, but her last outburst was on the public radio in Northern Ireland and should have landed her in trouble in my opinion. If a similar remark had been made in the commons about almost any other minority (I suspect not if it were "immigrants"), I'm sure it would have engendered a formal censure of some kind.

I am sure she does indeed represent some religious bigots in her constituency, but I am equally sure that not everyone who has voted for her can be tarred with that same brush. I do believe in democracy, so I am not calling for some interfering twerp from some QUANGO investigating her remarks - that's her consitutents' job when she next runs for office. But people should know that she's an evil bigoted bitch whose personal conviction renders her unable to represent her constituents properly.

UPDATE: As "Scribo Ergo Sum " reminds us, our psychopathic unelected "leader" Gordon Brown prefers to do business with her and her party than his own revolting members.  Iris would no doubt love the idea of locking up homosexuals for 42 days without charge or reason.