BIG GOVERNMENT GOES TO POT

Wanna score some government dope? In Canada, the courts recently ruled
that patients suffering from Aids, cancer and other diseases were
entitled to enjoy the benefits of "medical marijuana" - and not just
any old marijuana, but official government marijuana, supplied to them
by Health Canada, the government health system. Health Canada mulled
it over and set up a program to grow the court-ordered Federal pot in
a disused mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

Of the first 10 patients to be supplied with the government weed, half
claim it's the worst pot they've ever smoked. They're sending it back
to Ottawa, and they want a full refund.

"It's totally unsuitable for human consumption," says Jim Wakeford, an
Aids patient in Gibsons, British Columbia. "I threw up," says Barrie
Dalley of Toronto.

Health Canada insists their dope contains 10.2% THC, the main active
ingredient. But the respected pot lobbyist Philippe Lucas says the
government weed is only 3% THC and full of contaminants like lead and
arsenic. Aren't lead and arsenic dangerous? To modify Nancy Reagan:
"Just say no to government drugs."

One of the reasons I'm in favor of small government is because there's
hardly anything the government doesn't do worse than anybody else who
wants to give it a go. Usually when I make this observation I'm
thinking of, say, Britain's late, unlamented nationalized car industry.

But when the government of a G7 nation can't run a small marijuana
sideline as well as a college student with a window box, that seems to
set an entirely new standard for official under-performance.

Big government goes to pot, in every sense.

Instead of its hugely wasteful "War on Drugs," the US government might
have done better just to legalize them, give the contract to the
Government of Canada, and in three months the entire drug market would
have collapsed and guys would be huddled in darkened alleys saying,
"Hey, man, do you know where I can get some butterscotch pudding?"

Other plants in the news these days include the Gentry indigo bush.
This rare shrub grows in a few selected parts of Arizona and Mexico,
close to a proposed transmission line Tucson Electric Power hopes to
construct to enable it to supply electricity to its southern neighbor,
so that impoverished Mexicans will have better street lighting to
guide them as they swarm across the US border to pick up their
complimentary drivers licenses and free health care from Gray Davis.

But now the whole project is in doubt. Although an environmental study
says the Gentry indigo bush would be unaffected one way or the other
by the power line, the Center for Biological Diversity is suing the US
government to get the bush listed as an endangered species and thus
indirectly put pressure on Tucson Electric.

Alas, Jeff Humphrey of the Fish and Wildlife Service says his agency
has no money to list any new endangered species because its budget is
mostly tied up in court cases brought by the Center for Biological
Diversity and similar groups.

Got that? If this keeps up, the endangered species list will itself be
an endangered species. And the barrage of litigation on behalf of
beleaguered flora and fauna will have resulted in a spectacular
increase in population for mainly one species: environmental lawyers.

The Gentry indigo bush doesn't seem to be "endangered." True, you
can't find it in northern Maine. But then you never could.

This would seem to be yet another example of how every do-gooding
cause eventually floats free of whatever good it was trying to do and
becomes a self-perpetuating business all of its own.

The racism industry, for example, is now so large and lucrative and
employs so many highly-remunerated people from the Rev Jesse Jackson
down that it has a far greater interest than the Klu Klux Klan in
maintaining racism.

Thus, the African-American Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee was
recently moved to complain that the naming of hurricanes is racist.
Apparently, Blacks are being discriminated against because hardly any
massively destructive meteorological phenomena are given
African-American names.

The Black community can't relate to some white-bread wind like
Hurricane Isabel. Why are there never any Hurricane Leroys? It's
deeply racist and insulting to imply that only WASPily appellated
forces of nature are capable of billions of dollars of coastal damage.

WHICH BRINGS us, as most things do, to Iraq. In the last few weeks,
almost all the big NGOs Non-Governmental Organizations have pulled out
of the country, either partially or totally: Oxfam, the Red Cross,
Doctors Without Borders.

Is it dangerous? Maybe. When I was in Iraq earlier this year, I detected a
good deal of resentment at the NGO bigshots swanking around like colonial
grandees in their gleaming Cherokees and Suburbans.

But Iraq's a good deal less dangerous than, say, Liberia, where
drugged-up gangs roam the streets killing at random, and the
humanitarian lobby Big Consciences is happy to stay on.

What's different is the political agenda. The humanitarian touring
circuit is now the oldest established permanent floating crap game.
Regions such as West Africa, where there's no pretence anything will
ever get better, or the Balkans, which are maintained by the UN as the
global equivalent of a slum housing project, suit the aid agencies
perfectly: There's never not a need for them.

But in Iraq they've decided they're not interested in staying to see
the electric grid back up to capacity and the water system improved,
if it's an American administration at the helm. The Big Consciences
have made a political decision: that it's not in their interest for
the Bush crowd to succeed, and that calculation outweighs any concern
they might have for the Iraqi people.

Heigh-ho. For six months, their Chicken Little predictions of
humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq have failed to emerge. If the country
gets by perfectly fine without them, that may be a very useful lesson.

Meanwhile, who's staying on? The private sector: Bechtel and
Halliburton and all the other supposed Bush cronies invited to help
rebuild post-war Iraq. According to the conspirazoids, Dick Cheney
planned 9/11 so that he'd have an excuse to topple Saddam and his old
company Halliburton could make a killing.

Fine. Let's take that as read. The fact is, right now, Oxfam and the
other do-gooders have fled, and the only folks standing shoulder to
shoulder with the Iraqi people are the wicked capitalists.

So, in a month when the government can't even be a competent drug
dealer, and environmental nonprofit groups have bankrupted the
endangered species list, and the international humanitarians have
decided the Iraqis can go screw themselves, I say: Let's hear it for
the private sector.