Graham Parker: November 2019

NIXON’S RULES - A SINGLE

About four years ago, I emailed a local Labour MP in London asking what the current stance of the party was regarding the “war on drugs.” Now that anyone with half a brain in their head can see that the policy is a demonstrable and disastrous failure, surely, the political party whose central beliefs revolve around caring about, and seeking to help, the very people the policy deliberately targets - the lower classes, the most vulnerable, and now in keeping with the American model, almost entirely young black males with a few other inconvenient skin shades thrown in - it seemed a no brainer that Britain’s Labour Party would be at the forefront of supporting drug law reform. Not so much, it turned out.

We met in the canteen in the Houses of Parliament, surrounded by security cops having tea. The Labour MP turned out to be woefully clueless on the subject, even quoting the current Prime Minister David Cameron, a Tory, who I’d noticed had recently said on TV, “Our policy is working, drug taking is down this year.” He’d said this after a petition to legalise cannabis had been handed in that had attracted at least 100,000 signatures, which meant that some form of Parliamentary debate might be in order. My Labour MP appeared to take Cameron’s comment as a victory and that the “problem” of drugs was well on the way to being addressed and beaten. (Of cannabis, she also said: “but it gives you psychosis, doesn’t it?” Ah, I thought, that’s why me and practically everyone I’ve known for about 50 years is completely bonkers. Well, that explains a lot.)

Continuing to support ruining lives whilst criminalising people whom their Party allegedly represents seemed all well and good to this MP. What else would you? It seemed to be the settled idea of both major parties, even though all the evidence shows that this has zero impact on reducing the sheer amount of gear floating around the nation (and now, in the intervening years since our conversation, Britain is number one in Europe for drug deaths). This failed policy of social injustice was treated as normal behaviour by a Labour Party MP. But what really left me with my jaw hanging was that after about 40 minutes of conversation, the MP suddenly came out with what some drug law reform organisation members - as I’ve heard since - hear privately from MP’s from both sides: “Well, we can’t say anything anyway, we’ll get killed in the press. The Daily Mail? Cuh!” This is what a government representative I voted for and is paid by the British tax payer said. I honestly didn’t know how to respond to this. (And this particular MP really does work tirelessly helping some of the most challenged people in the area.)

My Labour representative had actually uttered those words, expressing concern of pissing off a right wing organ of the gutter press tabloids in which every woman is described as having “An ample cleavage and a pert bottom!” Oh my god, how terrifying they are, run away, run away, tiny English brains can’t take it!

Yes, the people we vote for are hamstrung, in mortal fear of trash right wing tabloids. “We can’t possibly annoy them,” was clearly the MP’s main worry regarding a failed and worldwide disastrous policy! A policy that has made Gt. Britain the number one drug death capital of Europe, and our government have made it clear that well documented harm reduction programmes used in other countries such as safe injection facilities will not be tolerated. The punishment addicted Home Office have zero interest in public safety, and the chances of getting something of indeterminate strength and purity regarding heroin/opioid products and many other drugs in the black market is high. It shocked me that the tabloids are still wielding so much power in Britain, no less than they were when I was a kid. (Talking to some old friends after the Brexit vote, I realised the right wing tabloids’ power was not only limited to affecting the decisions of MP’s, but also the working classes. But that’s another jaw dropping phenomenon - don’t get me started.)

After this illuminating conversation with a British MP I decided I needed to investigate the matter, and if possible become as weaponised with knowledge as the word “drugs” has been weaponised by propaganda, so I attended an event held by LEAP UK (http://ukleap.org/about/), an organisation consisting of people working diligently against the continued U.K. government support of what are, essentially, Nixon’s Rules.

Comprising of plenty of ex and current police officials, including former drug squad members like Neil Woods (help, I’m sleeping with the enemy!) and the odd ex MI5 agent. I chatted with a few LEAP members after hearing them talk passionately about the inhumanity of the policy and its catastrophic results. After the talks, one of the LEAP UK members, director Jason Reed, vaguely suggested - in what was more of a loose aside that anything else - “A song would be good.” Well, wave a red flag at a bull...

Which brings us to the song itself - Nixon’s Rules.

The Nixon administrations hugely emblematic War On Drugs announcement and the follow up tactics cannot be minimised in the sense that, although it was well after the modern architect of the War On Drugs, Harry Anslinger, codified it in the ‘30’s, the Nixon administration further enlarged upon the basic methods of its execution: demonise the arbitrary list of inconvenient illegal psychoactive substances with blunt force and classifying them, as Nixon exclaimed, “America’s number one enemy: drugs.” Then you get the public in a state of moral panic, using both right wing press and the often gullible left wing press to back up this claim with the usual exaggerations and hugely inflated dangers that date back to the ‘30’s Reefer Madness propaganda film, then coerce the United Nations into brutally prosecuting the policy throughout the world in an act of imperialism that the Americans learned only too well from us. As we speak, Nixon’s Rules are alive and thriving in British Government policy.

Now, I’ll hand it over to Nixon aide at the time, John Ehrlichman to explain how this warlike model works in simple terms:

JOHN EHRLICHMAN

“But in 2016, when former Nixon aide and domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman was quoted in an interview given 22 years ago, he claimed that the War on Drugs had nothing to do with preventing addiction and that the administration knowingly used drug enforcement policy to actively target anti-war leftists and the black community.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” said Ehrlichman. “You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

“Of course we did.” If this doesn’t clarify the matter for you, you might want to call a brain surgeon and ask if they have a better one lying around somewhere that they can insert into your thick head. The above statement nails the entire essence of arguably the most crushing policy of social injustice in modern history. A policy that is to this day largely adhered to in the United Kingdom and many other parts of the world. In the case of the U.K., it is still used for nothing much more now than political expediency. Saying “We’re the ‘Tough On Drugs’ Party when decades of being “tough” have created a Britain where a 14-year-old kid can get illegal drugs easier than the legal ones is finally, not quite cutting it anymore. If you’ve walked past a corner store and an underage kid asks you if you could go in and buy something for them then you know that the store sells drugs - alcohol and nicotine - and your response would be the same as any decent person, and unless you were a sexual predator, that would be a resounding No. Scoring illegal gear for that kid, however, is much easier, with no inconvenient ID checks.

As Nixon liked to say, “When you think of marijuana it’s all Jews and niggers.” But he also felt the need to add heroin as the latter’s main choice of immoral behaviour, just to make sure. This kind of comment was on the White House tapes, but in the ‘30’s; however, our aforementioned unhinged prohibitionist warrior Harry Anslinger did not need to hide his racism so much and he told it like it is:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Oh yes, a real doozie was Harry! This quote is one of many from this lovely fella, but the basic terms of it, although less harshly expressed now, are still applied by our very own British Home Office; essentially Anslinger’s manifesto is still adhered to in its basic principles of classism and racism but dressed up in slightly more opaque terms as presented on a daily basis to the fearful and ignorant British public. Worse still, the Home Office (largely comprised of Old Etonians) employs only one real policy, which is simply: We can’t send the “wrong message,” or: We must send the “right message.” Have you noticed that? They seem awfully keen on repeating those phrases. That’s because their idea of the “right message” is basically: “If you take the drugs we consider immoral, then die already.” There’s not a lot else they do, except shout the occasional “Crackdown!” (They love that one, too.) That’s basically it, that’s the sum of the Home Office/UK government’s sterling attempts to make sense of the subject of the arbitrarily illegal drugs that flood the U.K.

Despite this paucity of honesty and intelligence and their wilful ignorance, things are changing. Lately, largely due to the decades of work from reform groups going back decades via the early champs RELEASE (https://www.release.org.uk), this fakery has not been holding up too well, even to your average Joe. The British Government know they’re holding up a flimsy mishmash of desperate excuses - they know it’s all gone tits up on them - and it’s good to see at last a Labour Party drug law reform group out and about the country discussing the now clearly monstrous failure, even if top-down the party has been complicit in this travesty all along: https://www.labourdrugpolicy.com/about

And even the conservatives are having a little stab at it: https://www.cdprg.co.uk/blog

In one of the LEAP events I attended two members of the bravest reform organisations of them all spoke - https://anyoneschild.org

To hear people who have lost kids to overdoses due to prohibition who now rightfully consider that only legal regulation and education is the safest way to deal with this matter in order to minimise the damage was not easy. Any parent is going to empathise with someone who has lost a kid or loved one due to the continued irresponsibility of backwards, moralising, and often hypocritical government, many of whom jokingly admit their illegal drug use in the hallowed halls of Eton and other lofty educational establishments when they were younger, knowing full well that their elite status and surroundings gave them complete immunity where law enforcement is concerned. The very idea of what would more accurately be described as “the war on people thinly disguised as a war on drugs” relies on arresting and criminalising people who cannot adequately defend themselves and who more often than not, are absolutely fucked once they have been stigmatised for life in the form of a criminal record that will stay on the PNC (Police National Computer) for their entire lives. And, if you read the aforementioned drug squad expert Neil Woods’ books, Good Cop, Bad War and Drug Wars you will also clearly see how arresting a cell of really nasty dealers, real violent criminals that the flow of illegal drugs in the particular area that they’ve been operating in is interrupted by not much more than two hours. Those gang members will by then be replaced by another team, often by definition more nasty than the last lot; this appears to be an endless stream and will continue that way if the police are continually given the pointless job of dealing with this issue. And your tax money is funding this.

The public’s lack of cohesive thought on this subject is not surprising. Decades of systemic propaganda, deliberate misinformation and outright lies have weaponised the word “drugs” so thoroughly that whenever I have a conversation about the drugs policy with those rather rare old friends who have never and wouldn’t even consider taking an illegal substance, it’s obvious to me that every word and thought that comes out of them has been implanted by propaganda. This is not an accident. They don’t have a thought in their heads that is actually their own. In any other country, on any other subject, we’d call this brainwashing, plain and simple. But in 2019 it is still the weapon of choice for governments all over the world.

There’s scads of information about the power of propaganda on the human mind that is worth a look at. Here’s just one example: https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/propaganda-and-human-mind

“The wonder is less that we bought the initial tale, but that for many the belief in the tale persisted even as the evidence spoke decisively against it. Once the comforting falsehoods had taken hold, they had vice-grip on our beliefs. This vice grip is the result of what social psychologists call confirmation bias -- the tendency to notice and seek out what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, avoid, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs. Confirmation bias often leads us to subject putatively disconfirming evidence to very severe criticism or outright dismissal.”

And here’s something worth examining. For people who have enthusiasm for the arbitrarily illegal drugs, Great Britain is a giant funhouse, and practically a tourist attraction. The incredible amount of variety in the UK of available cannabis strains alone, much of which equals the high quality gear available in America’s medical and recreational pot, is something that folks who discovered this plant in the 60’s could not have begun to imagine back then. Cocaine is half the price it was in the late 70’s and through the 80’s and so common as to be labelled “pub dust.”

Thank you, war on drugs! You’re welcome!

I can assure you that a large amount of lovers of illicit gear of many kinds do not want the laws to change. Why hand it to the government, they’ll ask?, they’ll only fuck everything up. They’ve got a point: of course they will. And high end international criminal organisations would of course agree: billions in tax free money to be made - supply and demand rules. They’d rather that not go away. And I’m not directly arguing for legal regulation in this song. The lyrics certainly don’t suggest it in any concrete terms. Reform orgs such as https://transformdrugs.org do that much better than a song can.

I haven’t lost a kid to a dose of ecstasy that was knocked up by Chinese chemists on the orders of international criminal groups and died because it was something else entirely or was a dose many times stronger than is safe. Legal regulation would obviously be better, but when just cannabis alone is finally legalised in this fuddy duddy backwards nation it will be with as much deliberate contempt as the fake “legalisation” the Home Office has managed with the recent “legalisation” of cannabis for medical use: only the British government could make the drug legal for medical purposes in the sure knowledge that it will still be impossible for anyone who isn’t filthy rich to get hold of it, unless of course they stick with the black market. Get it straight - there are no accidents in the war on people pretending to be a war on drugs.

As for the writing of Nixon’s Rules I didn’t have any trouble finding the perfect target. After all, a song called The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and Harry Anslinger Was a Right Twat seemed similarly unwieldy.

The Misuse of Drugs act 1971 (1971? Where have I seen that year mentioned before) also seemed inappropriately dry.

The football chant of “England” worked perfectly although “Britain” is more appropriate, but comes over as clunky when performed, and seeing as the Home Office/Government is centred in London yelling “England” did the trick for me.

The aforementioned LEAP man Jason Reed, after hearing the recording, asked if I could change the “England” chorus to something more appropriate for the entire world because LEAP actually began in the USA and is a worldwide organisation, but when I recently went back to the studio where the song was recorded, Seth Powell the engineer asked me if I had taken the master tracks away on an outboard unit, but I had not. He asked this because he can’t find them on his computer anywhere! So there - I was stuck with the England-centric nature of the beast. That’s that.

And in any case, when you’ve visited a state-legal pot shop in America, although it might feel ironic that the country that enforced this prohibition junk all over the world is now streets ahead of us, it still felt like entering a sensible, adult world, and to see people walking out of that dispensary swinging sealed paper bags of fine dank right past an on duty cop (the easiest cop job in the world - there ain’t no trouble from legal pot smokers!), you tend to think that the glass ceiling in that country is not far off from receiving a good punching.

I’ll clarify here that this song was recorded in August 2017 but put on the back burner when I began to write the songs on the “Cloud Symbols” album, which obviously could not possibly include a song like this, the stylistic disparity negates that option. The reason I went back to the studio last July, 2019, was to edit the mix, creating in a short pop single style A side and letting the B side go on until the band fall apart after a ton of ripping harmony guitar work from the great Mike Gent of the Figgs. The other musicians were the Figgs’ Pete Hayes on drums and Jon Powhida on bass. Everyone contributes backing vocals.

I needed a video done in July before I returned to the UK and these guys proved difficult to schedule for the job so I thought it would be a bit of fun bringing in video “actors.” Hence, Catskill Mountains local Wreckless Eric on guitar, Natalie Parker on bass, and her fella Zack Kerr on drums. Jimmy Parker worked the camera and editing.

I’ve edited this blog to novella size from novel size because quite frankly, I could go on...and on.

But don’t get it from me, get it from the experts.

Books:

Chasing The Scream - Johann Hari

There’s a lot to learn in this book, including Harry Anslinger’s contribution, something I’d previously missed altogether.

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander

The subtitle of this book 2010 book: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness says it all. Find out how segregation is alive and thriving in modern America due entirely to the war on drugs. It’s a simple equation, but a very disturbing read.

Good Cop, Bad War

Drug wars - Neil Woods with J.S. Rafaeli

If there’s one expert on the subject of on-the-ground drug activity in the U.K, it’s this guy.

https://filtermag.org/drug-policy-reform-movement/

The above is a must read article and fully exposes the deliberate human rights violations of the war on drugs.

And follow the links to the drug law reform groups mentioned above and the many other interested parties. There’s plenty of them...

Twitter: @ItsGrahamParker

https://store.100-percent.co.uk/collections/graham-parker

https://youtu.be/THDumXOWP_o

By request, here are the lyrics:

NIXON'S RULES

SUMMER 1971 NIXON MADE HIS FATAL SPEECH

INSISTING ON A GLOBAL WAR ON DRUGS