Americans softening views on marijuana
For more World Daily blog posts visit thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily Historians are going to have a field day unpacking this new America bubbling up from the cracks of the Great Recession.
Set aside for a moment the rapid transformation in U.S. attitudes about gay marriage and gaze at this new survey showing a majority of Americans now support legalizing marijuana.
The numbers — 52 per cent favouring legalization versus 45 opposed — are unprecedented, the Pew Research Centre reports. It’s the first majority in more than four decades of polling on what was once the wedgiest of wedge issues.
The survey represents an 11-point shift since 2010. A shift, Pew notes, that is happening across multiple generations, with Millenials, GenXers and Baby Boomers all showing “a striking change in long-term attitudes” on pot.
The Pew data shows a collapse in the “gateway” argument, with just 38 per cent of the 1,501 adults surveyed agreeing “for most people the use of marijuana leads to the use of hard drugs.” It further shows that views on the morality of marijuana have reversed, with 50 per cent saying it is not a moral issue versus 32 per cent who say smoking marijuana is morally wrong.
Political partisanship still informs U.S. views on marijuana — but here too, views are changing. While most Republicans still oppose legalization (the majority of Democrats and independents are in favour), 57 per cent of Republicans and 59 per cent of Democrats say the federal government should not enforce federal marijuana laws in states that permit its use. Even stronger majorities — 67 per cent of Republicans and 71 per cent of Democrats — say “federal enforcement of marijuana laws is not worth the cost,” according to Pew. Mitch Potter
‘WHITE MEN NEED PIRATES’
Somalia’s fearsome pirates have been in the news a lot in recent years because of their kidnap and ransom operations off the Somali coast but they have also spawned another lucrative industry: actors posing as pirates to western journalists.
Channel 4 reporter Jamal Osman says he found actors in Kenya — where many journalists travel in search of pirates — who admit to hamming it up for the television cameras in exchange for money. The scam works like this: unsuspecting journalists hire a fixer who agrees to set up the interviews for a price. But the fixer is in cahoots with the actors. Journalists are sent on a false wild goose chase for days in search for the elusive pirates. Adan, whose day job is at a restaurant, told the network: “They (journalists) go to the boss and say we need pirates. The boss comes to us and says the white men need pirates. So he says, ‘pretend to be a pirate.’ ” He says he earns $200 for each gig. “I depend on myself. I’m an asset, not a liability.” Hamida Ghafour
BOOZING BIKERS BANNED
If you are a “bikie,” as the Australians call their outlaw motorcycle riders, you can guzzle beer in Darwin or you can wear your gang uniform. But you can’t do both. In advance of an expected invasion of 200 members of the Hells Angels for a raucous “convention” on Friday in the capital city of the sprawling Northern Territory, politicians rushed through “an emergency directive” banning pubs from serving “bikies” wearing their “colours” — the distinctive patches and emblems that identify a gang, NT News reports. The ruling is set to expire on April 11, but NT News says that the state’s business minister has recommended a motion to the cabinet to make the biker beer ban permanent. Much like in Canada, the Hells Angels Down Under have had a long-running and often bloody feud with rivals such as the Bandidos — though some of the violent gangs in Australia have way cooler names like the “Finks” and the “Commancheros.”
Australia has witnessed a wave of biker violence that mirrors the bloody gang feuds in Canada which saw close to 200 bodies pile up in the streets of Montreal during the 1990s and to this day still leads to deadly shootouts in Vancouver.
The rivalry has grown so intense in Australia that at one maximum security prison in the state of Victoria, authorities had to segregate rival gang club members — much like Quebec prisons have done for some years now. Julian Sher