So, gambling is part of our communities' life support system, now?
Many people
think gambling is a game. They actually call it gaming to make it sound less like
a disease. But that’s exactly what it is. It’s the next best thing after
smoking crack. In fact, it’s exactly like smoking crack, except your dealer has
a government issued license instead of a gun. And a nice well lit place that
has been visited by the health inspector instead of an abandoned house with romantic
graffiti written in human excrement decorating the cracked and broken walls.
I haven’t
thought about the gambling for a while. I just put it in the box with drugs: If
people want to do it they will and government, rather than stopping them, will
actually facilitate illegal markets, diverting what should be tax money into
the pockets of a selected few. The taxes will increase, the opposition will win
the election, while the hypocrisy continues to create jobs in law enforcement,
health and social safety nets unabated. The intellectuals will write books, the
media will reap advertising revenues, the judiciary will get promoted for their
co-operation, the cops will become increasingly paramilitant Dale Elliot will
do a documentary and everyone will be happy. Except of course for the people in
jail, their families, their victims, the victims’ families and the cops and nurses
who have to deal with the consequences of this unnecessary bullshit every
single day of their godforsaken lives.
But…
St Lucia has
developed a special case and it took LPM leader Therold Prudent to point it out
to me.
But this
article is not about Therold Prudent. This article is about an observation he
made about the hypocrisy of the Labour government on the issues of
gambling and ganja.
Therold Prudent, Leader, LPM
“First, they
raged against John Compton when the issue of gaming licenses was first brought
up. Then, when they got in, they went
further than he did and let it spill out
of the tourism industry into the communities
so that you have gambling parlors on every corner in communities
where they don’t even have a health
center or a school.
“Then, when it came time to renew the license, the
Roman Catholic minister responsible for the license conveniently has
to leave the island, while the not-so-Catholic
prime minister signs the contract. So this industry is allowed to prey on the average St
Lucia who is hoping and dreaming and
praying for some good luck for the benefit of
government revenue and that’s okay.
“But when it
comes to the legalization of marijuana now, they say, ‘Oh no, no, no, that is
not on the cards.’ That’s hypocrisy. That’s moral hypocrisy and it’s not good economic
sense.”
So damned
true, I can’t believe it.
Certified genius & stiff-necked fool, Kenny Anthony.
$70m worth of joints in his domestic economy and not one in his tax audits
Here we have
a government led by a certified genius and it couldn’t figure out that turning
to ganja for export earnings would have been a much better deal than
turning to gambling for government revenue. Prudent says his Catholic
conscience can stomach tourism-related gaming
for economic reasons. Money from outside St Lucia
comes to St Lucia and gets spent here. A portion of that money remains here,
circulating like oxygen in the blood
while some goes back
out to the foreign investors the way unabsorbed oxygen leaves the lungs. I think I can stomach that, too, for the additional reason that even the
tourist is not engaged
in lifestyle gambling. They’re on vacation. Let them free up themselves.
After all, this is St Lucia, where we are happy.
But Prudent
points out that cornershop community gambling is a whole different animal because the money
spent on those games should
have been spent on food, school
books, mortgages. It should have been reinvested in a micro-business or
saved or used to upgrade a family’s computers for the benefit of the children. That’s
money that’s already in the domestic economy being diverted away from
noble causes to be shared
between the foreign investor and the government. Kenny and the gaming
company board might as well just hombre
us in the night and said, “Stick ‘em up.”
Meanwhile,
the marijuana farmers of St Vincent and St Lucia have been working their asses
off to improve the quality of weed grown in the islands so they can get better
prices in their main European, which is
not to say Martiniquan) market. St Vincent’s
leadership has obviously recognized the undeniable contribution of
marijuana farmers and transporters to their national economy. Their economy
would be a total wreck if marijuana wasn’t there to act as a center pole when all else is failing. Marijuana is the reason why
St Vincent always has more money than it’s
accountants say it has.
Heroes of the post-banana economy
Saviours of the sinking small island states
Good job, guys.
Now, duck. La Lwa rolling hard!
St Lucia,
different story. Especially under Labour. Malhonettes par excellence. Even
though most cops now refuse to arrest
any respectful ganja smoker, marijuana has been maintained as a convenient
political scapegoat. Labour ministers
have confirmed over and over that the
decriminalization and export of marijuana and hemp products are not on their
agenda at all.
More telling
was that when the US continued the
blacklisting of St Lucian cops under the current Labour administration, the
Labour government and the cops once
again turned to marijuana as their scapegoat.
Even while cocaine was pouring through
the St Lucian gateway into Martinique like
lajijit, St Lucian marine police were busting fishing boats with ganja. And even worse, both the
commissioner and the government used it as an excuse to boast that St Lucia was
the most pro-active country in the sub-region when it came to drug
interdiction. People on the corner where I watch the news were like, “Yo, what
happened to the news? Take out that Christopher Hunte comedy maji and put back
the news, man.” They thought it as a joke.
Commissioner of Police
Ganja Persecutor
and amateur comedian
Vernon Francois
Why? Because
marijuana is one of the few things in the domestic and export economy that
works, has always worked and always will work. Everybody knows that. Good bananas
may rot, but good weed does not. Even shite weed gets sold and smoked while
other crops feed flies, rat and worms.
Why would any government shy away from a thing that is supporting them, even
under constant persecution and threat?
This is how most cops and judges feel when forced to criminalize ganja
They are really not feeling it.
Even while
cops and judges are agreeing that they don’t want to put on skeleton costumes
and chase ganja farmers and transporters
through the night anymore, the government is insisting on finding new reasons
to put them in the embarrassing position of having marijuana convictions on
their 21st century record.
Imagine that. Cops and judges are tired of this nonsense and yet the government allows this senseless,
unpopular law to persist in penetrating the people up the posterior.
The government
is insisting on maintaining marijuana as a scapegoat. And the opposition…man,
what a waste of time talking about those losers. They don’t know which way is
up much less which way is forward. Their leader doesn’t know his ass from
his elbow. (He was recently reportedly found with his elbow
in a toilet bowl/Can’t you realistically imagine Chastanet with his elbow in a
toilet bowl?)
Ganja
continues to give and ganja continues to suffer for it. But ganja doesn’t have
a choice. For without ganja, many will suffer far worse than what the police and
the prisons have to offer.
If every
ganja farmer and transporter had to cease and desist, the St Lucian economy
would suffer a case of asthma. Ganja
helps keeps the lungs of a weak, anemic,
life-support dependent society relaxed
and open. Ganja helps to dull the pain of many endemic economic cancers
that plague the islands.
Given the
pathetic state of the banana industry, it is safe to say,
unequivocally that ganja is already the biggest cash crop in St Vincent and St
Lucia and has been for more than a
decade.
Hey Kenny,
you're sleeping and the world is waking up.
Understandably, staying tuff on ganja have been the moral trump card that SLP and UWP have been using on St Lucian - the Churches have no reason to care what next, when the worst possible senario have been signed, sealed, delivered and awaiting campaign money next time around.
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