Of cars and candy bars

A friend of mine is a sports car collector. Sort
of. True, his collection only has one car in it at
the moment. Whatever.

Anyways, this car collecting friend of
mine is basically a mechanical guru. He’s got
a thing for early ‘90s sports cars like Eagle
Talons and Plymouth Lasers and for as long
as I’ve known him, he’s also had a thing for
keeping them in good working order—no small
feat, as any Talon and Laser owners will tell
you.

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Cars like these are known as “ghetto
rockets.” Fast and cheap, they’ll give you
breakneck speeds, but don’t expect them to last
more than a few years without breaking down
in a blaze of oil-burning glory. It’s a good thing

were discontinued years ago, so used is your
only option) because you can easily sink two
or three times that amount getting them in peak
racing form.

For years, I watched my friend sink more
and more money into his latest project, a Talon.
Everything needed to be replaced and it’s not
like he drove the thing slowly; he’s got the
speeding tickets to prove it. That car became
the quagmire that ate his wallet and he never
stopped throwing more money at it. Eventually,
it had to be sold for scrap because no one
wanted a car that just couldn’t be fixed.

In a way, there’s something of that Eagle
Talon in all of us. A good number of Canadians
are becoming cars that can’t be fixed, and
the mechanic who’s losing all his money to
maintain us despite our irresponsible behaviour

recklessly for our own good, and soon, it could
be us on the scrapheap.

Canada’s health care system is getting to
a crisis point. We spend already close to $180
billion yearly on health care, a figure that’s
jumped $10 billion from last year and can only
rise in the future. Spending so much money on
a single part of the budget is going to make it
unsustainable very quickly.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not one
of these people who want to scrap public health
care. I think privatizing health care would be
the absolute worst solution to the problem. We
won’t save any money and we won’t increase
the quality of delivery. But as long as costs
spiral out of control, conservative-minded-
politicians suddenly start to seem more credible

 

that these cars only cost about $3000 or so (they

is Canada’s health care system. We live way too

and the public is more likely to buy into this
idea that we will either need to abandon our
public health care system or go bankrupt
propping it up.

No, it’s not the system that’s the problem,
it’s us. Our North American lifestyle is what’s
bringing the health care system to this tipping
point and we need to do something about it.

But we can’t. We’ve heard for years about
how we’re ruining our lives with what we eat,
drink, smoke and breathe yet we aren’t making
the changes. And I know what a lot of you will
say to such nagging: “It’s my body, and I can do
whatever I want with it.”

Wrong. Yes, it is your body, but when the
tax dollars of your fellow citizens are helping
you to maintain that body despite your poor
choices, you should be held responsible for how
you treat it. And since we can’t be responsible
on our own, we need someone to step in and
hold us responsible.

So let’s get a fast food tax. Let’s artificially
raise the price of pop. Let’s make it so that
a Big Mac isn’t a cheap way to get a bite,
let’s make it a luxury, something you simply
can’t afford to do every day. We already
have ridiculously high taxes on tobacco and
alcohol, so why don’t we do the same for the
food and drink that’s causing diabetes and
heart conditions? If we make such things so
prohibitively expensive that they can’t be
purchased on a regular basis I’m sure it’l] make
people change their eating habits, and make
health care more affordable.

And hey, if no one does change their
eating habits, at least their tax dollars will pay
for their bypass surgeries.

Your friend in high fidelity,
Liam Britten
Editor-in-chief

The Other Press

 

 

 

 

 

Herb School targeted for their crimes, not their activism

feature, “Herb School’s in Session” [Issue #27

Vol. 35, May 11", 2009]. In the article, Britten
champions the Herb School for its “education and
harm reduction.” He paints a rosy picture of a brave
and noble Herb School, unjustly raided by the evil
Vancouver Police.

Britten offers the following speculations for
why the Herb School was targeted and shut down:
“They had an agenda, they held rallies, they wore
vests that said ‘More Dead Cops.’” Well, if I were
a police officer, 1 would be pretty pissed off if I saw
some punk kid wearing a vest that said “More Dead
Cops,” especially if the same kid, whom I had greeted
with “a nod and a smile” was selling pot out of a
venue that existed under the pretence of creating drug
awareness.

Yes, as anyone with a familiarity of the
downtown pot community could tell you, the Herb
School sold pot. If you took the tour, promised you

[= writing in response to Liam Britten’s

would take it, or at the very least nodded meekly
when they asked, “You’ve taken the tour right?”

the employees of the Herb School would sell you

(at inflated prices) your choice of a fine selection of
marijuana. Once you were in the know, all you would
have to do was tap on the glass with metal. Then they
would check you out from their security camera, let
you in, and sell you your dope. I know this because
I’ve done it.

It wasn’t because of their social activism that
members of the Herb School got shut down, it was
because they were trafficking drugs and making a
substantial profit. That’s why they got singled out
whereas Puff’s and other pot-related institutions were
not shut down. It wasn’t because of their protesting;
they were selling pot and they got caught. End of
fucking story.

— Anonymous