Ganja and grog used to beat the boredom

[freddie]

Ganja and grog used to beat the boredom

Paige Taylor | February 26, 2008

 

KELVIN Gordon was 17, bored and idle when an aunt introduced him to cannabis at Yiyili, a remote Kimberley community of 200 where payday means the young ones get drunk and stoned.

 

Ganja and grog eventually muddled Mr Gordon's mind and he was twice flown to Graylands Hospital in Perth as an involuntary psychiatric patient.

 

"I had it (cannabis) every day for breakfast and then I would walk around outside for a couple of minutes or hours until I had another one," he said. He continued his daily cannabis use even after his friend Lloyd Dawson, a heavy cannabis user with mental-health problems, got stoned and drunk and shot his neighbour Jonathon Dick, then himself, at Yiyili on October 18, 2005.

 

Dawson's death was among 22 Kimberley deaths examined by West Australian Coroner Alastair Hope in an attempt to find answers to a sharp rise in suicides among Aborigines in the region in 2006. Mr Hope saw appalling living conditions, shocking health problems and widespread alcohol abuse. He found the situation for Aboriginal people in the Kimberley was getting worse, despite the state government having allocated $1.2billion a year to indigenous funding.

 

"The plight of the little children was especially pathetic and, for many of these, the future is bleak," Mr Hope said.

 

Mr Gordon said becoming a Christian had helped him get sober and give up cannabis.

 

But he is worried that so many of his peers spend their fortnightly commonwealth benefits on alcohol and $50 sachets of cannabis from drug dealers in the towns of Fitzroy Crossing to the west and Halls Creek to the east.

 

It is a fact that also concerned Mr Hope when he spoke to the women at Yiyili last October.

 

His report yesterday includes a recommendation that the state's child protection authority should have the power to take control of parents' Centrelink payments if a child is deemed at risk.

 

Mr Gordon finds it difficult to explain easily why his people have been drawn in to drugs and alcohol, but mentions that there is nothing to do in the community unless you are lucky enough to have one of the handful of jobs at the school or the shop.

 

Young adults in the community are technically "employed" by the Commonwealth Development Employment Project, but locals say most do not work because there is nowhere for them to work.

 

"The young people here go to town and they drink-drive," Mr Gordon said.

 

"They do street drinking and street fighting. They are wasting their lives like I was. I'd like to be a leader for my people. I'd like to help them stop all this."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...5013404,00.html

 

from theaustralian.

 

The only reason I've posted this is to draw your attention to the bullshit reporting. The article clearly tries to link violence, suicide and mental illness with cannabis (or ganja and grog coz we are talking about aboriginals; can't call it cannabis and alcohol=racist language) I have a feeling that if you took away cannabis and just left the alcohol the problems would remain. Hands up who feels homicidal after a few cones? No one. Reading this kind of shit really pisses me off.

[Reverend]

The government is looking for an easy way out, especially if someone else or something can take the blame.

I have lived up North and trust me they don't want to work and as far as there are no jobs crap. How about rebuilding the houses that they destroy, that should keep them going for quite a long time and take the dole of them, give them vouchers for food and clothing that can't be cashed in for booze.

[Bubble Bags Australia]

It really pisses me off too, including the line:

 

"Mr Gordon said becoming a Christian had helped him get sober and give up cannabis."

 

Great, yet more bullshit accounts of aboriginals being brain washed into giving up their native belief system so they worship jebus and feel like sinners for smoking a plant that jebus's daddy in the sky created for humans's to use (assuming you believe in that bullshit, which I don't).

[Zaknefain]

The government is looking for an easy way out, especially if someone else or something can take the blame.

I have lived up North and trust me they don't want to work and as far as there are no jobs crap. How about rebuilding the houses that they destroy, that should keep them going for quite a long time and take the dole of them, give them vouchers for food and clothing that can't be cashed in for booze.

 

This is what is happening here in British Columbia; however, it is not just the indians partaking in drinking and drug doing - everyone is into drugs and alcohol. Over here we have first nations who are, not meant to be takin racially, pieces of shit. Plain and simple they are complete pieces of shit! All of their children have headlice, they are too lazy to take care of it. They keep on pushing out kid after kid after kid so that they dont have to take their lazy asses out of the house and find a job - they keep on getting welfare. Moreover, this is not just the case with peoples of aboriginal decent however it is more concentrated in their population and I do not know a single white person who has 14 kids merely because then they can stay on welfare and not have to get their fat asses out of the house.

 

 

To the point, welfare is spent on drugs and alchohol and not on their kids; what is the government doing to fix this?! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

 

But hey, they came up witha good idea to make us more green; make fuel more expensive (2.5-12.5 cents more over 5 years) and then they will take the money that they make off that and give it back to us in the form of $100 checks to everyone! $100 to all the addicts! $100 to all the poor people who need the money but will isntead spend it on drugs and alchohol! $100 to the drivers who will put it right back into their tanks! $100 to the welfare indians with 14 kids - moreover, $1400 drug and alcohol party, oh yah and a cab ride to macdonalds like most of them do. How about $100 to buy their kids new clothes, NOPE!

 

 

Thank you; nothing in this post is meant to be racist, therefore nothing in this post is racist - it is the truth.

 

If you dont like it PM me and I'll tell you something with 2 words and 7 letters and one space.

[WantDaChronic]

it sucks having this kind of racist properganda in the media, but sadly alot of it is based on reality

 

personally i think that the people in those small communities should be forced into work by the government or they lose their welfare payments. the government could easily buy decent blocks of land to turn into farms, they could hire people to teach the locals how to farm, build, etc. and before long the people will either be working or have no source of income...

 

short of that i say send in as many people as you can with tax breaks as an incentive for businesses to go there as well. all it would take is woolies, coles and some places for a source of entertainment like a cinema, timezone, etc. to move in and alot of the problems would go away simply because people would be too stuffed after slaving away for 8 hours, 5 days a week to cause any trouble

[postman]

Some of the communities need education, ie some dont speak english, take a trip to the Arafura Swamps and meet some of the tribals that have no clue as to what retriculated water, electricity, or even what a house looks like let alone what it is to have a job or to work for dollars. Some dont even know what a dollar looks like. To this day and to the Australian Governments shame they still hunt and gather for a living and have absolutely no idea of what welfare is about, They dont know about voting or have access to polling booths, even if they did they cant read or write to understand what the hell it is all about.

Over the years the Governments have acquired sheep stations for aboriginals to run and make a living but was met with little success.

[jabez]

If any white person had there way of life stolen from them and there food source destroyed and was forced to live in the middle of no where stuck between 2 different cultures, while some Christian do-gooders sat around pumping in to there heads how the way they have lived for the last 50,000 years is evil and wrong, they would end up looking hopeless and depressed too.

 

What's happening in the koori community is a result of what happens when you treat human beans like animals for over 150 years, it has nothing to do with the mentality of black people.

 

Anyway I think most of the violence, abuse and early deaths could be avoided by getting them to voluntarily give up grog in exchange for free ganja

[Stoney]

hmmmmm maybe its just me but im guilty of on the odd occasion using either weed or booze to curb bordom hey i have even used both

 

must just be me though

 

cheerz

[RobbieGanjaSeed]

I'm with jabez, shit they live in marginal to desolate land, been hunted as animals for sport, had their families disintigrated for a hundred years, ripped off on their pays, not allowed to vote, been registered until the 70s not as humans, but under the livestock laws!!

 

Spend 20 or 30 years throwing money at them and write them off becuase they haven't got it together. Fark me they've had a rough trot. Most white Australians think they've been treated fairly forever, because it's been almost so since that whit eindividual was born. Going on 30 years now they've been counted as humans, so for themost part anyone 40 years onwards if they don't think past their own generation see no problem.

 

Whatyear was it they went on strike on the farms they worked 9their own lands traditionally)? They were paid a bad of flour some baccy and salt, while white workers were paid decent wages.

 

That wasn't ancient history. They went on strike, and what happned? The bloody rural livestock industry nearly collapsed, so don't say the blokes can't work. they just got sick of being worked as slaves.

 

If any race was abused like this, I'd dare to say it'd take more than 30 or 40 years to rectify. it's just gonna take continues effort, many mistakes, and failures, and time.

 

it's wromng to say the projects of setting up industry amongst these people has failed, just wrong. there's plenty of success stories.

 

And Stoney's right too. I lived rurally for many years. The blokes I hung out with opened large bottle sof piss at 4 am, as they went to let the cattle out, were well and truly over thelimit to drive as they went into town to do day jobs, and drank at lunch time, then when they got hom the real drinking began.

When I gave up drinking, i was auctrocised, they felt I was turing on them, and yep every one of us was white.

 

As for they won't work or buy clothes for their kids, are usless etc, that's just too broad. I have a mate who's wife are original tribes people of a famous Island in qld, they have their land claim and live well. She's a teacher, well dressed, and my mate's aassistant bank manager. I spent years in a training course with a bloke who worked his arse off while the rest of us got pissed at lunch tme. he was black, we were white. In fact, and here's something people who stonewall these discussions don't see, I asked him to the pub one luch time in 1996. he relucatntly went, in spite of the heat, as he didn't like everyone looking down on him in th epub. We went, and were refused entry in two pubs before we got in! 1995!!

 

I insited we chase his legal rights and make an dissue of it. he told me to get real, it's what they're used to, all that fighting for his rights is white people's guilt to help them sleep. He reckoned you just get used to it.

 

now he was a real go getter. he admitted his parents were drunks and he wanted to work hard to get his younger brothers and sisters to his care and help them with life so they didn't fall int he trap. But think about being "used" to refused entry for you skin colour in 1995, and tell me you wouldn't expect alarge number of people wouldn't be able to cope with such heavy insult. How many whote people drop out becuase its all "too hard", and we don't have shit like that to deal with.

 

We all need to be patient.

 

What amazes me is how you live int he kimberlys or where-ever and pay for pot? Why don't they grow their own. hell that'd be a decent income with so many customers. just be fair and sell at reasonable prices. I suppose the gov would insult them for their belief in free trade and enterpise?

 

rob

[iamnotacop]

"The plight of the little children was especially pathetic and, for many of these, the future is bleak," Mr Hope said.

 

You would expect someone called "Mr Hope" to be more optimistic.