The video is fantastic. It shows the true face of corporatist right wingers.

On a side note,has anyone else noticed that coke heads and recovering addicts almost always lean to the Right?

There's an anti-drug message worth endorsing.

he's dead. 

drug addiction is a disease.

I can't agree about this characterization of those recovering from addiction ... but drug culture is right wing culture.  It took me far too long to figure that out. People outside of North America seem to know this. Many of my US and Canadian friends think the opposite.

As Chris Hedges puts it [in relation to Celebrity Culture in the USA, but still applicable I think] "the fantasy does not merely keep us entertained. It keeps us from fighting back."

Supplemental: Santiago Kovadloff, an Argentinian author, wrote that drugs generate a conservative youth. His article on this subject was rejected by the censors of the military dictatorship.

One cannot deny that LSD actually DID change the world and during its peek a lot of progressive movements were born.

I know that it changed my perspective of the universe.

But I digress. My comment linking people with a habit of or addiction to cocaine while espousing right wing 'values'. Some pick up this shit from a 12 step program,an epiphany or brain damage.

Quick list of Hollywood actors who are right wing and have or had cocaine problems.

Kelsey Grammar

Kirstie Ally

Gary Busey

Heather Thomas

Tim Allen

Stephen Baldwin

That's off the top of my head. My experiences with people who dabbled with psychedelics or smokes cannabis occasionally/regularly has been generally liberal minded,left leaning,socially conscious and secular. Where as friends that got into cocaine have very narrow points oif view of the world.

Don't get me wrong,it's not science.

An old friend that I ate garbage bags full of psylocibin and hand fulls of acid with over a period of a few years. He went on to business school.

I was disappointed yet not very surprised that he's a right wing conservative now.

Go figure.

And of course Dubya Bush was as much of a cokehead, VERY heavy binge drinker and Gord knows what else, for years. In his case though, a fatal overdose would have saved the world a lot of grief.

But I agree that the ideology of most 12-step programmes is deeply reactionary and individualist. There is a group for Latin American people in the same community centre as my tenants' association with a somewhat more social and progressive approach. Unfortunately such groups are rare. We knew a fellow with very serious issues, but he was among other things a very hardline atheist. We did succeed in helping him find a programme with no crap about a Superior Being, but it took more than a bit of research.

Thanks,lagatta.I forgot the easiest example.

I just think there are drugs that open your mind and drugs that close your mind and I would come to the conclusion that alcohol and cocaine closes minds.

And just to put it out there..It's been confirmed recently that Nixon's War On Drugs was all about his enemies which were anyone who wouldn't vote for him. Can't imprison someone for being a Democrat. So he went after the 2 groups of people that would never vote for him ; Hippies with their marijuana and Blacks with their heroin. 'Liberals' (the Left) and the poor.

I've heard about the War On Marijuana specifically and heroin possession and or sale usually results in a prison sentence.But I never hear about a specific War On Cocaine.

Mostly because it was upper class whites involved. Professionals,including cops -- especially in the 80's.

I view cocaine as a right wing drug. So are steroids :)

Except that "crack" cocaine (as opposed to nice, pure Bolivian Marching Powder) is typically regarded as a drug of the poor.  Rob wasn't snorting rails off a black Amex card... he was smoking rock.

It's interesting. You don't hear much of people (whites mostly) getting pinched for some powder cocaine but the system sure likes to punish crackheads. Except if you're an overpriveledged white male like Rob Ford. I have much doubt that he only smoked it once.Giving his personality,I don't think he could control himself to one simple rock.

Anyhow,he was a pathetic junkie hypocrite. Good riddance.

Rob Ford's crack video: Is it unethical to watch?

Personally I think it could be unethical to watch it over and over again with a sense of delight or glee.  Or to make a "re-cut" of featuring the song "Bad Boys".  Or print stills from the video on t-shirts.

But to want to see with your own eyes that it really did exist all along?  I think that's totally fair.

I'm not sure how the law weighs in on this, but it seems to me that you waive a certain amount of your expectation of privacy when you're an elected official, and when you're doing something illegal.

So video of Ford having a drink at the local pub, or going to the horse races, or smoking a joint out on the patio might be a needless violation of his privacy.

But video of him at an "after hours boozecan", or watching a dogfight, or making up a big batch of butane hash oil in his basement, maybe not so much.

I don't mean to suggest you have to find it in your heart to like him before watching.  I just mean that there's nothing in that video that should make anyone happy.

It doesn't even really confirm anything about Ford that wasn't common knowledge by the time he died.  All the video confirmed was that yes, as claimed, there was such a video.

I suppose it also confirms that Ford was a lying sack of shit.

Hmm, people in the high Andes use coca leaves in a very different way, and it doesn't destroy their lives.

Neither does enjoying some wine or beers with good food and good friends. In that case "abuse" and self-harm - as well as harm to others, is the key.

But driving WHILE drinking, and throwing the empties out the car window, isn't just abuse, it is downright strange.

Sineed might be the better one to comment, but I think that chewing a few leaves introduces the opiate/opiate precursor slowly enough that it's more like caffeine than cocaine.

And conversely, if you could purify the caffeine from a few big pots of coffee, and inject it right into a vein, you'd probably overdose, or suffer heart failure, or whatever.

Same with some of the scarier synthetic opiods like fentanyl.  If you have chronic pain, and you slap on a patch, you shouldn't overdose as it releases into your bloodstream over eight hours.  If you scrape the goo off of the patch and inject it for the rush, you might.

To be fair, sometimes good wine can also make up for bad food. :)

My father used to drive while drinking.  And not a can of Budweiser in a paper bag, either.  A big mixed drink, complete with ice cubes.  It was on rural nowhere roads, but still.

Haven't you said that your dad had a serious drinking problem? (Sorry if I've misremembered). When I was living in Lac St-Jean, decades ago, it was normal for guys to drive the rural roads with a beer between their legs.

As for my dad, he'd hide cigs in nooks and crannies of the car and house - that's the drug that killed him.

That's how I see it.

And any curiosity, titillation, or schadenfreude satisfied by watching this obviously non-consensual video is very hard for me to understand. It recalls Martin Niemöller's cautionary words.

You remembered correctly.

In later years, he smartened up a bit about drinking and driving, but mostly when enforcement and penalties substantially increased.  He was a construction worker who had to be able to drive to his jobsite, wherever it might be.  And he knew more than a few colleagues who'd lost their licences and were in a bit of a pickle, work-wise.

But I think he got his start just as you described, driving around the roads near Arvida, steering with his knees in order to open quarts.

Actually my sweetie up there was generally very serious and responsible about such matters; he liked a beer or a toke but took both driving and industrial work very seriously. He had trained as a cabinetmaker, but the closest he found to that after moving back home was work in the forestry industry. Very nice guy, nice family too but wanting to live in northern Lac St-Jean and in the very heart of Montréal could not be compatible.

I had an "aunt" only a couple of years older than myself from Arvida; my youngest uncle married a woman considerably younger than himself after his first marriage broke up, but no starry-eyed ditzy kid. Sadly, she died a couple of years ago from lung cancer - and she had only dabbled lightly in smoking (anything) when she was young, and was never a "real" smoker. Evidently smoking was not the cause in her case... And the last time we spent an entire day together was for my mother's funeral ... but she was 98.

Unionist, though I loathed the guy, and know trade unionists and cycling activists who certainly would have had good cause to want him dead, so far I've had no desire to look at that video.

OMG, was she a slight woman, with grey hair??  We may be related! :)

Apologies to the Ford family for this thread drift, but do you know the story behind Arvida's name?  Even as a child I knew that the paternal side of the family was from Arvida, and I knew that Arvida = aluminum like Hamilton = steel, but I was into my forties before I knew the whole story.

I looked at it, and regretted it. There is no teaching moment in that voyeuristic experience. At best, it shows that some people need their villains to look really villainous in order to keep their passion fed. You know, not like those sweet and gentle Obama and Trudeau types.

Your choice is the wise one, IMHO.

As for your acquaintances who would have had "good cause to want him dead". Well. I don't even know what to say to that. Do they want Obama dead? Hillary ex-Rodham Clinton? Or are they painfully ignorant of how much blood those two have on their hands?

People can only talk about Rob Ford (an irrelevant zero type) that way because they can feel superior to him, and because he looks and sounds like a villain. I don't share their value system.

I disagree.  Maybe it's not important to you, but now you know that the Toronto Star reporters who first described this video were not just taking a fabricated and partisan swipe at Ford, and Ford Nation.  Doesn't that have any value?

You need to get out more.

Folks here understandably dont understand drug use. It's may be a right wing thing, but I'm the outlier. I do drugs because of the right wingers. To escape this world. And my drug experiences are where I'm enlightened. Be careful with your conclusions.

You need to get out more.