03/09/2026
High Headliners!
I’m picking oranges every morning for juice and we just had a week of glorious sunshine, which makes heaven even more obvious. No doubt it’ll be hot soon enough and I read that it was the mildest winter in 150 years, so look out for a hot, hot summer. Speaking of climate change, Nepal changed my life fifty odd years ago.
It was the lifestyle of the people and their laughter. I’m six months out of the London stockbroker suit and wandering through the mountains out of Pokhara, which incidentally had just a few cheap places to stay for early hippies and now has maybe a thousand hotels and endless busloads of tourists, mostly from China.
I slept and ate with the locals in the villages, got my first dose of head lice and wondered at how happy these people were. The women would head off in the morning together, chatting and laughing to collect huge bundles of sticks they’d carry home on their backs, for their cooking fires and maybe a bit of warmth at night.
The men worked together building or planting, or whatever, as they did everything themselves. The villages and countryside were beatifically maintained, with little whitewashed huts dotted amongst the gardens, it looked like paradise to me. Although the big influence on me was the happiness of the people. Laughing and happy, I’d never seen anything like it before and I wanted it!
Hashish was legal then and sold everywhere, cheap as chips, from plants growing wild alongside hillsides of rhododendrons. That was 1973, just before America and the UN pressured Nepal to make w**d illegal, which totally disrupted their economy. I was in Nepal eight years ago and it was extremely hard to find hash. I was told by locals the King said it was bad and his word is gospel.
Nice to read a bit of Aussie involved research telling us what we already know. “Medical ‘marijuana’ was associated with significant improvements in chronic pain, anxiety and PTSD, along with better sleep, mood and quality of life”. Of course it means nothing to our medical system because it hasn’t jumped through their hoops of a double blind placebo trial. Narrow-minded fools, corrupted really, by Big Pharma’s one-way street.
I love the story analysing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics covering 20 million people between 1990 and 2025. In States that decriminalised mediw**d (which only started in 1996 in California, remember) health related work absences dropped by about 7%. Health services saw a 32% drop, manual workers 39%. These are huge figures related to treating chronic pain, muscle conditions and mental stress. Interestingly, the largest absenteeism reductions, at 36%, were amongst the less educated and experienced.
Love to see someone analyse the health expenses and doctor visits of cannabis users here, guaranteed we are saving the Government a fortune. It’s the World Cup Poetry annual competition in Nimbin this weekend, always a great event.
Love to everyone!
Michael Balderstone
Nimbin H**P Embassy Head
I’m picking oranges every morning for juice and we just had a week of glorious sunshine, which makes heaven even more obvious. No doubt it’ll be hot soon enough and I read that it was the mildest winter in 150 years, so look out for a hot, hot summer. Speaking of climate change, Nepal changed my...
