I was born in Canada in the early Fifties and lived there until early 1988 at which time I moved to the Dominican Republic where I live today. I have a high school diploma (kindergarten plus the thirteen grades in Canada at the time I was going to school).
My first paying job was manually setting pins in a bowling alley on weekends at age twelve. I also spent seven years sorting mail manually on the night shift. For three of those years I was a union shop steward. I've tended bar, been a windsurfing instructor, sold clothes, cars, stereo systems, real estate and computers (not in that order). I've owned two businesses of my own and managed businesses for others. I've also built a couple of beach erosion control projects here in the Dominican Republic.
Like virtually every young man who came of age in Canada during the Hippy Era, what few political views I held were originally Liberal. My evolution from Liberal to Laissez-Faire Capitalist began during my years working in the Canadian Post Office, whose union is about as Leftist as you can get; at the time I was a shop steward the majority of the national executive of the CUPW were -- I shit you not -- pawns of the Canadian Marxist-Leninist Party. Some of them were card-carrying members of the party.
By the time I hit my early twenties I was a confirmed Laissez-Faire Capitalist, and I have seen nothing in the last three decades to dissuade me that Laissez-Faire Capitalism is the only politico-economic system worth supporting.
The main reason I left Canada (and a six figure income, of which more than half was seized by the Canadian government before it ever reached my bank account, then another fifteen per cent was charged in sales tax on almost everything else I bought other than most categories of food and prescription medications) eighteen years ago was to escape the stifling hand of government. Where I live now the government does nothing for me (and I mean that almost literally -- I have no health care, no old age pension, no unemployment insurance, and if I want the services of a policeman I have to bribe him to do his job) but on the other hand they ask nothing of me (I have paid zero income tax in the eighteen years I've lived here). And that's the way I like it. I couldn't ask for more.
I started posting here over five years ago because I'd heard that LSD and psilocybin were effective treatments for Horton's Syndrome (otherwise known as Cluster Headaches or Suicide Headaches) -- a neurological syndrome from which I had suffered since the mid-Eighties -- and I needed to brush up on my shroom growing techniques. Thanks to the superb FAQs at this site, I needed very little time to get up to speed on modern techniques (I had first grown shrooms in the Seventies by following Oess and Oeric's book) and was able to verify for myself that psilocybin did indeed keep my symptoms under control. See my posts in the Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms Forum for details on the upcoming clinical study at Harvard regarding the treatment of Cluster Headaches with psychedelics. http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/2410501#Post2410501
Once I had learned all I needed to know about growing my own medicine, I looked around the other forums. The Political forum was a new addition at that time. I posted a few times and got hooked.
End of story.
Phred
--------------------
|