Thursday, May 15, 2008 

Scum-watch: Chasing Amy.

Surprise, surprise, Amy Winehouse is not to be charged over a video which the Scum "obtained" (i.e. purchased from one of Winehouse's "friends" for a no doubt colossal amount of money, much like the video of Kate Moss snorting what might have been cocaine was purchased from one of Pete Doherty's friends), meant to show her smoking crack cocaine. This is of course for the obvious reason that the police cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt in a court that what Winehouse was smoking was crack; the only way in which she could have been charged over the video was if she made the mistake of admitting to the police that yes, she had been inhaling that wonderful rock and getting completely off her tits. Doubtless when interviewed about it she maintained her right to remain silent, as even the most junior law student would have told her to.

According to the Sun, who after all, paid a lot of Rupert Murdoch's money for this footage, it's a front-page worthy outrage. As the learned Mr Power says, the issue with drugs is that it is not illegal to consume them in the privacy of your own boudoir or bedsit, but it is illegal to have them in your possession. La Winehouse, unlike her luminary Mr Doherty, tends not to make the mistake of continuously being caught with them, although she was fined after cannabis was found in her possession whilst in Norway. If Winehouse had been spotted smoking crack on CCTV, then it might be a different matter. My brother whilst on holiday in Whitley Bay made the mistake of going for a late night walk along the promenade while indulging in the wicked weed, only for the police to suddenly come blaring up, alerted by an eagle-eyed CCTV supervisor.

When it comes to weak, absurd and downright draconian arguments, the Sun's leader on why Winehouse should be brought before a court and presumably sent down for a long time takes the biscuit:

THERE cannot be one person who does not believe Amy Winehouse was smoking crack in a video obtained by The Sun.

That's not the issue here. The police have to be able to have a strong enough case for the Crown Prosecution Service to agree that taking the matter to court will both result in the high possibility of a conviction and that it is in the interest of both the public and the public purse. From just a video, especially one as badly lit and difficult to make out as the Sun's, that simply isn't possible.


Yet police will not prosecute her.

They think they could not secure a conviction on video evidence alone.

Which they certainly couldn't. The judge would throw the case out.

The Sun is deeply concerned.

When stars revel in the degradation of drug abuse, there SHOULD be a way to prosecute them.

Amy’s video is encouragement to break the law.


What utter twaddle. If a young, successful woman looking an utter state, in such apparent desperation that she has to take one of the most addictive but also destructive substances known to man is revelling in degradation or an encouragement to break the law, then the eye of the beholder who thinks in such a way is probably themselves already way beyond help. Fact is, no one would have known about Winehouse's taking of crack if the Sun hadn't bought the video off of one of her so-called mates; she's not encouraging people to break the law or revelling in the degradation of drug abuse to the public, but the newspaper that then brings such things to light when there is no public interest in such matters certainly is. All tabloid newspapers have very funny ideas of what privacy is, but none more so apparently than the Sun.

If you’re caught on CCTV using threatening behaviour, you are charged.

It should be the same for taking drugs on video.


The difference is that CCTV can be used to prove that you were being threatening: it cannot be used to prove that you're taking a controlled substance unless they get you completely bang to rights with you talking about what you're doing while injecting yourself or likewise. Even if you're filmed smoking what looks like a spliff you can argue that it's in fact a long roll-up as long as they don't actually catch you before you've finished it, and you can also argue that white substance you were snorting was not actually cocaine but flour, sugar or something else that looks suspiciously like cocaine when filmed in low quality. This ought to be common sense: otherwise we'd have busybody morons reporting every video featured on YouTube that might show someone taking drugs to the police, or even groups like Mediawatch reporting programmes to the police that show actors supposedly taking drugs. That's the kind of territory we're getting into.

We have laws against glorification of terrorism. So why not against the glorification of drug-taking?

Taking crack in private while talking to someone is now considered to be the "glorification of drug-taking". While we're at it why don't we also make glorification of hitting your husband while drunk illegal, or glorification of anything that breaks the law illegal? What the Sun is asking for is a law to be drawn up which means the press can legally justify their invasions of others' privacy.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith admitted yesterday that she herself SHOULD have been charged for smoking cannabis at university.

Which just proves what a vindictive petty little woman she is. Let's ruin the lives of everyone who dares to enjoy a drug which according to numerous studies is both less dangerous and harmful than either tobacco or alcohol. Incidentally, as we all know, journalists have never personally indulged in drug taking of any kind, and certainly don't snort for Great Britain at the weekend along with a distinct minority of the chattering classes of London. No sirree, they're most certainly not the most loathsome of hypocrites.

The law needs to be upheld in spirit as well as letter.

The Home Secretary accepts that. So let her create a law to save lives.


We're back to the same ignorant and patronising argument used for prohibition in general. The government is putting cannabis back in Class B to protect young people's health, not to placate right-wing ideologues in the so-called popular press who've been running hysterically distorted campaigns demanding just that. This isn't going to save any lives, it's instead crude gesture politics of the worst and most pitiful kind to cover up for the Sun's embarrassment in not getting their own way all the time.

Maybe Amy’s, too.

Oh yes, we have to remember, the Sun is doing all this for Amy's sake you see. It's not because it sells newspapers and brings major attention to the paper in general when it grabs such exclusives, it's because they deeply deeply care about Amy and don't want to see her talent being snatched away through the cycle of drug abuse.

The reality is that the last thing the newspaper wants to happen is for not just Amy, but for any celebrity in general to get off the wagon. After all, that means they don't have anything to write about or splash on their showbiz pages. Celebrity in going home and getting an early night outrage doesn't tend to make the headlines. In any case, just how much the newspaper cares about Winehouse was displayed when it and others crudely invaded and also probably set-up the circumstances in which she was previously photographed in tears in the street during the middle of the night wearing only a bra on her top half. That then was because they cared, not because it made such sensational copy and allowed them to ghoulishly and voyeuristically speculate on what she might have been going through while they profited from her discomfort. This is the legal kind of stalking, and it has no justification whatsoever. The war on drugs will not be won through such idiotic posturing, but through realising that prohibition and indignation go hand in hand in keeping the problem just the way it's been for the last 40 years.

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Monday, March 10, 2008 

Celebrities ate my homework.

Post 9/11, numerous firms not necessarily connected to either the tourism or airline industry thought it was a brilliant ruse to blame a fall in profits or some failure on the terrorist attacks. As time moved on, the new excuse became the Iraq war. Or Hurricane Katrina. Or the Boxing Day tsunami. Private Eye noted the huge rise in them through its "Warballs" column. Any disastrous event, large or small, can be used by the clever managing director or his PR overlords as a reason for why something hasn't happened as it should have.

Last week saw an increasing rise in a new form of the blame game. According to the latest UN report on drugs, use of cocaine amongst celebrities is encouraging more people to use drugs, and the failure of the courts to crack down hard enough on those caught was exacerbating the problem. The chairman of JD Wetherspoons, rather than pin-pointing the cut price antics which his soulless post-modern hellpits use to ram them in, instead attacked "inebriated celebrities" whose antics are then copied by the general public for the government and opposition's reactions to the binge-drinking moral panic. Then yesterday John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College leaders, in a speech mainly blaming parents for being useless, complained about how celebrities are making kids think that success comes easily or at the end of a lottery ticket. Buoyed by this, Gordon Brown joined in the act, urging "celebs" to think twice before doing drugs lest any children think it was a brilliant idea to copy them.

I've hardly been one in the past to go easy on or defend celebrities, but if there's one thing they can't be blamed for, it's for individuals with their own free will deciding to consume wanker fuel or binge-drink, let alone use crack cocaine or heroin. The first and most laughable attack line, that somehow people see Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty and think, wow, they look great and like they're having fun, I better get me some of what they're on is ludicrous even at the most casual look. That Winehouse and Doherty would win awards for the most unglamorous drug users if there were such a ceremony ought to be enough to dispel the notion but it doesn't seem to (photographs of Winehouse prior to drugs and tattoos are painful when compared with her current image). That both have sought help because of their drug problems also might suggest that it isn't all fun and games, but that too seems to be dismissed simply because of their stardom. Equally stupid are those that after Winehouse's wins at the Grammy awards said she should have them withheld because of her drug use; presumably musician after musician who down the decades has consumed drugs and quite possibly because of their use produced some of the albums and records that we treasure the most should also lose their recognition because of it. That'll be the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd...(continues)

The UN argument, that somehow the courts aren't tough enough on celebrities who are caught using drugs is similarly weak. Yes, on the face of it Pete Doherty does seem to have had an awful lot of court appearances and never had what would be a "tough" sentence handed down to him, but he also seems to have been specifically targeted by the police on occasion simply because of who he was and his reputation. I don't exactly keep up with celebrities and their amazing addictions, but I think the news is that he's actually somewhat progressing with his getting clean, something that might well not have happened had it not been for the continued persistence of a number of judges in not handing down custodial sentences, although he has been held in custody on a number of occasions. The other problem is obvious; those celebrities, like Kate Moss, that have been exposed are not actually usually technically breaking the law: they have to have the substance on them to be charged, hence why Moss has never faced a court after the Mirror's expose, nor did Craig Charles after a similar outing. Again, the UN alleges that celebrities are treated less harshly than normal members of the public are, something for which there seems to be very little to no evidence for. If you wanted to go for an equally facile argument, you could point out how politicians, many of whom have admitted that they used drugs (usually cannabis) in the past, and who have also never faced charges. In actuality, the point would be far more valid against prohibitionist politicians now urging kids not to touch the stuff that they themselves did, or indeed those making proclamations on drugs or alcohol when they themselves refuse to discuss their own rumoured usage on the grounds of privacy.

All of this though is still missing the most obvious point: that without the sanctimonious media that feels fit to follow a "celebrity's" every movement, and indeed has the power to both make that individual's image in the first place and then later to destroy it if it so desires, the public at large that are apparently so influenced by celebrity behaviour would never know about it in the first place. There are a number of photographs that paps aim for that they get them the real big money: the upskirt shot; the "wardrobe malfunction" shot; the bikini/beach shot; and finally, the "up the nose" shot, that illustrates that a certain celeb has most definitely been consuming the white powder because they've got some sort of substance in their nostril that might just be cocaine residue. Newspapers of course love to have it both ways: they denounce the behaviour of celebrities in comment pieces and leader columns while their sales and showbiz pages depend on capturing that very behaviour which would otherwise go unnoticed. That those who produce them have often been caught in the past in the most flagrant breaches of what they preach against (hacks hoovering up cocaine, splashing the expenses on booze and being spanked by prostitutes, anyone?) never either seems to stick in the public conciousness or is forgotten in the latest moralising over the newest low to be reached. They even make celebrities battling addictions or mental illnesses into daily entertainment and real life soap operas, yet wonder why some might then themselves seek publicity for their own problems. That their very coverage might be making these problems worse, with hacks and paps rushing after them daily making their lives even more uncomfortable is also hardly ever considered except in the "qualities".

The reality is that of the very few who might be influenced by celebrity behaviour, the vast majority would most likely already have had a predilection towards that sort of thing in the first place. Perhaps the biggest irony here is that the UN is by far the most unrealistic towards drugs, with its ludicrous, foolish and downright unattainable policy of the complete eradication of drug abuse. Back in 2003 Polly Toynbee (bear with me) wrote that the UN was optimistic and openly claiming that their programme was on its way to reaching its goals of ridding the world of the cultivation of coca, cannabis and opium by, err, 2008. People do drugs and binge-drink for one reason to begin with and perhaps other reasons only later: because they enjoy doing so. Until this universal truth is recognised and policies are perhaps shaped around this mysteriously opaque fact, we'll continue getting fatuous obscurantists like Tim Martin blaming everyone other than themselves and the UN clutching at straws which they themselves could help to snap.

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008 

How to lose the war on drugs.

On one level, you have to admire the ambition of New Labour. Not even communist China or Stalinist Russia attempted 10-year-plans; they were rank amateurs compared to the bureaucrats and civil servants behind the scenes given the horrendous task of drawing up 10-year-plans on such various areas of government as transport, children or today's latest on drugs.

Perhaps even Trotsky, the proponent of permanent revolution, would have balked at the prospect of a never-ending war, especially one on such a widely defined and ill-drawn category of substances as drugs. New Labour though, partly down to its now close to 11 years in power, has discovered the optimum way to ensure that you can continue with such a preposterous, ignorant and populist set of policies. Despite Blair's leaving of the scene, Brown and his press team have stolen his clothes superbly well. Blair learned that the best way to brief the press on what your latest policy wheeze is is to release the most draconian, ill-thought out and unworkable part of the plan, which will naturally appeal to the headbangers and suitably piss off the remaining soft rump of the Labour left, and then more quietly let the actual document itself, not usually as controversial and therefore not newsworthy, out a couple days of later.

Hence we've had the morning newspapers screaming at us of how those on benefits who refuse to attend treatment for their drug problems will have their state handouts taken away. This is nonsensical on a couple of levels: firstly, the average weekly payout to the individual on benefits will nowhere near cover the drug habit they likely have if they're addicted, meaning the government's claim that the taxpayer is "sustaining their drug habit" is ridiculous; secondly, it will only make it more likely that those that have no intention of giving up their habit (albeit these are a small minority) will simply lie to those in charge of the programme about their progress. The government's drug treatment and testing orders failed in a similar way exactly because of the level of compulsion involved in them, as well as how they were themselves built on a foundation of falsehood. You have to want to give up your habit; compulsion simply doesn't work, regardless of the political difficulties this entails. The other get tough measure, that suspected drug dealers will have their "bling" confiscated not when they're found guilty but when they're first arrested is just yet another astonishing step in the march towards the end of the presumption of being innocent until found guilty, bound to lead to a myriad of injustices. Jacqui Smith, who by the day seems to be doing her best to rival her three predecessors in sheer knuckle-headedness and illiberality, says that this is all right because if they're found "completely innocent" their property will be given back. What about if they're found innocent of dealing but do have some drugs for personal use then Jacqui? Will they still have their expensive consumer goods stolen by the police?

Much like the war on terror, the war on drugs is a misnomer built on a multitude of assumptions, prejudices and simple refusal to see something approaching sense. Just like you can't defeat al-Qaida and the takfirist jihadists through force alone, with all the signs being that it in fact only makes indoctrination and radicalisation more widespread and even harder to uproot, you also can't defeat drugs through prohibition. Indeed, one of the marvels of this latest 10-year-plan is that we've heard so very little of whether the previous one was a success or not. This might possibly be because rather than reducing the availability of illicit drugs at street level, one of the government's key objectives last time round, all the evidence suggests that the prevalence of Class A drug use has actually increased, especially among under 25s (PDF from Transform which contains much of the source material of this post and is also available on their excellent blog). Reported use of cocaine among 16 to 24-year-olds has gone from 3.1% in 1997 to 6.0% in 2006/07, while use of crack has gone up by 0.1% over the same period to 0.4%. Heroin use rose up until 2001, and has since stabilised, at the highest level across Europe, while Class A drug use by "vulnerable" young people increased by over 3.4% in the space of just one year.

The other suitably stupid way in which the government aims to control drug use is by supply side intervention, i.e. seizing drugs and shutting down the gangs that distribute them, and therefore raising the price as well making them less readily available, which is meant to make them less likely to be used. Quite apart from the fact that if drugs became scarcer and more expensive it would mean that users who fund their addiction through crime would became more desperate and have to commit more offences/robberies/burglaries/thefts in order to pay from them, the price of heroin and cocaine has actually almost halved over the last ten years, as the government itself admitted in an answer to a parliamentary question last week. If you wanted to really drive the skewer in, you could quite reasonably argue that the comprehensive failure in Afghanistan to either eradicate the poppy crop, persuade farmers to grow other crops or to buy it and use it for much needed painkillers is also attributable to government policy in the Middle East, considering the Taliban almost completely eradicated the crop to 2000. It now depends on it to fund the battle against coalition forces and the Afghan government.

The government's entire sheet of claims of success is questionable. It claims that "drug-related acquisitive crime" has fell by 20% over the last five years but the government doesn't even have any statistics on drug-related crime rather than acquisitive crime, as the minister Vernon Coaker admitted that crimes such as robberies are only recorded as robberies, not as a result of drugs or influenced by them! New Labour does have major form in this area.

As mentioned, the report isn't all bad. One of the few bright spots is that it recommends a rolling out of a programme of prescribing injectable heroin or methadone to addicts that don't respond to other forms of treatment. It's well established that methadone is in fact far more dangerous and insidious than heroin itself, which addicts tend to dislike and/or end up getting just as addicted to as they do heroin. "Pure" heroin in its prescribed form is relatively safe; it's the black market that cuts it with other substances that increases the dangers of using it. Providing safe injecting centres and prescribing heroin, with clean needles, battling the plague of Hepatitis C/HIV that goes hand-in-hand with sharing dirty and used needles is one way of massively reducing the cost to the NHS, not to mention that of the crime involved in funding a habit. The support for families, and an expansion in drug treatment programmes are also welcome, but whether the funding will actually be there, or whether effective drug treatment is possible in a prison setting, especially in such currently overcrowded jails is questionable.

The policies that would genuinely go some way towards tackling drugs are the exact ones that governments dismiss and the tabloid press are horrified by. Increasingly, chief constables and others within the police realise that they cannot possibly win the battle against drugs in the way it's currently being fought; it's almost a complete waste of time, raiding and destroying one supply chain only for another to immediately pop up in its place. When a few brave officers stick their head above the parapet and suggest that Class A drugs such as Ecstasy are relatively safe, the brickbats thrown at them are not just directed against the individual that made the comment, but also at any government that considers adopting a more measured approach. The biggest first step Labour could make towards ending the failure of prohibition would be to abandon the class system all together and instead institute something like the scale of harm posed by drugs such as that recently published in the Lancet. From there appropriate regulation of the substances could be defined and organised. Removing or destroying as much of the black market itself, not the supply, as possible is the key; without first adopting an evidence-based approach, we'll simply be stuck in the current mess for ever more.

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Monday, September 17, 2007 

Reefer sanity.


The unpublished results of authoritative research into cannabis confirm the "skunk" now on sale in England is stronger than it was a decade ago, but demolish claims that a new "super-strength skunk" - which is 20 times more powerful - is dominating the market.

Two studies due to be published later this year, which together analysed nearly 550 samples of skunk seized by the police, both conclude that the average content of the main psychoactive agent in skunk strains of cannabis, THC, has doubled from 7% in 1995 to 14% in 2005.

But the findings of the two studies to be reported in Druglink, the drugs charity magazine, contradict recent claims that most of the skunk on sale in Britain now routinely has a THC-content of more than 30%. One of the studies showed that only 4% of the skunk that had been seized by the police had a strength level higher than 20%.


Usually moral panics are started by the tabloids and then enter the public consciousness, forcing the other media to cover them. While the Daily Mail has had a significant role in the recent resurgence in nonsense being written about cannabis or "skunk", it was given additional credibility by the Independent on Sunday, which reversed its campaign for cannabis to legalised, with the former editor Rosie Boycott informing us that skunk is "30 times stronger", although she does still believe all drugs should be legalised. The main article, as Transform wrote, was all over the place with its facts, or rather lack thereof.

It's hardly likely though that the Grauniad article is going to change minds that have already been made up with all the fearmongering. Today this article was in the Mirror:

Cannabis is fuelling a youth crime wave - with 90 per cent of teen offenders using it.

Yes, because cannabis is almost certainly the cause and not coincidental.

A survey of England's Youth Offending Teams, which deal with lawless teenagers, adds that cannabis use had gone up by 75 per cent since it was downgraded to class C in 2004.

Possibly, although the other figures suggest that use of cannabis among the general populace has actually fell since 2004.

And a separate study by King's College, London, reveals 25 per cent of users have turned to crime to fund their habit.

Sounds laughable, considering how cheap cannabis is. Strange also that the Grauniad didn't mention that figure.

Having said that, cannabis is not harmless, and pretending that it isn't only damages the case of those who would like to see it go further towards the legalisation route. Those under 18 shouldn't be using it because of the increased potential damage to both their mental and physical health, as with numerous other drugs. The evidence simply isn't there however for the drug to even be considered for reclassification at Class B: do the Youth Offending Teams want the children they're dealing with to have further convictions for possession of drugs, increasing further the potential strain on the system? There's enough complaints from the police already about their time being wasted with excess bureaucracy and paperwork; do they want to be back with having to bring to book every person they stop who happens to be carrying a tiny amount of cannabis for personal use? The recent Lancet study which attempted to develop a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs placed cannabis as the 11th most dangerous drug out of the 20 they examined, with alcohol fifth and tobacco ninth.

Is it really so much to ask for a coherent, evidence-based policy? Oh, yeah, this is Britain.

P.S.
Stumbling and Mumbling sums up the ideology of panic over Northern Rock, while the Times reports on another interpreter murdered in Basra. The we can't turn them away campaign gets ever more vital.

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Monday, February 12, 2007 

Insert joke about Cameron and weed.

Has there ever been a bigger non-story blown out of all proportion than the simply astounding revelation that "call me Dave" smoked some of the green when he was a teenager? It was already obvious that he had experimented with drugs, possibly cocaine, and as recently ago as the 90s, and that had all been forgotten about once the Tory leadership election was over, so for this to emerge now just shows the desperateness of the Indie on Sunday in spending some of their cash on a serialisation of James Hanning and Francis Elliott's no doubt scintillating Cameron: the Rise of the New Conservative.

It would have been far more illuminating if Cameron had in fact not taken drugs. You'd have to be either a saint or a loner to get through Eton, Oxford and then years as a PR wonk for Carlton Communications without dabbling in one or more illegal substances. Some would probably think that you'd have to be taking mind-altering chemicals in order to actually get through any of them without having the kind of nervous breakdown that results in you ending up gibbering in the gutter with a shopping trolley as your shelter against the rain. Just imagine having to live with the likes of Wills 'n' Harry and their mates for 5 years, the only comfort being the daisy-chaining where you can at least pretend that it's not some rugby-loving hairy-palmed silver-spoon fed bourgeois neanderthal pulling you off, and instead just dream that it's in actual fact that gorgeous pouting Samantha, the slightly dangerous one who gets squiffy and isn't afraid to get her skin inked.

Why Cameron felt the need to comment but not to actually admit to what he did when no one is going to condemn him for inhaling in his youth is only probably going to increase the speculation. If he came out and admitted that yes, he had taken drugs, and said, amazingly, it tends to be what young people to do and that maybe we shouldn't be so eager to jump up and down on their exuberance, then he'd probably earn a lot more respect from those who couldn't give two figs about politics, the same ones he's so desperate to appeal to. If he has indeed snorted cocaine, or, heaven forbid, even taken ecstasy, then why not come out and say so? Obviously it's not going to be as easy to shake-off and play down as smoking a spliff at school, but for God's sake we need politicians who are human and do have experience other than spending their whole lives not having to worry about anything at all (just like, err, David Cameron). It's only going to be likely to come back and bite him if he has indeed done what many suspect, and it might do so just before elections when it could hurt him.

The whole issue of drugs and the Conservatives is fraught with hypocrisy. The Daily Mail, the paper so vehemently opposed to even cannabis being downgraded, is ironically the paper most likely to be read by the parents of the kids who are out at the weekend hoovering up cocaine as fast as Colombia can produce it. The journalists themselves are hardly likely to be sober and as opposed to casual drug use as their pieces and representative leaders are; one only has to remember the accusations of Lord Ashcroft about the cocaine use of hacks on the Times. It's these reactionaries who are responsible for so many potential reforms being abandoned as soon as they are mentioned; cannabis is always a "gateway" drug, schizophrenia awaits anyone who inhales, and let's not even dare suggest that giving heroin to addicts may bring down crime. How could that even be considered when law-abiding taxpayers can't even get Herceptin and other miracle cures for their ailments on the NHS?

Cameron could potentially lead a less condemnatory drugs policy, putting once and for all the lunacy of Anne Widdecombe's zero tolerance approach behind them. He has suggested that ecstasy ought to be downgraded: anathema to the Daily Mail, but common sense to anyone who has seen both the popularity and the price of the drug plummet in recent years. The hysteria of the 90s, based on a lack of understanding about both the culture surrounding it and the drug itself, could be firmly put behind us. Any chance of this for the moment is gone, with Cameron pathetically forced to suggest that he has wrong to so much as take a puff. Once we get beyond the point-scoring and stupidity, we might finally embrace the reality that prohibition and prosecution of minor users of recreational drugs is both a waste of time and more damaging to the person in the long run than the substances and chemicals themselves are.

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2/12/2007 07:02:00 PM | | | links to this post

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