Carmen Marie Moulton from Penrith died in April just after the government imposed a ban on mephedrone, due to media scare stories with no scientific basis. These stories, as we all now know, revolved around picking up on the death of virtually any young person around the country and pinning the blame on mephedrone. Many of these false stories have now been exposed as bollocks, but long after the fact.
Papers said police were probing whether Carmen had taken the “deadly party drug”, but yet again toxicology reports have pronounced her’s a non-mephedrone related death. While there’s little news as of yet as to what did cause her tragic death, expect to see more and more of these so-called M-Cat casualties turning out to actually have died of other drugs or natural causes.
As the Daily Mail picks up another story of mephedrone madness – this time the death of a daughter of a premiership footballer. Her tragic death is being used opportunistically by the tabloids to support their unscientific banning of mephedrone. In reality Sibylle Siberski tragically committed suicide, and the drugs she took are being used as a stick to attack them with. The fact that she killed herself after breaking up with a five month long relationship with her boyfriend is ignored – as is the fact she was taking another harmful drug, which acts as a depressant – champagne.
This dangerous champagne drug is associated with some of the worst criminals in the world – Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, George Bush, Tony Blair, Maggie Thatcher and Tim Westwood are all known to have taken champagne at various times in their life. The effects of this drug have been disastrous – many former Eton pupils are known to have taken champagne regularly throughout their schooldays and then moved on to erratic and destructive behaviour resulting in millions of British people being made unemployed, in the coal and steel industries.
Alan Duncan gets high before launcing a vicious attack on the poor.
Champagne also inspired hostile, aggressive and unreasonable behaviour towards the people of Scotland, as many regular champagne users in the Tory cabinet continually denied the right for Scotland to have it’s own Parliament. This violent behaviour reached it’s worst when the Tories champagne induced madness led them to inflict the poll tax in Scotland. Regular champagne junkie Maggie Thatcher was so poisoned by the drug that she had to be dragged kicking and screaming from power by her own party members, desperate to put the clean living moderate John Major in her place.
SSY thinks if the tabloids are going to blame mephedrone baselessly for the tragic suicide of a young girl then we should take action against champagne, whose drug fuelled madness has allowed Tories to cause massive harm to some of the poorest communities in the UK.
“OH GOD OH GOD STOP I CAN SEE SATAN HE’S LOOKING RIGHT AT ME!” -- this is not a common response to listening to most music, with the exception of Green Day or Daniel O’Donnell. However the world’s finest newspaper has found another TERRIFYING threat to your children -- noiseodrugs. Just when you thought your weans were safe from mephedrone -- or “meow meow” as no-one under 40 calls it -- sick bastards have concocted a new method to terrify your kids, and this time all they need is a pair of headphones and (surprise surprise) the internet to overdose.
The “drug” is called idoser and works by playing a series of binaural beats which affect certain parts of the brain to simulate being high. Some users claim to experience a high similar to being on cannabis or ecstasy, depending on what they listen to. Other tunes -- called “Idoses” -- are designed to be more extreme, almost like a bad trip and are called scary names like “Gates of Hades”. One user allegedly clawed his own eyes out with his fingers so he could jam a pencil into his brains whilst listening to “Gates of Hades” -- it later was revealed he was in fact listening to S-Club 7 “Ain’t no party like an S-Club Party”, which is still legal and unregulated.
It remains to be seen if the Government will try and ban idoses. Right now it seems very unlikely -- no one has died or been seriously harmed from idoses, and the nature of the internet makes it almost impossible to ban someone from listening to a piece of music. There’s also understandable disbelief about someone being able to get high off of listening to something (though amazingly binaural beats can affect brain waves).
Listening to this man is 23% more dangerous than crack.
I wouldn’t underestimate the power of media hysteria combined with Government opportunism though -- the fact people won’t understand how you can get high off of sounds may disturb and scare them more than getting high off of something you can understand like pills or grass. And under the ridiculous and draconian Criminal Justice Act “repetitive beats” which may be associated with drug use are technically illegal -- someone tell the Orange Order ASAP. Thankfully the tuneful symphony of most Irish rebel songs keeps them clearly on the side of British law.
With mephedrone banned after a wave of hysteria and media exaggeration in the face of scientific evidence, it’s not impossible idoses could be banned if newspapers decide to run with it. All it would take is a couple of savvy editors picking up stories of folk dying within a couple of hours/same evening as listening to an idose to start a frenzy, regardless of how they actually died - the same way they did with mephedrone. The reality is stuff like idoses -- like all things humans do to get high -- has been around for hundreds of years, it’s just been called something different. Instead of listening through headphones to get high tribes used to listen to repetitive drumming beats. Fortunately it took British imperialism a few hundred years before they banned that kind of thing in the Criminal Justice Act.
SSY has already risked life and limb to bring you a few examples of terrifying idoses which we have outlined below. Listen at your own peril,
Behavioural psychology tells us that in the morning you’ll be 17.8% safer after listening to this Idose
Call the polis, I can hear repetitive beats
OH GOD IT’S CALLED GATES OF HADES BAN THIS SICK FILTH NOW
When two babies were bitten in their house by a fox the other day, I wondered why the media were going so absolutely baws oot crazy about it, and made a quiet wee joke to myself that foxes were going to be the Daily Mail’s new target. Lo and behold, the campaign begins! It’s taken me about three attempts to actually start writing this post, because I’m a pretty sensible person and I can’t stop pissing myself at the Daily Fail article in question; it’s genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t help wishing that I’d written it as a satire piece for Letfield.
For those that can’t be bothered clicking the link, the article is a kind of hideous mash up of Countryside Alliance rhetoric and the Daily Mail’s own special brand of moral crusading; it would seem that, for them, foxes are the new terrorists. According to the ‘journalist’ who wrote this, Rory Knight Bruce, there’s a concerted PR campaign to give foxes a false cuddly image, which unites animal rights activists and Roald Dahl in a fiendish conspiracy to make children think foxes are their friends. Presumably the foxes made a generous contribution to Dahl’s estate so that it would be easy for them to find vulnerable children whose faces they can rip off.
A few years back, I was walking home and I saw a red fox just outside my house. I stopped downwind of it and crouched down to watch it a wee while, because I’ve always been an obsessive fan of animals. There was another girl coming from the opposite direction, and she had a pretty different reaction. She saw the fox, froze, and then ran screaming away from it. I laughed at the time, but apparently the mail considers that a measured reaction to these clearly evil and vicious little bastards.
They interview a completely unbiased trapper who makes his living shooting foxes, and surprisingly enough he says anyone who views them as essentially benign is “living in cloud cuckoo land” and then goes on to list a number of domestic animals that have supposedly been lost to fox attacks. Did anyone really need this wanker to give them the news that foxes like to eat small furry animals that have probably been left outside? He also totally overstates the incidence of foxes attacking dogs and cats. Foxes tend to be not much bigger than your average cat, and much smaller than the dogs most people have. Also, a lot of small dogs such as terriers have been bred for killing ‘vermin’ and would easily beat a fox in a fight. It would seem though that it’s the eating of a koi carp that cost £1500 that really offends Trapper Wank. Those damn foxes have no respect for private property! What are they, animals?! No doubt they raised the money to bribe Roald Dahl and the pro-fox sophists by selling the expensive koi meat down Brick Lane.
The mail then goes on to give us the shocking news that foxes mark their territory by pissing and shitting! You know, unlike nearly every other animal to walk the planet. What dirty wee bastards! See if you’re THAT bothered about foxes coming in your garden for a shit and your chickens are actually being taken by them, then there are a couple of things you can do. You need to get a handy male friend and ask him to piss all over your garden instead. Oh, and dig your fucking coop fence in, you stupid noob.
A fox lets out a groan of satisfaction after taking a huge dump on the Daily Mail editor's head.
Of course, it’s not just that fox shit is clearly disgusting, oh no, we have to remember that these dangerous animals can give us diseases as well! The Daily Mail informs us that fox shit can carry Toxascaris, a variety of parasitic roundworm. We’re also given the scary statistic that there are around one hundred new cases of Toxascaris a year in humans! If you know anything about statistics, medicine or not being a chump, then you should be pissing yourself right now, because one hundred cases a year is nothing. It’s the same as the number of cases of the very rare Q Fever, an infection that usually turns up in people who work closely with animals. Of course, the mail doesn’t tell you that, and they also don’t tell you that domestic dogs and cats also carry Toxascaris.
Hillariously, the mail also mentions a few foxes who, in the course of their natural chewing behaviour, developed a taste for brake fluid and started biting through the cables on cars, and it’s almost like the writer thinks there was some kind of malicious intent behind it. However, this shouldn’t really surprise us given that he spends a couple of paragraphs whining about how nasty foxes have been to him and his family. One vixen, who he tried to rescue from a collapsed earth, had the temerity to bite him! Why, who could imagine a frightened and cornered wild animal biting a person who touched them? Any animal worker will tell you that being bitten is part of the job when you get close to wildlife.
He also tells us that he believes two of his family terriers were killed by foxes. One through mange (because dogs never, ever get mange without the help of a fox) and one due to a “characteristically vicious assault”, which suggests to me that he didn’t actually see the fox killing his dog. Quite apart from that, if his dog was killed by a fox, it’s very likely that the terrier (as I’ve already said, they have hunting and killing in their genes) started the fight.
And then there’s the big issue. Rory cites two instances of foxes attacking children to boost his campaign against their brushy reign of terror. What he doesn’t tell you is that these two cases are pretty much the only two in a fucking age. The BBC felt the need to do a measured evaluation of how often foxes attack people, and I can save you the bother of going to look it up. The answer is (drumroll) almost never, you foaming at the mouth mail reading chumps.
From all this easily debunked nonsense, Rory reaches “the inescapable conclusion that the urban fox is a pest that needs to be controlled.” Well I’ll tell you what, following his logic (disease, bite rates etc.) then clearly we need to shoot all the domestic dogs and cats in the UK, and probably all the small furry pets too, because they bite people a hell of a lot more than foxes do. SSY demands that we start to eliminate this dangerous menace NOW, and we further posit that any objections to this plan are just lily livered liberal nonsense that does not recognise the fact that humans are clearly superior to other animals, and have a right to destroy any part of the natural world that inconveniences them in any way.
On the left Louis Wainwright and on the right Nicolas Smith
The case for the mephedrone ban rushed in by the last government was again undermined today, after it was revealed two teenagers from Scunthorpe did NOT die as a result of the drug.
Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19, died in March. At the time Humberside Police helped contribute to the climate of drugs panic by holding a press conference that claimed that they had information that “the deaths were linked to M-Cat” and that anyone that had taken the drug should “attend a hospital as a matter of urgency.”
This was then taken up by tabloids like The Sun as part of a hysterical campaign which successfully got mephedrone banned. As we argued at the time, this was based on straight up misinformation, which claimed that the drug had been responsible for scores of deaths.
In fact, Professor Roumen Sedefov, a leading scientist who monitors new drugs for the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), said this week he was aware of only one fatality in the world – that of a woman in Sweden – where the drug had been definitively identified as the cause of death.
In the case of the two guys from Scunthorpe, toxicology reports have revealed there were no traces of Mephedrone in their blood. Tests are ongoing to see if there were any other drugs present.
Professor David Nutt, the scientific adviser that Labour sacked for giving honest scientific opinions, has now called for an inquiry into the role of Humberside Police in stoking panic.
“The temperature was rising a bit, but the deaths got it boiling over,” he said. “You can argue if that hadn’t happened the previous government wouldn’t have been bounced into this response. If these reports are true, the government’s rush to ban mephedrone never had any serious scientific credibility – it looks much more like a decision based on a short-term electoral calculation.”
He added: “This news demonstrates why it’s so important to base drug classification on the evidence, not fear and why the police, media and politicians, should only make public pronouncements once the facts are clear.”
This news once again vindicates the stance taken by SSY as the only political group that stood by the scientific evidence and campaigned against the banning of Mephedrone. We didn’t do that because we think it’s a good thing or that people should take it, but because we’re against politics being hijacked by a bizarre media crusade that aimed at selling papers through fear and lies. After months of this thousands of young people who would never have heard of the drug otherwise are now interested in it – just in time for the government to put the trade exclusively in the hands of illegal drug dealers. Good job, corporate media/mainstream politicians.
Doctors, psychotherapists, pharmacologists and others came together to discuss the use of psychedelic, or mind enhancing/altering drugs, and their potential applications in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress, addiction to harmful drugs and severe depression.
In recent years a number of scientists have finally won the right from the US government to research the effects of psychedelics. This follows years of official prohibition of scientific research, following the drug scares of the 60s. The 60s counterculture that threatened the US establishment was in large part fueled by the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and so a massive moral panic helped to drive them underground, preventing scientists from looking at their potential applications in mental health.
Our society uses more drugs than almost any other in history, when we take into account daily stimulants used by millions like coffee, and all the prescription drugs necessary to cope with the unhealthy workload of capitalist society. So the question we have to ask ourselves is, why are some drugs ruled out of bounds by the state? Some illegal drugs, like crack or heroin, clearly have severe impacts on people’s health and lives, whatever you think of the current government policy. But there is no evidence of anyone having died of overdosing on psychedelics, and they have been used societies from every continent for thousands of years.
Drugs prohibition policy has always been driven by anything other than scientific facts about the impacts of different drugs. Drugs are made illegal, and users persecuted, often following media scares, known as moral panics, which are about creating scapegoats for society’s problems. They also serve the agenda of states very well, as they provide a perfect excuse to create huge regimes of high tech police monitoring the population, in theory to stamp out drugs, but in practice very useful for containing dissent. In the case of psychedelics, governments in the 60s were also very concerned about the fact that users who had mind altering experiences began to seriously question the fundamental basis of the racist, capitalist, imperialist societies they lived in. This led to heavy suppression of their use.
The result of this is that for decades scientists have been unable to properly investigate their potential therapeutic uses. But now that is beginning to change, as researchers who can demonstrate they are using rigorously scientific, and safe, procedures are being given limited approval to look once again at psychedelics. Some of their initial findings are fascinating.
Experiments have proved particularly fruitful in treating people with terminal illnesses or undergoing chemotherapy. Patients suffering from end-of-life anxiety are unable to enjoy their last months of life due to severe depression and gruelling impact of some cancer treatments. However, many now credit their participation in experimental trials of psyilocybin, a substance found in over 100 mushrooms around the world, with helping them overcome their depression, and transforming their relationships with family and friends.
As Dr Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist at UCLA puts it: “Under the influences of hallucinogens, individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”
Art from 2000 BC shows how long mushrooms have been used by different cultures
Or as one patient, Clark Martin, himself a retired clinical psychologist coping with kidney cancer, says: “It was a whole personality shift for me. I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”
Other studies have been looking again at the potential for MDMA, the chemical compound used for making ecstasy, to be used in treating post traumatic stress disorder. This has taken on particular relevance after the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have traumatised thousands of young people who turned to the military for a job in the US and UK.
One of the leading researchers in this field, Dr. Roland Griffiths, has argued his research could have profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and human history. He argues that the fact the experience of altered states is so widespread throughout history and across the world, as well as in his own experiments, points to the possibility that they are evolutionarily normal. That is, these experiences have been a normal part of human life for the whole of our history, and may have given us an evolutionary advantage. The controlled use of psychedelics by many societies may have promoted altruism, a lack of selfishness and commitment to supporting others. These are all things that would have helped groups of humans survive in the past, even if capitalist society does not find them to be useful traits, and represses drugs that promote them.
What all this underlines is that humans as a species have always used drugs, and always will. In the 20th century, as new technologies and more advanced societies enhanced the power of states to control their people, a new phase opened up in the relationship between people and drugs, in which governments and the mass media took on the arbitrary power to ban some drugs and promote others, persecuting some users and allowing the manufacturers of others to become fantastically wealthy global corporations. What we urgently need to do is to try and talk openly, honestly, and scientifically about our societies’ use of drugs, and examine which ones can be used beneficially, which do not cause real problems, and how collectively we can reduce harm. Indeed, much current research into psychedelics has focused on how they can be used to help break users’ dependence on much more harmful drugs like heroin.
But progress can only happen when governments accept that the irrational, unscientific “war on drugs” has been a failure. Sadly, in the UK there’s no sign of this happening, especially after the mephedrone scare, the first full on drugs moral panic of our generation. Less well known is that until 2005, whilst dried and prepared magic mushrooms were illegal, it was not against the law to harvest and distribute fresh ones. But then, the government classified them as a Class A substance, officially claiming they were as dangerous as crack or heroin. Good one, chumps.
Bonus: In a TED talk, Dr. Roland Griffiths discusses his work
“There was little time to consider carefully the scientific evidence on mephedrone. The ACMD did not have sufficient evidence to judge the harms caused by this drug class. It is too easy and potentially counterproductive to ban each new substance that comes along rather than seek to understand more about young people’s motivations and how we can influence them. We should try to support healthy behaviours rather than simply punish people who breach our society’s norms. Making the drug illegal will also deter crucial research on this drug and other drug-related behaviour, and it will be far more difficult for people with problems to get help.
The terms of engagement between ministers and expert advisers endorsed by [Home Secretary] Alan Johnson have been blown apart . . . [T]he events surrounding the ACMD signal a disappointing finale to the government’s relationship with science. Politics has been allowed to contaminate scientific processes and the advice that underpins policy. The outcome of an independent enquiry into the practices of the ACMD, commissioned by the Home Office in October, 2009, is now urgently awaited. Lessons from this debacle need to be learned by a new incoming government.”
As well as the editorial, the Lancet features a special report on the ban, which has info from Sweden, where the government has already banned mephedrone:
“David Gustavsson, now at University Hospital of Malmö, Sweden, questions whether experimentation with unstudied substances, especially by inexperienced young people, is because of the misconception that legality implies safety. Adam Winstock [from the National Addiction Centre, London,] also points to the large market of users who are dissatisfied with illicit stimulants and interested in substances with a desired profile of effects, availability, and perceived value for money. Users and community workers suggest that the unavailability or low purity of cocaine and MDMA—related to international control measures—“have contributed to the increase in mephedrone use”, the ACMD cites. Additionally, cathinone derivatives are so-called legal highs and widely available from internet websites, sold as bath salts or plant food, not for human consumption.
Sweden is among several countries that have now banned or controlled mephedrone. Gustavsson recalls that mephedrone use was more frequently reported at Maria Ungdom [hospital, where he worked] from mid-2008, including several users who had encountered “unusual” difficulty stopping mephedrone compared with other drugs. By autumn, 2008, “mephedrone was by far the most popular legal drug sold on the internet in Sweden”, he recalls. Mephedrone was classified as hazardous in Sweden in December, 2008, which restricted internet sale. Subsequently, anecdotal evidence suggests that mephedrone began to be sold person-to-person rather than on the internet, he says.
Stefan Sparring, senior consultant at Maria Ungdom, describes what happened after mephedrone was classified as hazardous: “the drug quickly moved to the illicit trade in the streets, and we still saw new cases every week. In the spring of 2009 it was classed as a narcotic and after that we thought we could see a trend of it disappearing.” However, Sparring still sees new cases related to mepehdrone use every week. “What we now also see is the true emergence of ‘designer drugs”, he notes. After mephedrone became illegal, methodrone flooded the market, he says. Methodrone has since been implicated in two deaths and banned in Sweden. Now, says Sparring, “we have flephedrone instead, and it just continues”.
In other words, the ban in Sweden has not worked, and people are still taking mephedrone. But one of the most interesting things in the above quote is medical experts acknowledging that the interest in mephedrone has a lot to do with the inaccessibility of untainted MDMA or cocaine. Users aren’t interested in “legal highs” because of any inherent respect for the law, but because they know that the illegal, unregulated drugs market means you can’t know what you’re getting. Any attempt to work with drugs users to ensure they know exactly what they’re taking is ruled out by the prohibition policy. As Adam Winstock puts it:
Sweden: Good with meatballs, drugs prohibition not so much
“The lesson we need to learn is, in the case of such drugs, what is the impact of different interventions in harm and use?” he told The Lancet. When a drug is made illegal, controls are limited to supply reduction and keeping harm to a minimum . . . “While in no way does ‘legal’ confer relative safety, it does mean that a broader repertoire of responses is available”, they note.
The Lancet coverage just underlines the scientific bankruptcy of government policy. Drugs prohibition is like the emperor who wears no clothes. Scientists, doctors, drug workers and young people can all see it’s a failed idea and must be scrapped. But when it comes to the political arena, the only political party that can see through the tabloids’ lies and stand by actual scientific evidence is the Scottish Socialist Party.
Raising the issue outside Anderston police station, Glasgow
Scottish Socialist Party General Election candidate for Glasgow Central, James Nesbitt, today spoke out against the banning of ‘legal high’ mephedrone, which came into effect today, Friday 16 April.
James, an unemployed 23 year old and resident of Govanhill, said: “Prohibition is a flawed approach. Experience has shown that criminalisation does not reduce harm. Leading scientists have spoken out against banning mephedrone, but they have been ignored by senior politicians.”
James pointed out: “Instead of listening to experts, the government has tried to browbeat them into propping up the failed criminalisation strategy. Policy is now being dictated by hysterical tabloid campaigns, rather than scientific evidence.”
“Banning m-cat will not reduce harm. Its production and distribution will now be in the hands of criminal gangs, who will benefit from the media-manufactured hype around the drug.”
Recommending a new approach, he comments: “A responsible strategy should begin with listening to the advice of drug experts: regulate recreational use so that safety is paramount. Focus should be placed on education, not criminalisation.”
“Professor David Nutt was sacked for speaking out against government posturing. A series of experts have also resigned over the rush to ban mephedrone, including Eric Carlin and Dr Polly Taylor. The government would do well to listen to the experts rather than be sucked in by hype and hysteria.”
“The war on drugs has failed. It is time for a new evidence-based approach designed to limit harm and take drug supply out of the hands of criminal gangs.”
The SSP is standing 10 candidates across Scotland and is unique in being the only party to speak out against drug criminalisation and in favour of a social health based approach to drug use.
The above story was picked up by The Press and Journal (left) and The Metro today, while The Scotsman also featured comment from James. No sign of a hysterical campaign from The Record yet anyway…
Primark’s secret plot to make little girls more appealing to paedophiles has been revealed, thanks to fearless journalism by The Sun.
They reported that “Primark bosses invite parents to send out girls of seven dressed as sex objects to be leered at by paedophiles,” after it was revealed that Primark have a range of swimwear for children which includes a slightly padded bikini top. Horror of horrors!
Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are all tripping over themselves to condemn Primark, and the Sun has extended its crusade to a whole host of other shops, announcing that it’s “Paedo heaven on our High Street“.
Let’s have a look at the bikini in question. It’s hardly a Wonderbra, is it?
There are two reasons girls start wearing bras or crop tops long before we might actually need them for support:
- to be mature and grown up, and avoid being made fun of by girls
- to hide the shape of our developing breasts, and avoid being made fun of by boys
Remember school swimming lessons, and having to stand in front of everyone you knew in a skintight costume that left nothing to the imagination whilst the PE teacher droned on for what seemed like an eternity… but none of the other kids paid attention because they were too busy making fun of you for either being a flatchested baby or a bigtitted slutty bitch? And to top it off, all of the popular girls are wearing bikinis and you’re stuck in a totally lame onepiece. Being a kid is really fucking hard.
As well as being ridiculous and not helping anyone, The Sun’s PAEDO BIKINI panic has an extremely sinister undertone. If paedophiles are only preying on children because of their “sexy” clothes, then who should take the blame when children are abused? The shops that sold the sexy clothes? The parents for buying them? The kids for wearing them? Anyone but the actual abuser and the sexually fucked up society obsessed with little girls’ and their virginity and purity, whilst promoting an pornographic ideal of hairless and childlike womanhood.
Laurie Penny at the Guardian’s Comment is Free has had the only remotely sensible take on this so far, saying:
Rather than encouraging healthy sexual exploration or promoting education, campaigns to protect girls from “sexualisation” assume that sexuality itself is a corrupting influence on young women.
The notion of “sexualisation” deserves serious critical unpacking. The term envisions girl children as blank erotic slates upon which sexuality can only ever be violently imposed. This narrow vision of sexuality leaves no room for young girls to explore authentic desire at their own pace, insisting instead that girls need to be protected from erotic influence, while boys, presumably, are free to fiddle with themselves to their hearts’ content.
Far from protecting young girls, the “anti-sexualisation” agenda actually serves a culture that shames girls if they have sexual feelings of their own while fetishising them as objects of erotic capital. The pornographic and advertising industries routinely infantilise adult women in an erotic context: in 2008, catwalk model Lily Cole infamously posed nude for French Playboy cuddling a teddy bear and licking a lollipop. Corporate visions of pubescent sexuality are marketed to children and adults alike as ritualised acts of erotic drag, and from an early age, young girls have a profound understanding that such sexual performance must be undertaken if we are not to be socially punished…
This ugly world of performative erotic control is made more confusing by a vociferous moral lobby in which adults talk to other adults about what young girls should be permitted to wear, say and do. The online mumocracy’s call for retailers to “show parents that their company believes that children should be allowed to be children” is irrelevant to the real experiences of girls growing up in a world where our sexual impulses are stolen and sold back to us.
Padded bras for preteens are not the problem. The problem is a culture of prosthetic, commodified female sexual performance, a culture which morally posturing politicians appear to deem perfectly acceptable as long as it is not ‘premature’. By assuming that sexuality can only ever be imposed upon girl children, campaigns to ‘let girls be girls’ ignore the fact that late capitalism refuses to let women be women – at any age.
But leaving all of that aside… surely paedophiles want children to look as childlike as possible, and would therefore be resolutely opposed to padded bras for kids? LOGIC FAIL.
Another expert adviser, Eric Carlin, has resigned from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, in protest at the government’s rush to ban Mephedrone.
Carlin is an expert in the field of drug prevention, public health and health promotion. His resignation from the council leaves the government’s already damaged drugs and scientific policy even more in tatters.
Over at his blog, you can read about his resignation, as well as his actual resignation letter to the Home Secretary, Alan “If it’s in the papers it must be true” Johnson.
Carlin writes of how he joined the ACMD hoping to take forward an agenda of research into why young people take drugs, and seeing how harm can be reduced, rather than just looking at drugs as a criminal justice issue. He has been disillusioned by the government’s lack of interest in these issues.
In his resignation letter he writes:
“We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour. Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure. The report was tabled to the whole Council for the first time on Monday; the Chair came to brief you before the whole Council had even discussed all of the report. In fact, I still haven’t seen the final version . . .
We need to review our entire approach to drugs, dumping the idea that legally-sanctioned punishments for drug users should constitute a main part of the armoury in helping to solve our country’s drug problems. We need to stop harming people who need help and support.
At the end of last year, I decided not to resign over the sacking of David Nutt, preferring instead to see how things panned out and to hope that the ACMD could develop a work programme which would help prevent and reduce harm, particularly to young people. I have no confidence that this will now happen, largely though not totally due to the lack of logic of the context within which the Council is constrained to operate by the Misuse of Drugs Act. As well as being extremely unhappy with how the ACMD operates, I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalisation of increasing numbers of young people.”
Says it all really, I think. Elsewhere, he writes of how “the criminalisation of young people does more harm than good”, as well as how other important work of the ACMD on harm reduction has been sidelined in the rush to ban Mephedrone.
“The latter process [the ACMD's rush to produce a report justifying the decision to ban Mephedrone] has left me deeply concerned, intellectually insulted and morally compromised. I contributed little to the discussion on Monday, confused and disillusioned that our focus was not on what we should recommend to understand and influence young people’s behaviour so as to prevent and/or reduce harm. Rather, we made a decision to ban this, the currently most publicly demonised drug, based mainly on its chemical similarities to other Class B substances. If that was the main criterion, how could one not agree with the decision? The problem is that the context of and rationale for our decision-making is a nonsense. What next? How many more new drugs are we going to ban, without an adequate evidence base about the impact of banning on young people’s behaviour re-use of drugs? Do we just keep on going? Rather than banning each new drug that comes along, we need to shift resources into social research about young people’s behaviours, how to influence them and investment in interventions to support demand reduction . . .
I’ve just been working with some young people who, honestly and seriously, told me that Cannabis, with all its risks, made them feel better about themselves, more able to assess their personal agency, manage their lives and feel more hopeful about the future. My current feeling is that the ACMD, with our focus on chemistry and legality, doesn’t contribute anything towards reducing the countless harms young people like these experience on a daily basis, including though not limited to harms from drug use. Moreover, we are colluding in the sustenance of a system which may in fact disadvantage even further some of the most disadvantaged people in our society.”
The Mephedrone moral panic has been a textbook example of how the madness of drugs prohibition is kept up, despite the fact that it causes huge harm to people in the UK and around the world. The government’s claims to be taking decisions based on expert advice lies in absolute tatters, their drugs policy a discredited echo-chamber for the lies of the corporate media. We have to stop letting the tabloids write our drugs policies based on nothing other than what will help increase their profits, and we have to start taking the drugs problems seriously and look at what approaches are actually going to help people.
Far from protecting young girls, the “anti-sexualisation” agenda actually serves a culture that shames girls if they have sexual feelings of their own while fetishising them as objects of erotic capital. The pornographic and advertising industries routinely infantilise adult women in an erotic context: in 2008, catwalk model Lily Cole infamously posed nude for French Playboy cuddling a teddy bear and licking a lollipop. Corporate visions of pubescent sexuality are marketed to children and adults alike as ritualised acts of erotic drag, and from an early age, young girls have a profound understanding that such sexual performance must be undertaken if we are not to be socially punished…
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