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.
So, the inevitable has happened. The government yesterday announced that their agenda on drugs is being set by the corporate media, when Home Secretary Alan Johnson told the media he will rush through a ban on Mephedrone in the few days left before parliament breaks up for the election.
How quickly can newspapers and the privately owned media write a government’s policy for them? In the case of Mephedrone, it’s taken just 5 months.
The Mephedrone moral panic got started in earnest when Gabrielle Price died. The media lied and lied again about the tragic death of this 14 year old at a party. They quoted anonymous neighbours, claiming that she’d been at a party taking Mephedrone and Ketamine, and that these had caused her death. Of course, to legally protect themselves, the headline had “took Miaow Miaow” in inverted commas, so that the newspapers didn’t have to take responsibility for the lies they were posting.
What they didn’t report was that the coroner concluded Gabrielle Price died of natural causes, following an infection she’d been suffering. Sussex Police announced there would be no inquest into her death, as it was not a mystery. It was NOT a drug related death.
As we’ve already reported before, this pattern was repeated again and again, as death after death was reported as “linked to Mephedrone.” Yet only one death has directly been attributed to Mephedrone through toxicology reports, and that man was also found to have other Class A drugs in his house. Most of the other deaths that have been blamed on Mephedrone were of people who had also been taking cocktails of methadone, alcohol, coke and other drugs. There is not a single other death from Mephedrone proven in the UK. FACT. In the same time, literally thousands of people have died as a result of legal drugs alcohol and tobacco, which NOBODY thinks it would be a good idea to ban.
Inverted commas means-"this is lies"
Other ridiculous scare stories were peddled, such as the total fabrication that “teachers are having to hand Mephedrone back after confiscating it in school.” Again, a total lie. This particular tall tale was pushed with the co-operation of headteacher Mike Stewart from Torquay. He was quoted again and again as saying that teachers would be forced to hand back confiscated Mephedrone because it wasn’t illegal. He NEVER said that THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Because it never has.
Imagine you’re in school and a teacher finds you with a white powder. Do you actually imagine they would give you that back at the end of the day? Absolute bollocks. Do we really believe that the head/rector (who would inevitably be brought in as part of such a scenario) would just take a student’s word for it that the powder wasn’t coke or speed? No, what they would do is phone the police. Devon and Cornwall Police felt the necessity to issue a press release affirming that if they seized a white powder, they would hold on to it. They even went so far as to say that if the substance was found to be Mephedrone, they would still destroy it rather than give it back!
As this whole sorry affair rolled towards its conclusion, there could have been no doubt in anyone’s mind that, in an election year, all parties would not have the courage to stand up to the lies and bullying of the massive profit-making corporations that own papers like The Sun. These completely cynical companies, who are interested only in greater profit for themselves, realised long ago they can make a lot of money by scaring people. To do this, they have completely exploited the tragic deaths of numerous people, and in the process pulled grieving families into a political crusade.
In the last year any pretense that government policy on drugs is made through scientific information has been totally discredited. First the government sacked Professor David Nutt because they didn’t like him publicly telling the truth about drugs like cannabis and ecstasy. Numerous other government science advisers resigned in protest. Then, this weekend, Dr Polly Taylor resigned in protest at new government guidelines that told scientists they “must not breach trust”, i.e. tell the truth if it contradicts government policy.
The Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs is required by law to give evidence before a drug can be banned. Since the resignation of Dr. Taylor the committee has been inquorate, that is, according to their own rules they are not properly constituted as a committee. Therefore they aren’t able to make a proper recommendation. But quickly after she resigned we heard that “Home Office lawyers are confident” that they could move forward with the ban. Translation – the government know they’re on dodgy territory, so they had to get lawyers to back them up.
Normally the ACMD will have several meetings about a drug, before drawing up a draft report to go to the full committee, which will then go to the Home Secretary. After the Home Secretary responds, it goes back to the committee for further consultation and research. The whole process should take at least a year and a half. The process that led up to the reclassification of cannabis was after a painstaking period of two and a half years research. And even then, the government IGNORED the committee’s advice, and went ahead with reclassifying cannabis as a class B drug!
Cover of government guidelines to scientists
Alan Johnson yesterday claimed he was following the advice of the committee by banning Mephedrone. What he should have said is that he was following the very preliminary findings of a depleted committee which has been unable to function properly over the last few months following the sacking of Prof. Nutt. Most of the members will not have seen the report on Mephedrone until yesterday, when they were told to approve it and hand it on to the government. There has been no proper scientific assessment of Mephedrone yet whatsoever.
Parliament in Westminster has about 3-4 days left to meet before the election is called. This period is known as the “wash-up”, when all parties co-operate to rush through bills that they all agree on, with virtually no democratic or public scrutiny. One of the measures pushed through this procedure will be the classification of Mephedrone. A complete victory for the corporate media, and a complete failure for science and the public good.
Something must be done!!!1!!11AAARGGGGHHH
Drugs prohibition doesn’t work. It is a cancer at the heart of our society, which makes drugs more dangerous than they should be, means there is no way to regulate the harm that they cause people, and enriches huge criminal capitalist organisations. People have taken drugs since the first evolution of humans. They are not deterred by laws passed by unscientific and ignorant governments. This idiotic government decision is supported by the entire mainstream political process, regardless of the fact that Mephedrone is far more likely to do harm when it’s illegal compared to when it’s legal. Not to mention the masses of free advertising it’s had in the last few months. It will also further discredit the government in the eyes of young people, meaning they are even less likely to listen to drugs advice from any kind of authority figure.
“A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), a moral panic occurs when “[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as “moral entrepreneurs”, while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as “folk devils.” Moral panics are in essence controversies that involve arguments and social tension and in which disagreement is difficult because the matter at its center is taboo. The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation, even when they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking. Simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety or panic.” (From Wikipedia.)
Yet another member of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, the independent body of scientists that advises the government on it’s drugs policy, has walked out. Members of the committee have been enraged by the government’s political interfering into their work.
Dr. Polly Taylor is a veterinary surgeon, and has resigned in protest against new guidelines from the government on how they want their scientific advice. Put simply, Gordon Brown and co. aren’t interested in actual science. The government wants scientists to be fact-inventors in order to back up government policy.
The part of the guidelines that’s pissed off so many scientists is where it says that scientific advice provided to the government “must not undermine mutual trust.” Many take that to mean: we’ll tell you what we want to hear, you go away and prove it, eggheads.
Affirming the important role of the corporate media in driving the pseudo-scientific agenda on drugs, she wrote in her resignation letter:
“I feel that there is little more we can do to describe the importance of ensuring that advice is not subjected to a desire to please ministers or the mood of the day’s press.”
Government Ministers: "Stop breaching my trust with facts!"
The funny thing about all this is that it may well delay the banning of mephadrone. Technically, new drug bans can’t be put before parliament without the advice of the committee. And the committee can’t be properly constituted without a veterinarian taking part. HA.
What the treatment of the government’s own scientists demonstrates is that existing drugs policies, and in fact official policies on many issues, are as informed by actual, real science as a Great White Shark would be emotionally affected by a picture of a cute seal. Not very much at all, in other words. Both sharks and ministers want what they want, when they want it. If the government keeps pissing off scientists at such a rate however, they won’t be able to get what they want. What they want right now is to look like they are sensitive to a manufactured media moral panic based completely on unscientific BULLSHIT.
The first game I ever played was Sonic The Hedgehog. I played it when I was around about 5 or 6, and thank god the unrelenting, brutal and sadistic violence in that game did not scar me for life. I did everything to that hedgehog you can imagine. I jumped him into lava, into spikes, balls with spikes on them, cylinders with spikes on the sides, robots with cutting tools, lasers and one time I even threw him to his death from a plane.
I must have killed more foxes than the entire Tory Party in the past hundred years.
Of course, this wasn’t my only experience with videogame violence -- when I was 10 I played Desert Strike, where I had to commandeer a helicopter gunship to attack a series of targets inside an unnamed IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ middle eastern country. I carried out dozens upon dozens of bombing raids, ostensibly on military targets like anti-aircraft radar, presidential palaces, scuds and tanks. But more than once I would fuck up and gun down civilians I accidentally assumed were enemy infantry -- or blow up civilian houses whilst searching for more fuel. What happened? Well I would return to the frigate, my mission would be over -- but I would be allowed to restart ALL OVER AGAIN. An endless cycle of violence and misery.
This only got worse when I got the sequel Jungle Strike, and consciously decided to lay waste to Washington DC -- destroying Justice Department buildings, The Washington Memorial, The Jefferson Memorial and laying waste to the suburbs, in a gross dereliction of my mission objectives. Sure I would be asked to return to The White House to retry my mission, but this threat was frankly somewhat toothless considering it would be the first building I would destroy when starting my mission.
This videogame violence is almost cartoonish compared to what you are now able to do on modern computers -- buy sex from prostitutes and kill them, machine gun down civilians in a busy airport, or use a wii remote to enact a beheading. Veteran gardener Alan Titchmarsh is on the case though -- watch him below attacking violent videogames -- who have grossly surpassed such gritty, sadistic, and bloody 50’s dramas like The Lone Ranger.
If you look closely in the audience, you’ll be able to see pitchforks and torches at the ready.
Listening to Alan spell out the games names shows he is clearly very familiar with the industry. Sitting next to him is Mrs Helen Lovejoy and noted social commentator and cunt Kelvin McKenzie. More on him later. First things first, violent videogames may only make up 5% of the market as the pro-gaming guy says, but they make up 95% + of all decent videogames. You really can’t get as much joy out of pushing plastic buttons on a guitar in tune with shiny boxes as taking over control of a predator drone and using it to kill 20 invading Russian soldiers in a shopping malls carpark.
This isn’t because human beings or videogames players are psychotic, it’s just that violence is exciting. Violence involves pressure on individuals which heighten tension in all drama -- books, films and games. Things are more thrilling if there is a chance someone could die, especially if it involves their head being ripped off by the Predator. If you don’t agree try watching the 4 hour black and white silent version of Die Hard done by Werner Herzog. The drop in quality is noticeable. Yet one of our prize rent-a-panelist chumps says she is against “all forms of violence for entertainment”. Did you hear that? “all forms of violence for entertainment”. If these nutters had their way we would not have,
* 24
* Battlestar Galactica
* Die Hard
* Aliens
* The Bourne Ultimatum
* Predator
* Where Eagles Dare
* Indiana Jones
* Terminator 2
* James Bond
* THE ENTIRE STAR WARS AND LORD OF THE RINGS SERIES.
That’s only a very small example of what would happen to society if we ceased entertainment based on (kiddy on imaginary) violence. We would be stuck in an endless nightmare of shit daytime telly, which is probably why this rent-a-gob supports ending all violence in entertainment as it would mean Loose Women would endlessly loop on TV, alongside Jeremy Kyle and Call My Bluff and she would be on telly non stop.
Kelvin proudly displays his membership of the British Wankers Charitable Trust.
She also goes on to claim that videogames “promote hatred, violence and sexism”. If she had simply looked to her right however, she could have seen noted piece of human shit Kelvin Mackenzie, who has spent an entire journalistic career promoting all 3 far more effectively than the Metal Gear series. Videogames may have all these 3, but it’s no different from most mainstream Hollywood movies. GTA may allow you to buy sex from prostitutes and kill them, but theres a whole film industry dedicated to “torture porn” which often involves women being mutilated to death.
Yes! I killed a ship going out the exclusion zone, I've won a multiplayer map!
When Kelvin attacks videogames on the potential offence they may cause he should remember that no current or previous version of Street Fighter accused Liverpool fans of pissing on their own dead and robbing them. And that when you destroy something in a game and get a high score for it, people haven’t actually died for your moment of glory -- unlike the Belgrano.
Attacks on the game industry aren’t limited to daytime telly shows though -- violent videogames are denied tax breaks other games get, and other games have been attacked by MP’s -- such as Modern Warfare 2. Most of Modern Warfare plays as a conventional shoot em up, with the player gunning down terrorists, soldiers etc. But in one mission that provoked tabloid hysteria you play as a US Special Forces soldier undercover with terrorists attacking an airport.
Part of this mission means you have to keep your cover, which means not stopping the terrorists from slaughtering hundreds of civilians in an airport. Contrary to the press, you don’t have to shoot folk to keep your cover -- but you aren’t punished for helping the terrorists massacre folk.
It’s pretty realistic to watch, with lots of chaos and screaming going around you while it happens. But the reason the level is there is to show the extremes the character has to go through to keep his cover. You get the same kind of scenarios all the time in 24 -- where terrorists are allowed to carry out attacks ostensibly for the greater good.
The reality is that every now and then the press and politicians need to find some moral outrage to sell papers with, and create false panic - using tried and tested techniques. It’s not unlike the hysteria over “video nasties” in the 70’s, that were frequently banned because they supposedly corrupted people who watched them. This hysteria sometimes overlapped on to mainstream, big budget films -- like Childs Play, because the killers of Jamie Bulger were alleged to have watched the films.
It’s the same kind of madness Michael Moore did Bowling for Columbine about -- the idea that listening to some kind of music, watching a film, or playing a game believed to be obscene can force the user into violent acts in the real world. It’s not that dissimilar from the mephedrone hysteria -- that taking mephedrone automatically leads to death, while ignoring many of the victims were also taking methadone etc. So the fact Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had no moral compass when they were brought up, and abused by violent parents would have had no impact on their horrific crime, it was watching a horror movie that warped them. Or that it’s Marilyn Manson’s fault a school got shot up in a country with more guns than people.
It is probably only a matter of time before some violent attack is reported in the press, with the criminal having Manhunt, GTA or Modern Warfare in his videogame collection, and a demand to crack down on violent games is made.
That said, I don’t think you can be totally uncaring about a games content -- not all games should be whitewashed. There are games you can buy off the internet which simulate the rape of women. The fact that you can actually beat a prostitute to death in GTA probably does fuck up a whole load of young men’s attitudes to women who work in the sex industry. And that there are now videogames being planned based on the current war in Afghanistan does desensitise people to a war that’s causing misery for thousands of Afghans and hundreds of families in the UK. It’s no coincidence the US Army has released an official videogame as a recruitment tool, they are clearly trying to sell the idea to young guys that joining the army is just like a really realistic shoot em up.
But the facts are, all these attitudes are just as much in movies, music, politics and the press as they are in videogames. The reason games are attacked is because they are played by an overwhelmingly young section of the population, who don’t vote or own houses etc. This makes them the perfect whipping boy for MP’s who want to get votes and or publicity, and also newspapers who want to increase their circulation by generating some false moral outrage.
It makes me so sick, I just wish I could pull this kind of shit on them ALL DAY,
Steward! Yes, excuse me, the gremlin on the wing has just informed me that this young woman's breasts are going to explode!
Ah, newspapers. We’ve alreadycommentedon their tendency to jump on (or in fact create) a headless chicken bandwagon in order to sell papers keep the public informed (for an excellent article on this subject, check out Charlie Brooker) and lately, a story came along that was, in many ways, harder for them to resist than a good old moral panic over drugs. It had everything; terrorism, a Carry On film edge, scary women’s bodies, modern science gone mad and, what all newspapers are looking for, something new for people to be afraid of. Buy this newspaper or you will DIE! Too bad it wasn’t at all feasible or, in fact, true.
“Terrorists ‘could use exploding breast implants to blow up jet’” warned the Telegraph. Cue panic in the streets! Anyone you know could be a secret terrorist with deadly breasts! Next time you sleep with a woman, how will you know her chest isn’t going to explode right in the middle of things?! Maybe that woman with the big breasts who’s on your plane to Disneyland is a threat to your children! But really, the only warning signs present here are to do with the nature of the article itself.
“Breast implants packed with explosives could be used to blow up an airliner, experts are said to have warned.” Well now, I count three obvious marks of hemming and hawing in just this once sentence. Terrorists could use explosive breast implants to blow up a plane? Well yes, I suppose they could, but I could also stuff a pet snake with condoms filled with plastic explosive, get it put in the luggage hold and do the same. That doesn’t mean I’m going to.
Then there’s that ever present word – experts. Experts said this, experts said that. When newspapers deploy this term they never explain what they mean by an expert, what qualifies their expert to comment and half the time they don’t even say who the expert is! It’s one of those catch all stylistic get outs that newspapers use in order to print any old shite they want. In this case, the Telgraph aren’t even confident enough to say definitively that their experts have made this warning. They’re only “said to have warned” of it. Now, what does that mean?
The Sun in all its glory. Don't buy it!
All is revealed once we get further into the article. The source of the Telgraph’s information is…The Sun. The Sun. That well known paragon of good, honest journalism. Apart from the nature of the paper the Telegraph are using as a source, this is yet another habit of modern newspapers, and it’s one of the most destructive and poisonous. They don’t do independent investigation (you know, actual journalism) but instead they just feed off of each other’s panic until you end up with newspapers screaming ridiculous things about exploding breast implants. Maybe though, just maybe, The Sun had a reliable source? No such luck; their source was Fox fuckin News. The biggest amount of work the Telegraph did for this story was to phone a plastic surgeon to see if it was at all possible to put an explosive implant into a woman’s breast or, in fact, a guy’s arse cheeks – isn’t it hillarious how they kept the bomb implants all gender appropriate?
I can’t believe that none of them thought to answer one very simple question. How on earth do you detonate a breast bomb? Nipple fuses?
Eventually, the air was cleared by an unlikely source – the bigoted, foaming at the mouth US neocon website World Net Daily. I wont link to it here, but a bit of googling should lead you to the right article if you so desire. Essentially, it seems, the Telegraph didn’t even attribute this ridiculous quote to the right person. They claimed that Joseph Farah, self proclaimed terrorism expert and editor in chief of World Net Daily, had warned of this new development in blowing things up. Instead though, it was actually one of his underlings at the site (who even they seem embarrassed by) who made this claim and then put the words in his boss’ mouth, probably to lend them more legitimacy (lol).
The upshot of all of this is that the whole story is a piece of nonsense, which UK newspapers printed without doing any serious investigation, and after yet again taking ‘experts’ at their word. And will they learn their lesson? Will they print an erratum? No, of course not. They’ll keep on doing the same thing, peddling shite to a mass audience, because it makes them money and fits with their owners’ agendas. It’s easy to drop a journalistic grenade among an already on edge population – it’s much harder to do the work of debunking the nonsense that papers print.
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…
f money by scaring people. To do this, they have completely exploited the tragic deaths of numerous people, and in the process pulled grieving families into a political crusade.
Yet another member of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, the independent body of scientists that advises the government on it’s drugs policy, has walked out. Members of the committee have been enraged by the government’s political interfering into their work.
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