The internet is a relatively new conception, being invented in the mid-20th century, some of us remember before it was developed (and most of us remember it not being a part of our lives). Like most inventions, it has been used by both the ‘Establishment’ or ‘The Powers That Be’ and by ordinary people. The internet and computers in general have both empowered people to take control of their own lives and created a whole new level of surveillance and ‘The Big Brother State’.

Ever since the personal computer has been in mainstream use and since Microsoft bought the DOS operating system, Microsoft has had an iron grip on the computer market. Their vision was that everyone would have a personal computer and they would be the ones to let them use it (for their price and under their control), while IBM envisioned great servers around the world that would be controlled by individuals’ terminals, they would not need Microsoft’s software and so hardware was where the money was. As we know, Microsoft were correct in their analysis and the idea that people could have their own computer that they thought they could control was popular. But some people didn’t like that they had to pay £100 just to use their computer and that if they wanted to do useful tasks such as write letters or store information for an organisation or group they would have to pay yet more. Microsoft have made it harder and harder for anyone to use software other than their own and increased the price accordingly.

Some have turned away from Microsoft’s model of “every extra thing you want to do costs extra” and turned to Apple who will give you most things that you need but you have to buy everything from them. Others have created a community where people make software for themselves. The idea is that if ordinary people all around the world make our own software, it can be as good and even better than its commercial counterpart. This software does not have its code encrypted like Microsoft’s and Apple’s but is open for all to see, this is the world of open source software.

For many years this movement has been small and its products have been pale in comparison to their mainstream version. For years after most people were using a mouse to control their computer through a graphical user interface, these people were still typing out commands. But over that last decade their numbers have grown and their progress accelerated, most open source operating systems now use advanced graphical user interfaces and have more and more advanced programs to match. Linux is the most common type of software within this world and its browser ‘Firefox’ has become quite famous for its ‘Port’ to Microsoft Windows and is accepted by most to be better than Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer, even on its native Windows. This is just an example of the powerful software that is produced by the open source movement and now that the UN has chosen ‘Ubuntu’ (a Linux operating system) for its under $100 computer, to distribute in underdeveloped countries. A lot, if not most, of the movements resources are now focused on Ubuntu’s code.

Compatibility has long been an issue as with all non Microsoft software and OpenOffice has had problems creating Microsoft Office documents due to Microsoft office’s closed source nature (Microsoft obviously made no effort to read any file other than their own). The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) worked with Sun Microsystems to create a standard format for word processing documents and came up with the Open Document Format, which was then accepted as the standard word processing and office suite file format by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Microsoft refused to accept the new standardisation and Microsoft Office was still not even able to open, never mind create OpenDocument Format files. They were inundated with complaints by angry customers who were not able to use any of the standard files they were receiving and so Microsoft relented and Microsoft Office is now able to read and write OpenDocuments from Microsoft Office 2007 (from service pack 2).

People within this moment have mainly been technical in nature and have mostly let companies hold the copyrights to the names of their software, due to there being no individual creator to hold such rights. OpenOffice’s copyright was held by Sun Microsystems but when Sun were purchased by Oracle, a company with a history of commercialising and tampering with open source software, without permission from the community. The leading creators of OpenOffice became worried that the same would happen to OpenOffice so they created the document foundation to hold the copyright of OpenOffice and any other open source software that wishes to use it. Anyone can join the document foundation who agrees with its values and can take part in its democracy (based on a meritocratic, skill based division of labour). After which the developers continued to improve the software although they no longer had rights to the OpenOffice name, then owned by Oracle. The name LibreOffice was chosen for the continuation of the project until such time that the copyright of the OpenOffice name be reacquired. Oracle decided to keep offering OpenOffice and have even posted updates, but have since donated the name to Apache.

It will be interesting to see how many other software projects go down the same route and hold their copyrights in the document foundation or form similar structures. If projects continue to allow commercial entities to own and sway their products, they will likely be pushed and assimilated into commercial software such as Windows and the war will be lost.

Freedom of information goes further than just source code in this war, Wikipedia has become the largest encyclopaedia in the world and is created by specialists and knowledgeable people all around the world. Its accuracy is doubted by many due to the lack of credentials needed to modify or create an article. However Wikipedia and its users routinely remove false, unreferenced material and lock pages that have been continuously changed to the most accountable, previous state. Pages go through a hierarchy or locked states, where only the most certified users can request a change. While vandalism and incorrect posts do occur, it is a very good source of information where cross-referenced properly, as with any other source. Wikipedia recently undertook a ‘Blackout’ on the English portion of its site in protest to bills going through the US Congress. It was not designed to block users from information as they were shown how to bypass the blackout but meant that users read about the bills that implicated any site, with a link rout to illegal copyright material, as liable. Google also showed its support for the campaign by censoring its logo on Google.com.

With Google web search using a version of the Linux kernel, the engine behind Linux operating systems, and Android phones using another version of the Linux kernel, the future looks bright for open source software. It is now very possible to move away from Microsoft’s empire. Ubuntu has a very nice interface and integrates social networking far better than Windows; while those who are less techno savvy might like Linux Mint which is simpler than Ubuntu or Windows. Office files can be created by the powerful LibreOffice and free programs like Gimp can be used instead of Photoshop. Maybe one day, if this revolution is won, taxation will pay for the effort that people put into these projects, but until then, they rely upon donations based on the ability to pay and give time, from its users. The Future is ours, if we just choose to take it.

Today’s Daily Record reported on something I’ve been seeing for months as a pre-registration pharmacist.

If you’ve ever seen Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, you’ll have seen how capitalism causes many Americans to have substandard or even a total lack of health care. In the Scottish pharmacy I work in, however, I have seen capitalism’s effects on medical care a lot closer to home. From manufacturer, to wholesaler, to pharmacy and finally to patient, there is plenty of opportunity for money to be made. Overall this means greater cost to the NHS and a decreased supply of medication available.

Pricey Pills

Lets start with a little quiz. These are Zyprexa 10mg tablets.

Zyprexa is one of the most common drugs currently prescribed for schizophrenia and the 10mg strength is the most commonly used. In practice, I dispense this drug just about every day. It comes in boxes of 28 tablets, each tablet about the size of a 5p piece. It isn’t a new drug, having been released 16 years ago. So how much does one single box cost? Take a guess before reading on.

…

…ready?

The exact price will vary between wholesalers. But for one box of 28 Zyprexa 10mg tablets, the pharmacy would pay around £81 (almost £3 per tablet). Once the pharmacy has dispensed the medication against a prescription, the cost of the drugs supplied is reimbursed to them by the NHS. This means that every year, NHS Scotland spends £12.1 million on Zyprexa tablets alone, making it the drug with the 9th greatest cost to the NHS in 2009-2010. This drug is by no means the most expensive medicine dispensed by pharmacies, and it leads to the question: why are drugs so expensive?

Looking at the case of Zyprexa, we can eliminate some reasons. Bringing a drug to market is a long and expensive process, but considering how much they receive each year from NHS Scotland alone, consider what they’ll be making from the rest of the world! Its pretty safe to say they’ve made back their expenditure. Its not a rarely used drug, so the price won’t have to be inflated to recoup manufacturing costs. By looking at the story of Zyprexa, we can get some clues into the real reason. For a long time, the most effective treatment for schizophrenia was a drug called clozapine. This meant that in order to gain control of this difficult condition, patients had to suffer some very nasty and potentially lethal side effects. So in the 1990s, when new antipsychotics like Zyprexa were developed, they allowed patients to gain control of their condition without the high level of potentially lethal side effects. The drug companies realised that due to the benefit posed by these drugs, health care systems like the NHS would be willing to pay large amounts of money for them. And so, to this day, as with many other drugs, the NHS pays an inflated price to keep people healthy.

Keeping people healthy isn’t a particular concern of drug manufacturers. Ask any GP about drug reps and they’ll tell you that until recently, they would have done anything to get their drug prescribed, regardless of the actual evidence. Thankfully legislation has now prevented drug companies sending GPs on golfing trips and buying them dinner to prescribe a certain drug, but health care professionals still frequently get sent graphs with no numbers and a handful of pens from drugs companies trying to prove how good their drug is.

Missing Medication

Drug companies don’t sell their products directly to pharmacies; they sell their overpriced wares to pharmaceutical wholesalers. It is around this step that the drugs get lost. You see, they may have patient information leaflets, but they don’t have maps and so they take a wrong turn and end up in Europe. Because of the value of the Euro in relation to the Pound, wholesalers can get a much better price for medicines in Europe than they can in Britain. And so why sell a box of cancer medication in Scotland for £20 when you can get £30 in France? Never mind the fact that people in Scotland will then die of cancer. Which is where we are now. For months now it has been a constant struggle to get many common medicines, drugs for conditions from breast cancer to addiction that used to be freely available. Patients have been waiting for weeks to get tablets they need now, people have to make do with less effective drugs because they can’t get what they really need and pharmacists have been spending hours every week chasing up manufacturers, wholesalers, phoning other pharmacies to borrow stock and fighting quotas on what little supplies are available. These drugs are all being produced in their millions in the UK every day, but they go straight out the country for a little extra cash, leaving us with nothing. We’re in the middle of a massive drugs crisis here in Scotland, and its caused by pure greed.

Pharmacy Profits

Despite providing NHS services, all community (i.e. shop) pharmacies in the UK are run by private companies or individuals and not by the NHS. This means that they are run, you guessed it, for profit. While the individual pharmacists who work in each shop will have the best interests of the patient at heart, they are under tremendous pressure from the company or individual owning the shop to make profit. This may often include being encouraged to take part in illegal practices such as claiming money from the NHS for dispensing prescriptions that they did not actually dispense (eg. if the patient didn’t want one of the items on the prescription) or registering patients for services without their consent. It often means that pharmacists are forced to take on as many services as possible, leaving them little time to properly carry out the services and often making them too rushed to speak to patients about how to take their medication or to effectively check that prescriptions are safe and effective and that dispensed medication is correct. Many pharmacists, if not the majority, are not entitled to any form of break during the day, as this would mean that no prescriptions can be dispensed and thus money would be lost. In an 8 hour day, the average pharmacist, almost always the only pharmacist in the shop, may be expected to check around 300 dispensed prescriptions (one every 90 seconds!), on top of any other services and speaking to patients. Its pretty easy to see how making pharmacists and pharmacy staff so rushed compromises patient care.

One of the activities that keeps pharmacists rushed off their feet is a little trick learned from wholesalers. It seems crazy, but while so many patients struggle to get their medication, it could well be in the pharmacy all along. Of course those medicines aren’t intended for NHS patients. Pharmacy owners have pharmacists doing everything they can to order them, phoning wholesalers, phoning manufacturers, ordering one box each day so as not to arouse suspicion, telling supplies they really need it for a prescription. Except this time its not for a prescription. Because much of the medicines that wholesalers don’t sell to Europe are bought by pharmacies. And sold to Europe. No drugs for patients, but lots for profit.

Yet after all of this, some drugs finally make their way through to actually get dispensed by a pharmacy against a prescription. When pharmacies dispense a drug, the NHS pays them the cost of the drug back, plus a small dispensing fee. This fee isn’t very much, so pharmacies have sorted out a way with wholesalers to make some profit on the cost of the drug. In exchange for ordering from them, wholesalers will charge pharmacies a massively inflated price for the drug. Doesn’t seem like a very good deal does it? But the pharmacy then has a really highly priced invoice that they can use to claim back the drug cost from the NHS, while the wholesaler refunds the pharmacy a lot of the cost at the end of the month. This means that while a pharmacy might only end up paying 50p for a drug, the NHS will pay them £10 for it. Multiply this by however many times it happens in a day, multiply by all the pharmacies in Scotland and you’ll see just how much money the NHS loses every year.

Cut Capitalism

Of course, I’m really not having a go at the profession of pharmacy here. I know that the vast majority of pharmacists have patients as their main concern and that they hate having to fleece the NHS and patients our of medicines and money. Its the business types pulling the strings who force our profession down the road of profit, not patients. Pharmacists are health care professionals, they have 5 years of University education and training before they can practice, they are experts in medicines, yet if they want a job they must put patients in harm’s way to make someone else money. And with all this going on, our government’s best idea to save money is to further cut services and further damage patient care. When we think of easily preventable deaths, we think of malaria, tropical diseases in the third world, HIV etc. Maybe we should be looking a bit closer to home.

One possible candidate for the new ACMD

As previously reported by SSY, the government isn’t generally too keen on scientific advice when it comes to formulating drug policy. When the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and independent body advising the government on drugs legislation, recommended against Cannabis being reclassified as a class B drug, the Labour government went ahead and done it anyway. When the same body said that Ecstasy, a class A drug, should be downgraded, they ignored that advice too. The former chair of the ACMD and SSY hero Professor David Nutt was even sacked after a pamphlet he produced said that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than cannabis, LSD and Ecstasy. Now we have a new government, and they’ve finally come up with a solution to the fact that none of their drug policies agree with the scientific evidence – get rid of the scientists all together!

That’s right – if a proposed amendment to the Misuse of Drugs law passes, it will remove the requirement for scientists to be included in the committee. After years of ignoring all the evidence when it comes to drugs anyway, this policy looks like it could be signed into law. It’s a well known fact that policy on drugs is driven by the tabloid newspapers more than what is useful – this year’s mephedrone ban was brought in after a series of deaths reported in the media attributed to the drug. The most famous of these cases, the deaths of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith, put huge pressure on the government to ban the drug – it was later discovered that they had not been taking mephedrone at all. By removing the need for scientists on the ACMD, the government is making an admission that they don’t care about science when they make decisions that criminalise thousands of people – only about pandering to the media lies and propaganda about drugs.

As SSY has always argued, legalisation and regulation, based on scientific evidence of harms, is the only sensible drug policy. Drugs would be purer and safer, production would be taken out of the hands of criminal gangs, and people could be given information about each drug’s harm that isn’t based on scare stories. Removing scientists from the ACMD further reduces its importance and relevance, and means the government can carry on doing whatever it likes about drugs without scrutiny from people who actually know what they are talking about. Whilst not all the scientists on the ACMD support legalisation, they support an evidence-based drugs policy – something that it’s obvious the government couldn’t care less about.

In love with himself: Bjorn Lomborg looks like he used to be in a boy band but then got too old

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish statistician and political scientist at the Copenhagen Business School who shot to international prominence a couple of years ago with his book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’

In it he basically argued that taking action to tackle climate change would be too expensive and a waste of money. He tried to show that the risks associated with ecological destruction had been overstated; despite having no particular expertise in climate science he thought he knew better than pretty much all the other scientists in the world. As a result he has faced a lot of complaints about the serious scientific flaws in his work, from bodies like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Scientific American magazine (don’t worry, the right wing Economist mag rushed to his defence!)

Basically his argument is that tackling climate change doesn’t amount to value for money, and if governments around the world are going to spend big cash on a major problem they’d be better placed getting to grips with poverty or AIDS (of course ignoring the fact that poverty, climate change and the spread of preventable diseases are all consequences of capitalism). This has rightly led to him being ridiculed for underplaying one of the greatest threats to ever face civilisation. But last week, The Guardian and other papers were delighted to report that he’d changed his mind and has declared that actually spending £100 billion a year on climate change would be good value for money. Thanks for that Bjorn, not like you’ve been wasting our time up until now!

Although he was never an out and out climate change denier, and accepted its reality, Lomborg became a poster boy for the far right effort to deny scientific reality, that at its root is motivated by people who want to defend capitalism in general, and the energy corporations in particular. So the fact that he’s changed his stance is on one level kind of good news. That is, until you look into what he actually proposes doing.

How Lomborg would like to see us spend a good chunk of this money is the exceedingly mental idea of geoengineering. This means gigantic mega-projects by which humans would attempt to take control of the global climate and control the weather, in order to try and counteract global warming. Projects like sending thousands of ships into the Pacific to spray saltwater mist into the air and make clouds more reflective to deflect heat back into space (one that Lomborg seems particularly keen on), or filling the sea with iron filings to encourage the growth of massive algal blooms that would then lock up carbon in themselves.

One of the ships Bjorn would like to see pumping mist into the clouds. The reason it looks like cheap sci fi concept art is no one has been crazy enough to do it yet

What’s wrong with this? Lomborg puts it quite well himself when he says that geoengineering “could lead to really bad stuff.” Basically, the global climate is an incredibly complex system, with huge numbers of different factors affecting it. Already we’re seeing the unexpected impact of our actions through anthropogenic (i.e. caused by humans) global warming. There’s absolutely no way to predict what unforseen consequences would result from mega-projects like these. It’s a bit like pulling a thread from a big complex tapestry, and then trying to repair it by pulling out other threads and tying them together to replace them – you’re almost certain to do more damage that you can’t predict.

His other solutions are generally along the lines of finding techno-fixes that will allow us to keep up capitalist society pretty much as it is, but maybe with some greener technology. This is where we get to the rub of why people like Bjorn Lomborg will be unable to prevent climate catastrophe. Fundamentally, what his work does is apply capitalist economics to the global climate and ecosphere, something that capitalism fundamentally can’t understand.

There are some simple facts about life on Earth. All species evolve in ecosystems that support them, and if they exhaust the capacity of that ecosystem to support them then they’re in trouble; if a predator eats all the prey to extinction, then pretty soon it’s extinct as well. Humans have done very well at using technology to offset our need for the natural environment to support us, but ultimately we are just another species, and need to recognise that we now need to choose between the short term survival of our ever expending, ever impoverishing socio-economic system, and long term survival. Lomborg’s line up until now has been to choose disaster in the long run, because it would be a waste of money to prevent it now. Now he’s changed his tune, but he’s still only a capitalist economist, trying to find ways to make our survival as part of the global ecosystem economically viable.

Even if we pretend for a minute that getting technology to fix everything for us would work, instead of just causing more problems, where does it end? Some scientists have tried to calculate the economic worth of all the tasks that the natural world performs for free that allows human civilisation to carry on as it does – purifying water and air, regulating climate, keeping the soil fertile etc. They found it ran to trillions of dollars every day. The more we damage these natural processes, and the more we rely on ourselves and our machines to do the job, the more we will start to take these costs on to ourselves, instead of just trying to live as a part of natural systems, not as a replacement for them.

The survival of civilisation isn’t economically viable under capitalism. It is completely possible for the human race to choose to live better, more equally and in a way that is sustainable over the long term. But to do that we need to get rid of capitalism. The future has a name, and it’s ecosocialism.

Monday morning's headlines after SSY's legalise cannabis march

Every human society since we first evolved has experimented with drugs, pyschoactive substances, and altered states of consciousness.

Many leading psychologists and anthropologists believe that this is a normal part of human life, and experimenting with substances like cannabis or magic mushrooms has actually played a role in the evolution of modern, intelligent humans.

But in the last 200 years human society has changed dramatically. With the arrival of capitalism came the rise of modern states, with their borders, armies and police forces. As the technology to control their own people developed, states have had an ever increasing urge to monitor and discipline their populations.

One of the ways they have done this is implement a worldwide system of prohibition of drugs. While the two biggest drug killers, alcohol and tobacco, remain legal billion pound industries, relatively harmless drugs like cannabis and ecstasy remain the target of expensive police operations, and users are turned into criminals who can face imprisonment for doing nothing but experimenting with their own bodies.

The drugs laws we have in Britain and throughout the developed world have never borne any relation to real medical or scientific information, but instead have been shaped by the prejudices and scapegoats created by elites to divide and control the people. One of the main ways they have done this is to use racism, associating certain substances with foreigners or ethnic minorities.

Now, in the 21st century, many countries around the world are finally beginning to wake up to the fact that prohibition has been a costly disaster that has caused untold misery across the planet. The time has at last come to begin treating drugs as a health and social issue, not a criminal one, and base our drugs policies on real scientific evidence, not prejudice and racism.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two scientists have now resigned from a group charged by the Food Standards Agency with having a “public dialogue” about genetically modified foods.

Last week Dr Helen Wallace, who is part of the think tank Gene Watch UK, resigned from the steering group for the project, and Professor Brian Wynne, who was the group’s Vice Chair, resigned yesterday.

Professor Wynne is an expert on public engagement with science, and said the dialogue programme, which was set up by the previous government, was in fact little more than propaganda for the companies responsible for developing GM food. He added that the Food Standards Agency, which is supposed to act as an independent watchdog that protects the public, had a “dogmatically entrenched” position in favour of GM.

Dr Wallace has similar concerns, arguing:

“It has now become clear to me that the process that the FSA has in mind is nothing more than a PR exercise on behalf of the GM industry. In my view, this would be a significant waste of £500,000 of taxpayers’ money. A process that was barely credible has become a farce.

“Taxpayers’ money should not be wasted on a PR exercise for the GM industry.”

Campaign groups have argued that the whole exercise, which is going to be outsourced to another organisation, will in fact just be used to gather information to allow better marketing and political propaganda efforts as part of an effort to make the public accept GM food.

The last government set up the project to explore the public’s views on the possible wider use of the technology. In the late 1990s GM foods were introduced throughout Britain, including in Scotland, with virtually no public consultation. This led to many massive campaigns, of which the SSP played a key part in several. Now, although GM crops are still grown in the UK, many supermarkets promise not to stock them because of the pressure.

GM protester pulls out crops

Socialists have argued for years that the drive to introduce the technology was coming from massive private companies with an interest in making more money from food, and agricultural products like pesticides and fertilisers. Chemical companies like Monsanto have worked hard to genetically alter organisms so that they will be able to cope with poisons intended for pests being sprayed on them. However, there are concerns that once new genes are introduced into the natural environment they have been shown to spread to other organisms and crops, with unforseen consequences for environmental and human health.

But perhaps most worryingly, these new technologies are not being developed by innocent scientists just interested in advancing knowledge. They are being designed and developed by for-profit corporations, whose sole interest is in making more money. So once a company has altered the genes of an organism, it can claim that this living thing is now their work, and patent it. This means that whenever someone uses that crop or animal in farming, they will have to pay the company for the privilege. In fact, many farmers have been forced to pay who weren’t growing genetically modified crops, after company scientists discovered that what was predicted had happened: their genetic modifications had cross pollinated, and you could find altered genes in non GM crops. Instead of seeing this as a concern, companies like Monsanto see it as a way to make more money, by making these unfortunate farmers pay.

The ultimate consequence of this would be the privatisation of our food supply, so that a few huge corporations would be able to control the seeds and technology necessary for the world to feed itself, and we would have to pay them ransom to survive. One of the most terrifying examples of the way these companies think was the attempt to develop “Terminator” seeds (their name!), which would produce crops that would not themselves go on to produce any seeds. If the companies were ever able to get this product widely used, then farmers would be unable to collect seeds from the previous years’ crops for replanting, meaning they would be completely dependent on seeds bought from the company that owned the patent on Terminator crops.

The resignation of these two scientists follows on from the complete discrediting of the previous government’s relationship with science, after it reclassified cannabis as a Class B drug despite the advice of its own scientists not to, and then rushed through a ban on mephedrone with no concern for real scientific evidence. It remains to be seen whether the ConDems will have a better relationship with the scientific community, but given their support for the mephedrone ban we won’t hold our breath. The Food Standards Agency says it will ask the new government before going ahead with the GM food consultation.

Eating this can not be a good idea

The fact of the matter is, the idea that we need GM crops to end world hunger is a myth peddled by people looking to make money for themselves. The world is more than capable of producing enough food to feed the human race through sustainable, ecological and organic agriculture. The problem isn’t the food we produce so much as the way its distributed. When so much of the land on Earth is dedicated to producing crops and meat for the rich countries, it’s hardly surprising those who live elsewhere go hungry.

Bonus: Check out this article, ‘Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People?‘ (If you can’t be arsed reading the whole thing, the answer’s yes.)

By A. Journalistnotascientist

A study/case report/article today published by a medical research group/university/charity revealed that a popular food/lifesaving medicine/controversial activity may cause/reduce risk of cancer/heart disease/stroke. It was found that some people who ate the food/took the medicine/did the activity later went on to develop/did not develop cancer/heart disease/stroke and despite that fact that no link between them has been shown, this newspaper/magazine/blog recommends immediately eating/taking/doing more/less of the food/medicine/activity. This research contradicts previous studies/case reports/articles that have shown the opposite effect, but this article will conveniently forget the results we distorted last week to cause fear and sell more papers/magazines/get more blog hits. This newspaper/magazine/blog also recommends ignoring the advice of your well qualified and experienced doctor/nurse/pharmacist and instead taking all of your medical advice from some journalist looking for a good story. Further handpicked results/inspirational tales/hate speech will follow later in the week to rile up public support/anger/disgust for whoever/whatever/wherever we’re telling you to worship/hate/throw bricks through the window of and campaign outside with poorly spelled placards this week.

Today we’re reviving a regular feature you used to see the in the classic (pre-blog, paper only) version of Leftfield.

“Who the Hell is…” brings you the low down on key folk who’ve tried to make a difference to the world in the past. Previous people we’ve profiled have included Delegate Zero/Subcommandante Marcos, and Che Guevara.

Today, we’re asking: Who the Hell is… Albert Einstein?

That might seem a bit of a redundant question, since he’s one of the most famous scientists to have ever lived. Everyone has heard of him, and his name is like another word for “really really clever.” What’s less well known (but shouldn’t surprise you considering how smart he was) is that he was a lifelong socialist.

In science, Einstein completely revolutionised the study of physics, with his theories of relativity, beginning of quantum mechanics and explanation of the wave-particle duality of light, to name just a few of his massive contributions. His work was so important he was to become a world wide celebrity decades before celebrities became as commonplace as today. He used his international fame tirelessly to fight for social justice and for the rights of people who had been wronged by racism, the capitalist system and right wing politics.

Read the rest of this entry »

How mushrooms work

Last week there was one of the world’s largest gatherings of psychedelic scientists in 40 years.

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.”

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

Doctors: Frustrated with the government's pish

The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals, has used an editorial to slam the government’s ban on mephedrone.

Under the title ‘A collapse in the integrity of scientific advice in the UK,’ they write:

“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.