Book-buying pro-tip: If you’re in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road and go to the counter with just Snowblind and Cocaine Nights in your hand, the shopkeeper lady will make a comment and look at you as if you’re a drug fiend.
Trust me…
And this is why we shouldn’t let media outrage and fear-mongering dictate such sensitive issues as government drug policy:
A few months ago, there was a whole flurry of hand-wringing in the media after a few people died after allegedly taking mephedrone, a legal high drug. In particular, two teenagers were among those deaths, and their parents were amongst the most vehement in calling for a ban on the drug.
Despite the lack of real scientific evidence as to the dangers of the drug, the government swiftly banned it, with immediate effect. A number of arrests followed for those continuing to sell it from websites and in clubs, and talk has risen of further bans on other legal high products.
The government basically took a completely kneejerk reaction to some fearmongering headlines, and now we have another drug added to the extensive list of illegal substances that really don’t have as much of a lethal effect as alcohol and cigarettes.
Oh, and the reason why reacting in this fashion is wrong? They didn’t have all the facts.
The toxicology reports released today for the two teenagers above have shown that in fact they had not taken any of that drug prior to their deaths.
This reminds me so much of the panic around swine flu, when a few people died at the start of that outbreak. There was a ridiculous amount of coverage, with screaming frontpage headlines proclaiming the apocalypse, for each death, but when those deaths were later shown to be entirely non-flu related, that news was relegated to page 94.
The fear had been put into the populace, and to be honest many won’t even have noticed the corrections or follow-ups. The media’s view of the story thus becomes the one which the public believes to have actually happened, despite that not being true.
And we’re seeing the same again now with mephedrone: a couple of scary headlines, and things change. The government’s reaction to swine flu cost us millions in buying Tamiflu and staffing a swine flu hotline. The new drugs policy has instantly criminalised thousands of people.
And this is why we shouldn’t let the media dictate government policy.
Despite all the press stories, there is actually no confirmed case in Britain of mephedrone having contributed to any death in any way. That’s not to say that it isn’t dangerous: today the ACMD is reported to have identified at least 18 deaths in England and a possible seven in Scotland where cathinones, of which mephedrone is one, have been implicated. In seven cases, there was evidence of mephedrone at post-mortem. But, as yet, no inquest has concluded that mephedrone killed someone.
Mark Easton, summing up the government’s decision to ban mephedrone, also known as meow-meow, and their lack of reliance on any evidence for doing so.
Other, that is, than frenzied media crowing which isn’t yet based on any firm facts. It reminds me a lot of the ridiculous storm around swine flu and the early deaths supposedly caused by that virus, which in fact turned out to be entirely unrelated.
Show me a post-mortem that identifies mephedrone as the cause of death (or even a cause of death), and I’ll start to think that it could be dangerous. Until then, I’ll trust scientists more than I will headlines.
Writing about Brass Eye a few minutes ago reminded me of this clip, which I just showed to the girlfriend in order to educate her about the brilliance of Brass Eye. It’s from the Drugs episode, and it shows how celebrities, and even a freakin’ Member of Parliament can be duped into doing material for an anti-drug campaigns.
Cake, you see, is a “made-up drug”. This didn’t stop the great and good from preaching to us about its dangers and effects, and the MP even went so far as to bring it up in Parliament! Epic win.
Oh, and this is nothing when compared to the similar tactic used in the Paedophile episode, which got one celebrity to state to camera that the average paedophile has more DNA in common “with a crab, than with you or I”. Utter, utter genius.
Sabine posted a link to a great story on Wired about the placebo effect in medicine, and its effect on Big Pharma’s R&D in recent years.
It reminded me of how Ben Goldacre in Bad Science explained the placebo effect beautifully, and most importantly told how to test for it efficiently and correctly. This, evidently, is something that pharmaceutical companies have been loathe to do (or to admit to doing, at least) for many years.
The most troubling part for me of the article was the infographic on page 3, including the above snippet. Seriously, branding accentuates the placebo effect? Good God we’re a society/generation of consumers.
EDIT: I should title this post “If Carlsberg made placebos…”
The Daily Mail amuses me sometimes. Usually it irritates me beyond belief, but sometimes it’s so incredulous that I can’t help but find it funny.
Take this story, for example, which details some made-up anger about the BBC hiring ex-tennis player Martina Hingis as one of their celebs on the new series of Strictly Come Dancing (the forerunner of Dancing With The Stars in the US).
The Daily Mail and their handily available angry commentators Mediawatch UK are up in arms because Hingis was forced to quit tennis for a second time last year after a positive test for cocaine. She denies it, obviously, but the ITF still banned her for two years.
My issue isn’t with that.
It’s the way that another celeb in this year’s line-up is being given a free pass, and has been for the last few years by the media.
Scroll down to the bottom of the article and look at the group photo. See the guy on the left?
That’s ex-cricketer Phil Tufnell. He has a criminal conviction for assaulting his then wife. Not just an accusation or a rumour. A full on, court of law guilty judgment against him.
How the fuck is maybe using cocaine worse than assaulting someone?!?! The Daily Mail’s morals (as ever) are sorely misguided on this one.
The UK government is going to make a number of “party drugs” illegal by the end of this year, ostensibly in a bit of a knee-jerk reactions to a couple of deaths after the consumption of these drugs. The drugs are currently sold openly in the UK, and over the internet, but from next year possession with intent to supply will carry a maximum jail sentence of 14 years, with mere possession punishable by up to five years in prison.
Already, I’ve seen accusations of nanny state-ism, and as usual references are made to the existing legal death aids of alcohol and cigarettes.
My issue, however, is with the reasoning that making something illegal will reduce the number of deaths from it. I say that, because today it was announced that deaths from illegal drugs rose 8% year-on-year, including a 20% rise in cocaine-related deaths.
Now cocaine has been illegal since forever. So that policy is working, then…
It looks like I spoke too soon: Tour stage winner tests positive
Just after I’d proclaimed this year’s Tour de France as the cleanest in a decade, it seems that one of the stage winners has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Sigh.
As an afterthought to that photo concerning the Tour de France, I’m delighted to say that this year’s Tour was the cleanest for many, many years. I wrote last year a few times about the tainting of the sport through drug use, and it’s great to see that the sport has cleaned up its act.
This truly was a great Tour de France, and I especially liked having the penultimate stage finishing with a massive climb, to really test the mettle of the leading bunch. The route this year was pretty solid, taking in a good few mountain stages, but also giving the sprinters stages to aim at too. And starting with a time trial that involved a hefty climb was a fantastic idea. That really sorted the men from the boys, straight from the off.
Hopefully they’ll be back to London for the prologue in a few years time; the 2010 Tour starts in Rotterdam next July, and I’m already looking forward to it.
One thing I wished the film went into a bit more was the fact that beyond diabetes the U.S. is seeing more cases of autism, ADD, allergies and depression in children, and what we eat can be linked to such problems.
Erin has written a great review of the film Food Inc, which seemingly takes the book Fast Food Nation to another level in terms of uncovering the hows and whys of our fast food diet.
But, and I genuinely hate to be this guy, I have to say that I found the above paragraph to be a little misleading. I’m a firm believer in the fact that the upswing in diagnoses of the above diseases/conditions is only because of a result in the increase of testing for such disorders.
50 years ago, there was no such thing as ADD, or mild dyslexia. But now we have these titles for them, and accommodate them accordingly. I don’t want to say that these conditions don’t exist, but I genuinely feel that we use them too much as an excuse nowadays.
Your kid is unruly and doesn’t listen to your instructions? He must have ADD. We’ve lost the ability, or, more likely, the willingness to label an individual as a “bad kid” and thus belittle his parents to boot. Instead, we prescribe shit like Ritalin and give the child more leeway in his actions.
And let’s be honest, do we know anything about the long-term effects of these behavioural drugs? Do we fuck. We’re basically doing a long-term experiment on unwitting and unconsenting participants. I struggle to see a morality in that.
When did we lose this method of social diagnosis? It’s as if we want to excuse every action as mere genetics or inevitable. We no longer want to say that people are bad parents, even though we know instinctively that they must be.
Look at things from a solely statistical viewpoint: 49.9% of parents are going to be “bad parents” in terms of the median. Yes, I’m simplifying massively, and ignoring the whole concept of orphans and so forth, but my point remains the same:
If we’re aiming for a particular threshold of behaviour amongst kids, then we have to admit that some parents are incapable of achieving that level in their children. But we shouldn’t be prescribing drugs to overcome that “problem”. We should be educating both the parents and children in an effort to improve their relationships and thus the kids’ behaviour.
Drugs are not the answer.
[To be clear, I’m not getting at Erin here. It’s just that her paragraph has got me thinking on the subject.]
Reblogged from: brieflynoted
Originally posted on: briefly noted
