January 25, 2011
Drugs, Religion and the Usefulness of History
There’s currently a rather silly series airing on BBC3. How Drugs Work ostensibly “combines real life stories and computer graphics to explore inside the brain and the body” to find out, er, how drugs work.
Yet the cannabis episode is interesting, if only for one minor reason: the show’s repeated attempts to inject a sense of justification for marijuana’s prohibition. Despite being mostly an hour-long demonstration that illegality is largely pointless and unnecessary, deference to the norm of social prohibition has to be maintained. So we’re breathlessly told that after smoking a joint your chances of a heart attack increase by 50% - without it being noted that because most people are not at risk of having imminent heart attacks, this is largely irrelevant.* And so forth.
Those – like me – who favour moves to drug decriminalisation, and eventually controlled legalisation, often despair at the apparent impossibility of change. After all, the long-haired hippies of the swinging sixties grew up with drugs all around them…and proceeded to cut their hair, before become MPs, journalists and voters who largely favour continued criminalisation.
Yet social attitudes do change, and far bigger things than drug prohibition bear testament to this. Consider the case of Thomas Aikenhead, who on January 8th 1697 was executed for blasphemy in Edinburgh, after allegedly railing against the Holy Trinity. His was the last execution in Britain for this “crime”, and he was indicted as follows:
“That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Mahomet to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.”
By merely reproducing this text and stating that I heartily approve of Aikenhead’s antics, I thereby demonstrate that British society has changed profoundly. Yet before the 18th century, not only was blasphemy a capital crime, but the proposition that a society of atheists was even possible was treated by many as plainly ridiculous.
During the 18th century, the spectre of atheism and non-conformity gradually dwindled, as coerced adherence to approved religious dogma faded from the forefront of social anxiety. (If you want to understand some of this fascinating story from an intellectual history perspective, read this excellent book.)
Indeed, my hero David Hume is a case in point here. Born in 1711, he notoriously “cut off the nobler parts” of his 1739 magnum opus A Treatise of Human Nature, partly for fear that his irreligious positions might earn him Aikenhead’s fate. Yet by 1748, Hume instigated a devastating attack on natural religion in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And although it was ultimately published only posthumously, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion put the nail in the coffin of a host of religious arguments, without its publisher being indicted.
In less than a hundred years, British official public attitudes to the necessity of some level of religious conformity altered dramatically. Sadly, the reasons for this are far too complicated to expound here. Though it has something to do with the end of feudalism, the development of what we would now call capitalism, and the emergence of the modern coercive state apparatus. Plus the sheer variety of forms of religion and dissent growing ever exponentially after the protestant reformation, and the continued need in Britain to discover a via media between competing faiths (not least Catholicism) so as to avoid social breakdown.
If you think that attitudes towards the need for drug criminalisation today are deeply entrenched, they are as nothing compared to the importance of basic tenets of shared religion in early modern societies. After all, questions of religion reach into questions about the very nature, being and purpose of human existence, as well as the more pressing question of the ability of human beings to live together in peace.
What this nicely goes to show, therefore, is how history can help us gain some perspective. What may look to us, here and now, as necessary and fixed, may in fact prove to be contingent and transitory. A knowledge of the past thus has unexpected and indirect uses in the present, even if only to improve self-awareness.
Of course, philistine dunderheads fail to see this, usually whilst maintaining that only market-recognised “practical skills” have true value. On which point I note that the study of history is coming under the Coalition axe, as 80% cuts to University arts and humanities teaching budgets take effect. A well-known aphorism goes: those who don’t learn history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. More generally, I would say: those who don’t value the past are quite likely to fuck up the future.
–
* My favourite example of silly TV science about drugs was broadcast a few years ago. “Scientists” got some mice high on marijuana, and compared how long it took them to get out of a bowl of water vis-à-vis more sober mice. The glaring flaw in this “experiment”, however, is surely that it had no way of controlling for whether stoned mice just really love swimming.
September 12, 2010
Frankenstein Media
If you were to draw up a list of “People Most-Well Suited for Initiating Inter-Faith Dialogue and Putting Pressure on the U.S. President”, a redneck loon threatening to hold a Burn the Koran Ceremony would probably not be near the top.
Similarly, those consulted on how to deal with the results of a terrible tragedy – and empowered to bring public pressure on politicians and decision-makers – should not include victims of that tragedy.
That’s because being a victim (or the relative of one) is no qualification in itself. Indeed, just the opposite. Victims, and their friends and relatives, are often the worst people to offer advice on how to deal with a tragedy, precisely because they are emotionally involved in a way that severely distorts judgement. When my friend was murdered, I would have been the worst person to decide what happened to his killers precisely because my desire for revenge was barbaric.
Yet 9 years on from the tragedy of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we’ve seen exactly the opposite of what sanity would prefer.
Pastor Jones – leader of a congregation reported as being between 30 and 50 – has been catapulted onto the international stage by threatening to carry out an act of gross stupidity and bigotry. He is now in New York, demanding to speak to the Imam behind the “Ground Zero Mosque”. Which of course isn’t a Mosque, and isn’t at Ground Zero.* Thanks to the saturation coverage he has received, Jones has been able to put pressure on President Obama himself, and conspiracy theories of back-door deals are rife.
In turn, families of those killed on 9/11 have been quizzed relentlessly on how they feel about Pastor Jones, before naturally moving to subjects like the “Ground Zero Mosque” (WIAM,AIAGZ), Muslims in America, and the Afghanistan conflict. And whilst some of these interviewees have shown admirable restraint, reflection and forgiveness – that’s not the point.
The point is that the modern 24 hour media has this effect: it elevates people who are the least qualified and suited to offering policy advice and opinion – and in turn bring pressure to bear on politicians – precisely to positions of influence.
What’s interesting (and scary) is that for the most part this isn’t done on purpose. Whilst the Murdoch Fox News vanguard does seek to manipulate ordinary people – whether they be innocent mourners or hick loons – most news outlets don’t. They’re just reporting lazily on the “human interest” angle, going for cheap and easy stories by covering what everybody else already is, and filling schedules with handy telegenic victims. The process is self-perpetuating, and grows to be something none of its makers intended…or controls. Call it the Frankenstein Media Effect.
This weekend, the Frankenstein Media Effect will probably not result in further tragedy, at least not directly. And as far as insane and illogical responses to 9/11 go, the US-UK military adventure in Iraq is pretty hard to top.
Admittedly, sometimes the Frankenstein Media secures positive outcomes; think Joanna Lumley and the Ghurkhas, even if the Coalition has forgotten its promises already. But usually the results are more negative. Mountains of statistics on recreational drug-use may as well spontaneously combust, the minute a bereaved mother calls for a substance ban on the 6 o’clock news. Anecdotes from statistically anomalous cancer survivors power a “debate” about using scarce public resources to purchase medicine already proven not to offer justifiable value for money.
Our (global) Frankenstein Media is a fact of life. And because it’s a Frankenstein effect we’re dealing with, there’s nobody we can go to and demand that they shut it off. At least, short of abolishing the free press altogether. Which, obviously, is not recommended.
Nice world we have here, eh? Sleep tight.
–
* BBC reporting on the matter prefers to call it a “Mosque and Cultural Centre”. When it’s not a Mosque. Why? Because if they report the truth, the right will accuse the BBC of left wing PC gawn maadism – so the BBC distorts the truth in the name of “balance”. Kafka would be proud.
August 26, 2010
The Banality of Institutions
I’m increasingly interested in the role of institutions in people’s lives, and the way those institutions affect the moral choices and outcomes people find themselves committed to – or implicated in.
In particular, I think we should pay attention to the ways in which people find themselves compelled to do questionable acts, or participate in dubious programmes, because of institutional allegiances they’ve already committed to.
I have two examples in mind.
Nick Clegg now finds himself in a sticky situation. Having played king-maker and put the Conservative Party into office, the Lib Dems are complicit in a programme of “austerity” heavily criticised by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for being deeply regressive. (Indeed it’s worth stressing – as Larry Elliott does – that George Osbrone’s “emergency budget” is set to hit the poor hardest not just proportionally, but in straight cash terms).
Clegg’s is faced with holding together a party most of whose members would never have agreed to the Coalition if they’d known this would be the outcome. The Lib Dems were supposed to be a “moderating” influence on the Tories – but this increasingly looks like a naive, self-serving fantasy the Liberals told themselves to justify a share of power.
Nonetheless, many senior Lib Dems are committed to supporting policies they deeply disagree with. Even if only by remaining silent, figures like Vince Cable and Charles Kennedy are compelled to support ends they would rather oppose. To figures like Clegg, the burden falls heavier. He must go into print, publishing a nonsense attack on Britain’s leading impartial economic think tank (which he’d formerly heaped praise on). Clegg must ludicrously claim that regressive impacts on the poor will be offset by job creation, despite Osborne’s emergency budget being most likely to increase unemployment.
But the phenomenon goes wider than politics, and here’s another example. Increasing numbers of my friends are training to become teachers. Some of these friends – though of course not all – have previously been known to indulge in some light substance recreation. Usually just a spliff here and there, or maybe the occasional E on special occasions. No scenes from Scarface, just party prescriptions.
None of these friends ever died, killed anybody, raped anybody, committed serious crimes or did anything untoward when under the influence. They simply had a good time, left everybody else alone, and went about their evening. Yet when these friends become teachers, they will be compelled – by the institutional system they marry into – to stand in front of dozens of teenagers every year, and lecture them about the life-destroying evils of illegal drugs.
In other words, my friends will have to become systematic liars and hypocrites. Yet their lies will be disbelieved by future generations of kids, whose personal experiments will teach them far more than the propaganda of the school room. More widely, the bizarre social hysteria about recreational substances – other than violence-inducing alcohol, of course – will go on. Those who know very well that society’s attitude to drugs is founded on bullshit, will become the proverbial bulls.
As regards Nick Clegg’s dubious actions, we can perhaps be harsh. He played king-maker, this is politics, and now he must live with the consequences. We might, however, have more sympathy for more reluctant coalition figures like Cable and Kennedy. Surely not even in their worst nightmares did they expect it to be this bad after just a 100 days. Nonetheless, Lib Dem members who ever believed their party could be a force for social justice ought now to be considering their positions.
As regards my friends who must become hypocrites, they’ll no doubt learn to live with it – just as their own teachers did before them. And yet the consequence of everyone learning to live with this hypocrisy is the perpetuation of a drugs policy exhibiting collective social madness.
Hannah Arendt famously concluded that evil is characterised by banality. She was talking about something far worse than what I’ve drawn attention to today. But nonetheless, insofar as we want to understand life’s little lesser evils, and the banality that lies behind them, an examination of the commitments individuals find themselves reluctantly fulfilling because of the institutions they’ve pledged allegiance to will take us a long way.
August 24, 2010
Fairness, Drugs and the Dole
Does fairness dictate that we should support mooted Coalition ideas (stolen from New Labour) to force drug addicts and alcoholics to attend sessions aimed at kicking the habit?
The basic idea behind much recent egalitarian thinking might suggest so. What has become known as “luck egalitarianism” takes, as its starting point, the sensible idea that equality must track the choices for which people are responsible.
If you are rich and I am poor, the egalitarian must surely want to know a little more before deciding if the inequality is objectionable. If you are rich because you have worked very hard, and I am poor because I have done nothing but surf the beautiful Pacific and live on the beach for the last 15 years, then it seems fair that you should have more money/wealth/material resources than me. If I have chosen to be a beach bum, then it seems wrong to equalise the inequalities between us.
By contrast, if you and I have both worked equally hard throughout life, but you inherited piles of cash from your rich grandfather, whilst I was raised by a single mum in poverty, then insofar as inequalities between us reflect “brute luck” not our respective responsible choices, it would seem there’s a stronger case for taking some measures to equalise our situations.
So what happens if we apply similar thoughts to the idea of withdrawing benefits from addicts who won’t get clean?
A crude reasoning process might go like this: drug addicts have chosen to become addicted, and they are responsible for that; insofar as they demand support from the rest of us it is fair that they kick their addictions before we pay up.
Is that the end of the matter? No. For at least two reasons.
First, it may well be fair in principle to expect benefits-recipients to reciprocate by not only looking for work, but also by not spending state money on drugs. But fairness may be trumped by a more important value: respect. The case for this has been made by Jonathan Wolff, in a paper criticising some aspects of “luck egalitarianism”. Wolff’s core point is that although fairness is one important value, the over-rigorous pursuit of it can lead to practices that unacceptably demean and humiliate those they come into contact with.
Similarly, we might consider that subjecting drug and alcohol addicts to prying tests and conditional benefits is simply too disrespectful. That placing people under threat for not succeeding in overcoming addiction – a difficult enough process at the best of times – is unnecessarily cruel and invasive. Sure, drug and alcohol addiction at the expense of the state is not something many will be happy with. But the state should nonetheless resist the vindictive urge to punish vulnerable people; it should rise above the base and vicious instincts of the demagogic gutter press.
Secondly, pursuing fairness may be important, but consequences may matter more. Attempting to force people off drugs or alcohol by threatening to remove their benefits seems unlikely to succeed. Addiction is a powerful thing (and the meagre state dole of £65.45 a week alone isn’t enough to feed a serious habit anyway). Taking benefits away will simply push addicts deeper into crime, in order to further feed their addictions. There’s much to be said for fairness – but not if it means worse social consequences whose financial costs are likely to outstrip any meagre savings on offer.
However, don’t fail to note a certain irony in any discussion of whether its “fair” to withdraw benefits from some of society’s most vulnerable, impoverished and miserable.
If this government – or society generally – were really interested in “fairness”, we would get rid of private schools. We would massively increase inheritance tax rates. We would take measures to reverse the trend – growing since the 1980s – that says if you are born poor, you will most likely live and die poor.
But as a society, we’re not really interested in fairness. We’re interested in beating the vulnerable with big sticks. Sticks which we like to give names to. Names like “personal responsibility“, or “the importance of individual choice“.
August 12, 2010
Stalin Syndrome
Peter Hennessy’s revised and re-issued The Secret State contains a particularly astonishing revelation.
In the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union was getting the best intelligence possible about British activities. This was because five top British agents – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – were simultaneously working for the Russians, passing on mountains of top secret information.
When that information got to the USSR it went direct to Stalin, because he didn’t trust anybody else to prepare intelligence reports for him. Yet Stalin was a deeply deluded paranoid maniac. In particular, he was utterly convinced that Britain and the USA were planning a pre-emptive strike against the USSR before it could obtain nuclear weapons.
Yet the stolen information from Whitehall indicated that Britain was planning nothing of the sort. Devastated by conflict with Germany, Britain had zero intention of attacking Russia. Indeed, British intelligence lived in dread of a Red Army push westwards at a time when American resolve in Europe was waning.
However, Stalin had decided that Britain (and America) were preparing to attack. So he systematically ignored the best intelligence information he could have hoped for, and concluded that it was all a clever ruse by the British secret service.
Depending on perspective, we should either be deeply thankful or utterly chilled by Stalin’s delusions. We should be thankful if we decide that had Stalin treated the intelligence reports with the authority they deserved, he would have swept Westwards and conquered Europe. We should be chilled if we think that, on balance, information that should have made Stalin less paranoid – and thereby less likely to start World War III – was completely disregarded by him.
But then, doesn’t modern society exhibit a variation of this Stalin Syndrome? I refer to the special war which we’ve been fighting for 40 years; our war on drugs.
As the recent Channel 4 documentaries have been making clear, this is a war which we are losing and have no hope of winning. Let’s romp through some facts, already tedious to those who’ve thought about the madness of drug criminalisation for more than 5 minutes.
Britain spent £1.5 billion “fighting” the war on drugs last year. A recent estimate put the quantity of drugs prevented from reaching the market at 1%. But even if the authorities are doing 10 times better than that, they’re way off the 60-70% supply-prevention rate that the UN estimates is necessary to have any appreciable impact on the drug trade.
We spend further billions putting drug users and dealers in prison. Addicts are not rehabilitated, and leave prison only to fall back into cycles of crime and dependency. Dealers likewise pass through the permanently revolving door of criminal justice and drug supply. In the meanwhile, the drugs trade systematically corrupts law enforcement officers, customs officials, members of the judiciary and just about any section of society it comes into contact with.
British money spent on heroin makes its way to Afghanistan, where it is used to fund an insurgency in which British troops are being killed and mutilated. Although research shows that white and middle class citizens are as likely to use drugs as the poor and ethnic minorities, it is the latter that overwhelmingly make-up the prison population. In America it’s even more extreme, as Monday’s instalment at Channel 4 showed.
And that’s not even touching on the civil liberties question: why, exactly, should informed and consenting adults not be allowed to take certain substances in the privacy of their own homes, especially when this does no harm to others? Unlike alcohol, which kills thousands every year and lies behind most street violence and domestic abuse…but which is entirely legal.
The evidence is in: drug criminalisation does not work, and we need a change of approach.
But for whatever reason, the powers-that-be are exhibiting Stalin Syndrome. Refusing to accept the evidence because it does not fit the pre-determined conclusion: that drugs must continue to be criminalised. And because of Stalin Syndrome, the Channel 4 documentaries will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
In Uncle Joe himself, Stalin Syndrome risked the destruction of the entire planet. At least with the war on drugs it simply guarantees that we continue to collectively live-out the definition of insanity: to keep doing the same thing over and over, even when it’s failed.
Oh, that and the devastation of millions of lives across the globe. Hey, it’s your world. Try not to choke on it.
July 1, 2010
The Aesthetics of Poverty
Over the last year I’ve been living in East London, first in Whitechapel and then in Stepney Green. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much a tourist in these parts. As a funded graduate student I live off a government grant, and if things ever go pear-shaped I can run back to mummy and daddy. But nonetheless the past year has given me an insight into an aspect of poverty that is rarely – if ever – discussed.
Although I am not poor I see poverty on a daily basis in Tower Hamlets, in parts one of the most deprived boroughs in the country. When I campaigned for Labour in the general election, I had the dubious privilege of visiting some of the most run-down and decrepid estates in London. And decrepid is the word I want to focus on here.
There’s no doubt that one of poverty’s most grinding hardships must be the daily struggle to make ends meet; of living hand-to-mouth under the shadow of uncertainty, an unsecured future and a present of never having quite enough. For those living in poverty with children, the double burden of worrying not only about oneself but also about vulnerable dependents must simply be horrible.
But as well as those better-recognised aspects of poverty, there’s also the fact that poor people live in poor areas. And that really matters. I’ll try and paint you a picture.
Here in my flat, just off the Mile End road, not a day goes by without hearing (usually four or five times), the screech of police sirens. These are forever interspersed with the dull thud-thud of bass speakers from the local boy-racer cars, who compete in an apparently un-spoken agreement to find out who can turn corners the fastest (in most dangerous style) whilst blasting out what passes for “music”, at whatever time of the day.
There’s little doubt where the money for these cars is coming from. Indeed, there’s a small grassy area just 30 seconds from the back of my flat where a group of 5-10 Asian lads (not, by the way, that race matters) are doing their best to recreate a Baltimore corner scene from The Wire. Not that I would particularly want to sit on that area of grass. It’s covered in dog shit.
If I fancy a 25 minute walk I can always head off to the only area of open green space that isn’t covered in canine faeces and old beer cans: Victoria Park. In fairness, this is quite a nice park – not least because the drunks and drug addicts that make the rest of the local “greenery” effective no-go areas are spread-out there. Having said that, it doesn’t always feel especially safe: East London’s finest helldogs can usually be observed running off-lead and unmuzzled, occasionally savaging unfortunate Yorkshire terriers.
This may sound trivial, but over the last few weeks of hot weather its been incredibly frustrating to find that there are few clean, safe, welcoming areas in close distance to just go and sit in. (Remember that round here few people have gardens). It’s ok for me, of course; I can walk half an hour to get elsewhere, or take a tube. But imagining what it would be like to raise children around here – and in a cramped, too-hot by summer, freezing-by-winter, council flat to boot – isn’t much fun. Doing it must be far, far worse.
Walking round these streets – especially if you brave some of the estates – you soon notice what a state of disrepair everything is in. Paint peels from doors, loose bricks and slates hang from walls, pavements are uneven and black with dirt and used chewing gum. Sunlight is intermittent, as low-rise housing estates cast strange patterns of darkness. Whoever gave planning permission to the disjointed monstrosities that pass for local architecture clearly didn’t have “inspiring happy human emotions” at the top of their priority list.
And it really, really gets you down. The noise. The dirt. The disrepair. The vandalism. The permanent stained grey of the concrete. The sheer ugliness of it all.
Human beings are drawn to beauty, and nobody wants to live in a dump. Having to do so makes life far more unpleasant than it otherwise would be – and this is an aspect of poverty, heaped on top of the other hardships that brings, which really ought not to be forgotten.
The likely financial effects of the Tory budget on Britain’s poor are rightly receiving a lot of attention. Increased economic hardship may tip some struggling families over the edge, rendering the lives of many individuals even more difficult than they already are. But public spending cuts will also mean reductions in investment in basic infrastructure, in public cleaning, in park maintenance, in urban renewal. People – and most of them will be poor – who are living in already depressing areas such as Tower Hamlets can expect for things to only get worse over the next 5 years. It’s just one more way in which life in poverty will be made even harder.
April 2, 2010
Meow Meow
So-called “mephedrone”, or “4-MMC” (to reflect its chemical composition) or “meow meow” (to reflect what gullible journalists will believe) has been causing a stir in both the dead tress press and the sensible blogosphere.
Pretty much every mainstream media outlet has run scare-mongering stories about 4-MMC, from the supposedly sensible-about-drugs Observer to the hysterically shrill ban it ban it ban it! Daily Mail. Leftist bloggers with brains, like Left Outside and Scepticisle, have been doing a stirling job of putting their heads in their hands and moaning softly about the unfolding Kafkaesque nightmare of epic stupidity and lies. (Read this and this, and then also these).
Something that both Scepticisle and Left Outside have picked-up on is the possibility of a fourth drug classification, in which “new” substances could be put until proper scientific tests can be undertaken to ascertain excatly what they do. Instead, the government’s advisory panel on the misuse of drugs (the ACMD) is fast-tracking criminalisation:
“A far more appropriate response from a council interested in actual evidence rather than anecdote would have been to delay making a recommendation until more research had been conducted. Indeed, it’s almost certainly what the previous head of the ACMD, Professor David Nutt, sacked by Alan Johnson for criticising the government over their failure to reclassify Ecstasy following the committee’s advice would have recommended. Nutt has also suggested that a new classification, a so-called Class D, should be introduced under which “new” drugs like 4-MMC could be temporarily classified until more is known about them. This would allow them to be sold but place such substances under far stricter regulation than the current free-for-all, which will incidentally continue if it is criminalised but instead mean that it will be organised crime rather than legitimate businesses in control of the supply. It’s not just Nutt calling for such a change, but also the UK Drug Policy Commission, which is referring to its similar suggestion for a new emergency classification as “Category X”.”
Now, Scepticisle’s observations would be completely correct, if it were not for an over-reliance on one fatally flawed assumption: that we live in a country in which predominant attitudes towards drugs exhibit any consistent or broadly logical relation to the question of harm.
If society was really interested in reducing the harm that the use of mind-altering substances causes, then quite simply cannabis would be legal. Big question-marks would hang over alcohol – but we might continue to legalise it on the basis that prohibition in America (our relevant alternative case study) was a disaster of enormous social proportions. Yet if we were actually being consistent on our social harm metrics, we’d correspondingly take drugs out of the hands of violent criminal gangs by legalising and regulating their distribution.
Which straightforwardly tells us that predominant attitudes towards drugs don’t primarily seem to be tracking issues about harm. The action, therefore, is somewhere else. And accordingly, the suggestion of a “Class D” alternative is a chimera.
Of course, it’s a chimera that appeals to sensible people like Left Outside and Sceptic Isle. It emphasises restraint, reliance upon scientific evidence and a chance to assess likely harmful impacts before rushing to the statute books. But that simply isn’t how most people view drugs, which is out of the back of their heads because they’ve gone 180-degree swivel-eyed at the mere mention of the D word.
What they – and the media, and politicians, and Various Pillars of the Community – demand is a Tough Response. A Clamp Down. A Moral Message Backed Up By Law. Not because it will reduce harm to criminalise 4-MMC (after all, it won’t).* But because drugs are modern society’s collective demon; the evil in the night to terrify children with whilst hysterically bemoaning the Collapse of Decency.
Making 4-MMC “class D” would not fulfil the collective urge and demand for hysterical over-reaction. As a result, Professor Nutt’s suggestion misses the point entirely. That in this land the action regarding drugs lies not in the harm that they do or do not cause, but in the collective hysteria they elicit.
The interesting questions that thus emerge are: what is it about our society that generates this overwhelming collective propensity to go swivel-eyed? Why does the prospect of competent adults feeling a bit happier after sniffing some white powder, rather than (say) getting tanked-up in Wetherspoons before seeking a fuck or a fight, make people so frantic and upset? What is it in our collective social attitudes that creates a demand for such hysteria – and what function is that hysteria serving in our society?
–
*After all, it won’t: people will still take it, but now it will be supplied by organised criminals reducing its purity.
March 30, 2010
Ridiculous Claim of the Day
OK, it’s actually from last week.
But this piece of classic tabloid cliché hysteria from the Mail is priceless:
“Mephedrone, which sells for £10 a gram, is highly addictive and is reported to have led to some 11-year-olds selling it to even younger schoolchildren.”
It’s even better if you read it in the voice of Chris Morris.
Those seeking a sensible article about “meow meow” (as nobody calls it), go to Left Outside.
In Gloucestershire, children as young as 13 are taking the drug, according to education officials.
Last week, Mr Wainwright and Mr Smith died within hours of each other after taking the legal high on a night out.
Dr Cathy Montgomery, the psychology lecturer behind the research said: ‘During these tests, the university makes it clear they do not condone drug use.
‘Until now, most evidence comes from people anecdotally. We will be holding structured interviews with users, asking them how they feel at different time points.
‘They say it increases energy and improves their sociability. It also leads to goosebumps and increased heart rate, similar to ecstasy.
‘Students here at John Moores tell us they prefer mephedrone over the drugs they were using before.’
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs are due to report back to Home Secretary Alan Johnson on mephedrone at the end of this month.
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- What giving up sweets did for songstress Charlotte Church The mother-of-two has posed in a skin-tight dress… and even banished any airbrushing
- Now Jessica Simpson pours salt water up her nose for another bizarre beauty therapy You’ve got to take your hat off to her!
- Raquel Welch was rejected by model agencies until she found fame as an actress Sex bomb, now 69, reveals setback in new book
- Ricky Martin finally comes out as ‘a proud, homosexual man’ Livin’ La Vida Loca singer decided to tell truth while writing his memoirs
- Pregnant Dannii Minogue is pretty in pink as she jets off to judge Australia’s Got Talent She flew from home in Melbourne to Perth auditions
- Gerard Butler makes his escape… but it’s not long before Jennifer Aniston pins him down Bounty Hunter roadshow rolled limply into Berlin
- Sobbing Heather Mills claims: ‘I treated former nanny like a daughter’ Former Mrs Macca took the stand on Day Two of unfair dismissal case
- Cheryl Cole manages a happy smile as she surfaces at LA recording studio She’s back making music after bout of bronchitis
- Jail for teenage girl who posed with machine gun on Facebook as she fulfilled her dream of being a mobster’s moll
- First pictures of ‘Black Widow’ Moscow tube suicide bombers revealed
- Rapist who dumped victim on rubbish tip escapes deportation after judge says he ‘has right to marry and stay in UK’
- Woman stunned to find Romanian immigrant living in her shed (but he does recycle)
- Pet shop owner who sold goldfish to boy hauled before court and ordered to wear electronic tag
- Fury in U.S. as boy, 12, is to be tried as adult for shooting dead his father’s pregnant fianceé
- Labour MPs accused of fiddling their expenses to spend Election Day in court
- Labour in ‘utter retreat’ over death tax as parties clash over reforms to social care
- Look who’s back! Tony Blair returns to election trail to hail Brown’s ‘boldness’
- Boost for Darling as Britain’s emergence from recession stronger than first thought
- Tesco refuses to deliver food to woman’s home… because her street was ‘bad area’
- ‘Super-Taser’ shotgun bullet that can knock down criminals from 100ft considered by Home Office
- ‘Saving Private Ryan’ brothers of soldier killed in Afghanistan pay silent tribute at his repatriation
- Father who filmed children saying ‘goodbye mummy’ before strangling them is jailed
- I’m dreaming of a white… summer? Snowstorms leave drivers stranded, with more wintry weather to come
- Businessman ‘drugged and raped teenager after paying £300 for her to be brought to his home’
- Poor children could be sent to school on Saturdays to help them achieve as much as the rich, say Tories
- Levi Bellfield to be charged over murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler
- Gay rights campaigner condemns £1,000 fine for preacher who said homosexuality is a sin
- Need to move a dumped mattress? We’ll need a JCB, says ‘jobsworth’ council
- Smacking ban extended to Muslim madrassahs and after school clubs
- Belgian man who raped his daughter, 4, walks free after claiming he suffered from ‘sexsomnia’
- Horror as bodies of 21 Chinese babies wash up on riverbank
- ‘You’re branding all men paedophiles’ says swimmer locked out of pool changing room while schoolboys dress
- Large Hadron Collider breaks new record as scientists create Big Bang-like conditions
- MORE HEADLINES
- Rapist who dumped victim on rubbish tip avoids deportation after judge says he ‘has right to stay and marry in UK’
- Woman stunned to find Romanian migrant living in her shed (but he does recycle)
- Businessman ‘drugged and raped teenager after paying £300 for her to be brought to his Mayfair home’
- Hero soldier who survived Taliban attacks is killed in Britain… by a pothole on the A338
- Fury in U.S. as boy, 12, is to be tried as adult for shooting dead his father’s pregnant fianceé
- Pet shop owner fined £1,000 and told to wear an electronic tag… for selling a GOLDFISH to a boy aged 14
- Christian nurse ‘ordered to remove crucifix… at hospital where Muslims were allowed to wear headscarves’
- ‘I know you is the mayor… it was an accident’: Bike-riding Boris Johnson confronts litter louts in ‘souped-up Astra’
- First pictures of ‘Black Widow’ suicide bombers who killed 39 people on Moscow metro
- Shipwrecked! Six months of turtle meat lies ahead for family stranded on Pacific island
- Coronation Street actress charged with drink-driving ‘after being found twice the limit’
- A father at 74: Bananas helped pensioner become Britain’s oldest dad
- Millionaire sues escort for £60,000 after she refused to let him turn her into ‘Pretty Woman’
- ‘I treated my ex-nanny like a daughter’: Sobbing Heather Mills gives her side of the story to unfair dismissal tribunal
- Schoolgirl arrested as 12 teenage boys in court charged with stabbing 15-year-old schoolboy to death in Victoria Tube station
- Now showing… Samantha Cameron premieres her baby bump in chic beige outfit
- Tesco refused to deliver food to residents… because the street was blacklisted as ‘a bad area’
- We’ll ALL cut more than Maggie: Darling, Osborne and Cable go head to head in TV’s Battle of the Chancellors
- School becomes first to hand every single pupil a laptop to use in lessons and at home (that’s 1,400 computers at £400 each)
- Rare Austin which stood in garage for 50 years discovered… and starts first time!
- I’m dreaming of a white… summer? Snowstorms leave drivers stranded, with more wintry weather to come
- Pupils ‘frogmarched by teachers to have fingerprints taken’ so they could eat in canteen
- Jail for teenage girl who posed with machine gun on Facebook as she fulfilled her dream of being a gangster’s moll
- Blair faces questions over secretive investment deals as he returns to back Brown’s election campaign
- MOST READ IN DETAIL
EDITOR’S SIX OF THE BEST
- Is this the face of Jesus? Computer artists claim to have recreated Christ’s face from Turin Shroud
- Pineberries and cream? The new summer fruit which looks like a white strawberry… but tastes like a pineapple
- New warning to smokers: Traces of pig’s blood found in cigarettes
- Is this one of the most polluted areas of Britain? Idyllic ‘Heartbeat’ village ‘has second most filthy atmosphere in UK’
- Just in time for Easter, scientists say chocolate is GOOD for your heart… but only one square
- Nasa spacecraft takes amazing thermal image of Saturn moon (that looks just like Pac-Man)
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October 8, 2009
Secrecyjurisdictions.com
The Tax Justice Network this week launched the world’s biggest website for the study of “secrecy jurisdictions” – those shady little corners, more commonly known as “tax havens”, where the rich and well connected hide their ill-gotten gains, or clean dirty money on its way to legitimate western bank accounts.
Secrecyjurisdictions.com is a massive, on-going research project. It collects key data on the world’s 60 secrecy jurisdictions and aims to “map the faultlines” of the global financial infrastructure (including the “pinstripe army” of lawyers, bankers and accountants) which enables tax evasion, terrorist financing, organised crime, the looting of developing world assets, and a whole host of other evils, to take place.
As the website Project Overview states:
Secrecy jurisdictions facilitate illicit financial flows stemming from three overlapping sources: bribery, criminal activity and cross-border trade mispricing. Secrecy jurisdictions and those operating through them undermine development for the poorest countries, and create a criminogenic environment in which all sorts of crimes can thrive and feast on the fruits of law-breaking.
Secrecy jurisdictions facilitate a wide range of crimes such as tax evasion, non-payment of alimonies, money laundering, terrorist financing, drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal arms trading, counterfeiting, insider-dealing, embezzlement, fleeing of bankruptcy orders, all sorts of fraud, and many more.
…
Financial opacity undermines the rule of law and destroys trust in markets. Loss of trust seriously damages market efficiency, raising the cost of capital and wrecking confidence in democracy.
The purpose of secrecyjurisdictions.com is to serve as a resource for those seeking to bring about positive change in the international financial system.
That change is desperately needed. Global Financial Integrity has estimated that each year, developing and transnational economies experience $800 billion – $1.06 trillion of outflows due to illicit financial flows. Each year, the developed world gives these economies just $100 billion in aid. By facilitating illicit financial flows, secrecy jurisdictions are at the heart of global poverty, as well as a wider web of corruption, crime and financial abuse. Secrecyjurisdictions.com is an early step in global attempts to clean up the international financial system, to create a better world.
More information can be found at the Tax Justice Blog, and at Tax Research UK.
(Yes, I helped with this project. But only a little bit. At least compared to the thousands of hours put in by some of the team).
August 25, 2009
Why Tories Should Bother to Watch The Wire
Liberal Conspiracy today reported that Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling claimed that parts of Britain are now akin to sublime American drama series The Wire’s depiction of Baltimore. He said:
“The Wire used to be just a work of fiction for British viewers. But under this government, in many parts of British cities, The Wire has become a part of real life in this country too. Far too many of those features of what we have always seen as a US phenomenon are now to be found on the streets of Britain as well.”
As Sunny Hundal at LibCon and Sunder Katwala at Next Left have already pointed out, Michael White at the Guardian politics blog has exposed Grayling’s claims as complete nonsense:
“Now down to the stats. The city of Baltimore, where The Wire was set by local reporter David Simon, has a population of around 640,000 and a murder rate – falling, I am happy to note – of 234 in 2008, down from 282 in 2007 after rows about fiddled figures – a detail which echoes the TV series.
Is that around 40 murders per 100,000? That’s around six times the New York rate of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2008 (523 murders, slightly up on 2007) and a lot, lot higher than the UK – where the murder rate per 100,000 is around 1.4, slightly higher than France, lower than Scotland (2.56), a lot lower than South Africa (49.6). The overall US murder rate is 5.5 – a quarter of post-Soviet Russia’s.”
Yet Grayling’s claims are to be lamented and criticised on a number of levels. As Sunder Katwala points out, this is indicative of the Conservative’s tactic of pounding out the mantra of “Broken Britain” which deliberately perpetuates a myth and lie about our society, in a cynical bid to gain votes through fear.
This cynicism is only made more tasteless by the fact that Grayling has clearly never watched The Wire. As Sunny Hundal reported, Grayling squirmed when questioned on BBC Breakfast:
Interviewer: Have you really seen any more than that first episode?
Grayling: Yes I’ve seen a number of … I’ve seen most of the first series. I have seen a number of the other episodes yes. I have.
But then, as Sunder points out, “Grayling won’t mind demonstrating his ignorance of The Wire – and he probably wanted a row about the state of our cities.”
Which is a real shame, because Grayling – and the rest of the Tories – could learn a thing or two from watching possibly the greatest television show ever created. To this end, there’s the more obvious points which have already been well-made in the LibCon comments thread:
“If Grayling had watched The Wire he’d have realised that it portrays the ‘tough approach’ to drugs to be an abject failure, and that the key lies in education and decriminalisation.”
“The final series also explored the role of the media in turning complex social and political problems into simple narratives of goodies vs baddies. You have to wonder if Grayling saw any of it at all.”
- Shatterface
“I would say it also demonstrates how good our relatively restrained policy on drugs is in comparison to the shit that Americans have to put up with.”
-Nick
Yet I want to focus on something specific about what The Wire achieves amidst those more general assesments. Namely, a sublime exposition of the importance of uncontrolled arbitrariness in life. The Tories would do well to pay attention.
Arbitrariness – and more generally, luck – have preoccupied a lot of the best philosophers of the last 60 years. John Rawls, for example, devised an entire political conception of justice around the idea that people could not be held responsible for arbitrary factors of their birth, and that social and material inequalities that result from such arbitrary factors can only be justified if they serve to make the worst-off better-off than they would otherwise have been. Ronald Dworkin and the late, lamented G.A. Cohen battled for decades about the role of luck in which socio-economic inequalities society ought to tolerate. Bernard Williams, probably the greatest moral philosopher of his century, spent many a paper exploring the impacts and effects of “moral luck”; the way arbitrary uncontrollable factors influence our conceptions of, and responses to, ethical situations.
The Wire is engaged in the same exploration of issues of arbitrariness and luck in determining socioeconomic distributions, and the attitudes we attach to them. In particular, it brings out beautifully the way in which one’s birth – over which one has no control – determines so much.
Take, for example, the character of D’Angelo in Series 1 and 2. Most viewers probably start out disliking D’Angelo: he is a murder, a drug dealer, and a man who conducts a long-running affair behind the back of the mother of his child. As clear a cut case of a conventional “bad guy” as you could ask for? Not at all. For one of the best aspects of the first two series of The Wire is the manner in which the D’Angelo is gradually humanised to the audience: he turns out to be a man of great integrity, loyalty, intelligence and honour.
How to reconcile these apparently contradictory characters? There’s no quick answer – in part because the beauty of The Wire is that it doesn’t deal in quick answers – but in large measures the contradiction is resolved as one comes to see that D’Angelo is who he is because he was born a member of the Barksdale crime family. He was born into a life of crime, raised to be a drug dealer from day one. Thus the extent to which he is a man of integrity, honour and loyalty is forever reflected through the prism of the arbitrary fact that he is a Barksdale.
What The Wire shows is how powerfully that arbitrary fact of his birth controls D’Angelo’s destiny – and how different it could all have been. For if D’Angelo had been born on the other side of the tracks, if his mother had not been the sister of a drug lord, he could just as easily have grown up to be a cop as a criminal. It’s the arbitrary fact of his birth – the sheer luck of the matter, for which he did nothing to deserve – that dictates his future.
The Wire not only explodes the conventional myths that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” by presenting every character as multi-faceted and complex, it goes further and shows that if there are such things as clear-cut bad guys, understanding why they are bad is no easy task. What it certainly shows is that in many cases bad guys no more choose to be bad than good guys choose to be good; that arbitrary factors of birth play a far greater role in determining fates than choices individuals make. And it is the brutal, unflinching realism of The Wire’s character depictions which make this lesson so compelling and hard to refute.
It is against this backdrop that the Tory’s attempt to co-opt The Wire as part of its rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is so misguided, and why the Tories would do well to actually bother to watch the programme from start to finish. For a key component in Tory rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is the notion that society is disintegrating because people do not take personal ‘responsibility’ for their actions, choosing to blame external factors instead. Accordingly, the way to “mend” Britain – we are told – is to increase the focus upon ‘personal responsibility’, reflected in an emphasis on retributionist punishment of the individual as oppose to society-wide attempts to deal with situational causes. Indeed, just last Thursday David Cameron managed to include such rhetoric in his speech about the NHS:
“I stuck my neck out on this before when I said that instead of blaming external factors for everything, it’s time we recognised that there is a moral choice…that personal responsibility cannot be shirked.”
Presumably when he spoke of “sticking his neck out”, Cameron is referring to his speech of July 2008:
“society…is in danger of losing its sense of personal responsibility, social responsibility, common decency and, yes, even public morality.”
Yet these are messages about society which are completely antithetical to the lessons of The Wire: that life and society is complex, that much is determined before one is even born, that judgements about good and evil cannot be reduced to simple, convenient narratives about “personal responsibility”. Because such a notion is worse than meaningless in the real world: it is positively dangerous because it leads politicians to advocate simple solutions to complex problems, with disastrous results.
Which is not to say that The Wire removes all questions about personal responsibility and reduces everything to simple determinism. It doesn’t. But what it does do is show that it is wholly inadequate to just emphasise personal responsiblity at the expense of situational factors and determinants over which one has no control.*
That’s why the Conservatives should bother to watch The Wire. Without leaving the comfort of the Westminster Village they could learn more about the real world than they have ever yet managed to grasp. All they need are some DVDs.
There is, however, a final and considerable irony to Grayling’s attempt to appropriate The Wire to promote social policies which are completely contradictory to the programme’s message. And I’m not thinking of the quote from Wire creator David Simon that’s already been remarked upon:
“It is possible that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: “You are hopelessly full of shit.”
Rather, I draw your attention to the following:
“Why is it that it’s so hard for everyone to focus on these problems? What are we paying attention to? What gets our focus, and what doesn’t? And why? The Wire spends a lot of time pointing its finger at this institution and that institution, and deconstructing a lot of the dysfunction slice by slice. But the last finger to point is at our selves. So to quote the great line from Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s kind of where we’re going with the last season. If this is really what ails us, and if this is really what needs to be addressed, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?”
That final question remains unanswered. Grayling and the Tories, by pumping out their tired, simplistic rhetoric about “personal responsibility” can only cause such a question to remain unsanswered. That’s the biggest – and most egregious – irony of it all, because I want to know, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?
–
* This paragraph is an edit made in response to a comment from John Meredith at the Liberal Conspiracy shortened version of this piece.
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