Friday, 16 April 2010
Hypocrite!
TransformDrugs @DrEvanHarris.@johannhari101 @bengoldacre "Drugs available to people who need them" said Cameron having earlier laid into methadone
Johann Hari on the Tory drug policies - 'Ian Duncan Smith's drug fantasies'
The Quiet Man is turning up the volume once more - and this time, he wants to drown out the demon dealers of the Demon Weed. Ian Duncan Smith (remember him?) is back with a fat report into how to end poverty in Britain. The sections demanding the financial punishment of single mothers have already been pored over and torn up for their sociological illiteracy. But there is a yet-to-be-noticed section of the new Tory plans that would have an even more bracingly reactionary effect - and send your own odds of being a victim of crime sky-rocketing.
Let's look at skinning-up first. IDS believes that spliff-smoking is such a catastrophe that cannabis needs to be reclassified as a Class B drug and the police need to spend thousands of hours to tracking down the people who sell and smoke it (rather than, say, murderers and rapists). But he bases this view on blatant three factual errors.
IDS Error One: Cannabis today is much stronger than the cannabis of the 1960s. It is now a different drug to the one our hippy parents smoked. This is asserted casually these days, even by cuddly liberals who once supported cannabis legalisation. But in reality, the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction has published a major long-term study of cannabis potency - and found this is nonsense. "The effective strength of cannabis consumed in Britain has remained stable for the past 30 years," the report explains. There is variety between different kinds of cannabis - super-skunk is obviously more powerful - but the report found that "this variety always existed... there have always been some samples that have had a high potency."
IDS Error Two: cannabis 'causes' psychosis. A major study at the University of Cologne and King's College, London published this May showed a much more complex picture, with different chemical constituents of cannabis having different effects. The researchers found that although tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the ingredient that produces a high, giggly feeling, can trigger psychosis in a very small number of users, another chemical component to cannabis, cannabidinol (CBD), actually inhibits and supresses psychotic symptoms in people suffering from them. CBD is so good at supressing psychotic symptoms that it proved to be more effective than any of the major anti-psychotics currently prescribed by doctors.
Professor Jim van Os suggests a solution: legal cannabis could be easily grown and marketed with high CBD levels, ending the psychotic effect. Indeed, such a drug would actually be helpful for psychotics to smoke. Obviously, it's impossible to do this while cannabis remains in the hands of gangsters and organised crime syndicates - a certainty under prohibition. So it is actually more accurate to say cannabis prohibition causes cannabis psychosis - and legalisation would end it.
IDS Error Three: Relaxing the law makes more people use drugs. Between 1972 and 1978, eleven US states decriminalized marijuana possession. So did hundreds of thousands of people rush out to smoke the now-legal weed? The National Research Council found that it had no effect on the number of dope-smokers. None. The people who had always liked it carried on; the people who didn't felt no sudden urge to start.
But IDS' factual errors become even more startling when he turns to the needle. He has a simple solution to heroin addiction: he will end all the legal methadone and heroin prescriptions in Britain, and demand addicts stop altogether. They will be offered a Bible and a session of rehab - and after that, they're on their own.
This is part of a Tory critique of the current government's policy. Since 1997, Labour has - below the radar - radically revised Britain's drug treatment policies. They took a hard look at the evidence and admitted something inconvenient: even the best rehab centres in the world, the Betty Fords and the Priorys, have a success rate of just 20 percent. That means that for 80 percent of addicts, rehab, alas, doesn't work. If these addicts are offered no help or support beyond that one policy, as IDS demands, then we know what happens: they become burglars, or street prostitutes, or corpses. So the government increased methadone prescriptions by 87 percent. (They were more cowardly on heroin prescription, only running a few clinical trials).
And the result? As the former Deputy Drugs Tsar Mike Trace told me, "These prescriptions are the secret reason why crime has fallen so much under the current government." The Cheshire Drug Squad found in the 1980s that the presence of a rare heroin-prescribing clinic on their patch caused an incredible 94 percent drop in theft, burglary and property crimes. We are seeing a similar effect across Britain today - and IDS will reverse it.
Far from "giving up on addicts", giving them a regular prescription sets them free to have a normal life. Many go on to excel. Look at Dr William Stewart Halsted, the early twentieth-century captain of the Yale football team who became "the father of modern surgery" and the cofounder of the world-famous John Hopkins Hospital. Here is a typical description of his surgical technique: "He used frequently light, swift, sparing movements with the sharpest of knives, instead of free, heavy handed deep cutting... [There was] the minimum of hemorrhage." He did it all while injecting a minimum of 180 milligrams of morphine a day. He, of course, had access to a safe, legal supply, which he prescribed to himself. All the evidence shows it is scrambling for an illegal and contaminated supply that screws up opiate addicts - not the drug itself.
But IDS calls all this "methadone madness", serving up in its place a plate of cold turkey, with a cup of lukewarm moral piety to wash it down with. As Danny Kushlick, head of the drug reform charity Transform, explains: "The report's authors avoid the science and the evidence like the plague. It is the worst-written, most poorly informed report on drugs policy I have ever seen."
Will this now become Tory policy? One of the very few areas in which David Cameron is impressive is in his subtle, supple understanding of drugs policy. In 2002 he served on the Health Select Committee, interviewing dozens of experts on drugs policy, where he clearly understood the issues. He ended by co-authoring a brave report which said legalisation should be considered as an option - so we can finally take drugs back from armed criminal gangs and hand them to doctors and pharmacists.
As he picks up IDS' ramblings, Cameron faces a dillemma. Will he go with his own intellectual convictions, which tell him drug prohibition has been "disastrous", or will he appease his panicked party yet further by adopting this infantile prohibitionist cry? David, it's time to turn the volume down on the Quiet Man - to zero.
(April 2007)
You can read more articles Johann Hari has written about drug legalisation here.
If you support drug legalisation, the best British organisation to join is the excellent Transform whose website is here.
Bettie Page - FBI consultant
When a 1957 police drug raid on a Harlem apartment turned up a cache of obscene magazines and photos, paddles, a riding crop, a whip, and lengths of chain, rawhide, and rope, FBI agents contacted Page for some expert guidance. Specifically, they wanted to know if the apartment was a photo studio where obscene material was produced. According to the below memo sent to Hoover, Page told investigators that she “had never heard of that type of photography being made in Harlem.” An agent reported that Page also advised that the “flagellation and bondage pictures that she had posed for” were shot “in photographic studios or photographers apartments.”
The seized porn, which included “two books and four pictures depicting Betty Page in various poses,” was shipped to Washington for “examination” by the FBI Laboratory, according to a second memo. At some point, agents planned to quiz the apartment’s inhabitants about “what the source of these items was, and to what use they were putting them to.”
See the documents
New progressive Tory policies #1
Cameron comes out against substitute prescribing for opiate addicts?
The triumph of a lone skeptic...
It's finally over for Simon Singh - the BCA is no longer pursuing him for defamation.
It's good and bad, though, since the stupidest law in the world remains unchallenged, and anyone so inclined can use the british libel law to silence any critics, right or wrong...
It's good and bad, though, since the stupidest law in the world remains unchallenged, and anyone so inclined can use the british libel law to silence any critics, right or wrong...
They dropped the case, and it’s over.
Well, kinda. Actually, there are a lot of unresolved things here. One is that Simon is out over £100,000 of his own money. Had this gone to court and he won, the BCA would have had to pay his expenses.
That’s a pretty strong incentive on their part to have dropped the case, not-so-incidentally. I’ll note that fellow skeptic Ben Goldacre says Simon may go after the BCA for costs, something I would dearly love to see.
Second, the libel laws in the UK are still truly awful. I hope that the libel reform groups there keep the pressure on the government to look over those laws and drag them from the 17th into the 21st century. Don’t forget to show your support (even if you’re not from the UK)!
And third, I wonder how this will affect the BCA. Will they be more careful? Will they review their practices, going over them carefully to see which ones are backed by scientific reviews and testing, and which ones may be nothing more than thinly-veiled nonsense that not only do not help but can in fact harm or even kill patients?
They are all the fugn same
LaraABCNews Just stumbled on fact that Anwar Al Awlaki, Yemeni-American terrorist cleric, was arrested for soliciting prostitutes in San Diego in 90s
The Perils of Plastic
TIME Magazine recently highlighted “The Perils of Plastic.” Here’s what they have to say about Bisphenol A (BPA), the type of plastic used to bottle water:
What It Is: A chemical used in plastic production
Found In: Water bottles, baby bottles, plastic wraps, food packaging
Health Hazards: The government’s National Toxicology Program has concluded that there is some concern about brain and behavioral effects on fetuses and young children at current exposure levels
What You Should Know: Switch to glass products when possible
Thank you to each and every one of you
The stats for the last year
Sometime in the next 24 hours 'Exile' is about to get it's 250,000th visitor.
What can I say?
I started this blog on the last day of September 2008 after losing my job and I never in my wildest dreams thought that it would ever have got this far.
So to everyone of you that visits all I can say is "thanx"
Mona
XXX
Concertgoers VS record hoarders - who has more friends?
Once again, science proves what would appear obvious: people who have rich lives are more interesting and are more liked than people who are centered around their collecting habits (sadly, I seem to be part of that group, which would mean I am headed straight for depression unless I start getting out some more soon).
Van Boven has spent a decade studying the social costs and benefits of pursuing happiness through the acquisition of life experiences such as traveling and going to concerts versus the purchase of material possessions like fancy cars and jewelry.
"We have found that material possessions don't provide as much enduring happiness as the pursuit of life experiences," Van Boven said.
The "take home" message in his most recent study, which appears in this month's edition of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, is that not only will investing in material possessions make us less happy than investing in life experiences, but that it often makes us less popular among our peers as well.
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