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Showing posts with label drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drugs. Show all posts
Monday, December 10, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
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I was somewhere around parliament, on the edge of Westminster Square, when the fairy dust began to take hold. Jesus it was strong. Half a bottle of Canadian Club whisky was sitting uneasily in my gut and suddenly someone had stuck an egg whisk in and was going crazy. A waterfall of sweat was running down the small of my back, my eyes bulged out of my head and tiny pin pricks of light dotted themselves all over my vision. I mumbled "join the fuckin' dots man" at no-one in particular. A child stared me as its mother ushered it away, saying something about care in the community.
God fucking dammit where are these smokes. The white clad walls of power seemed to loom over me as I shakily meandered my way across the pavement, hands in my pants on a quest for tobacco and skins. Dodging traffic I stumbled across a road and collapsed against Winston Churchill. Finally I found my apparatus and shakily constructed a malformed rollie. I asked Winston Churchill for a light. The protest hippies parked on the grass regarded me with suspicion. They were right to, I stole their light and ran across the street giggling as taxis beeped me and shouted throaty working class swear words. I leaned against a big black railing as I sparked it up, taking a rude lungful.
Too much. I retched, head spinning wurse than ever. I balled my eyes up and squeezed my fists clothes. My teeth hit each other harder than I ever had before catching a bit of tongue between them. The booze in my stomach turned and some kind of liquid splurted from my mouth against the walls of parliament. "o fuck its red". I distinctly remembere thinking this because I know it's bad when you puke up the red stuff. A cop with a machine gun walked up to me with an angry look on his face and also in his voice and body. If the blood was coming from my tongue I figured I'd be okay. I tried to explain to him that I'd bitten my tongue and probably puked at the same time but only managed to burble incoherently at him as his machine gun seemed to breathe out.
What the fuck man! Machine guns aren't supposed to do that. I explained it to him as best I could through my ruined tongue. I then said policemen aren't allowed to have guns like this anyway. But there was a pounding drum beat building in volume inside my head and it was hard to argue properly. A crowd was forming around me now. Some fat guy took a photo of me. I tried to claim copyright on it but I tripped and whacked my hed on the stone by the cop. In a misguided attempt to politicise the incident I would later try to claim the cop had clubbed me with the butt of his gun, but I always knew this was bullshit.
I lay twitching on the ground, staring up at Big Ben which was spinning round and round in a warped whirlpool. It all goes fuzzy here but in the witness statements they say I yelled "firssst on til morning!", soiled myself and lapsed into unconsciousness.
Memory is a tricky game and unfair as hell. Happy times slip away like golden and glistening sand through your fingers and the bad times indelibly tattoo right in there. Next thing I knew I was sitting in some green and pleasant woodland. It was hyper-real, like the world with all the settings jammed onto 11. Somewhere far away I could hear a beep beep beep of an elektrocardiogram. Panic. It crept up my spine like the first rising vibes of a cartoon frenzy. Insects with human faces flitted around my head squeaking burbling Mickey Mouse gobbledegook at me. One of them had the face of Marilyn Monroe. Here I was, alone in fairy land, completely twisted inside out. No cash. No smokes.
Frightened squeaks like deranged mice surrounded me as I moved around, every movement tearing something apart. I was like Godzilla and not in a good way. Green weaved baskets were scattered across a clearing and I blundered into a big pile of them. These crazy winged bitches pulled my earlobes and beat their fists against my face but I was drunk on my own fire now.
And then the owls came.
Big white snowy bastards swooping out of nowhere! I couldn't tell if they were just clumsy or actively trying to take me out but one thumped into my chest, knocking the wind out of me. I gasped for air and for a split second second I could see a serious looking doctor pounding down on me but as I looked up I was suddenly looking down at a owl limply staggering into some kind of tiny hospital with blood seeping from a snapped wing. He banged on a buzzing bug and let out a hoot of agony.
Then things got really weird. I felt the life drain out of my cheeks and snow began to tinkle down from down from the bright blue sky. It spun crazily in perfect geometric mandala patterns towards me. So real I could almost reach out and grab a piece. The animals of the wood put on their winter costumes. Some weasels turned white and fluffy. A bunny got all dressed up in snow fur and skipped away full of itself. Dreamily I laid back on the ground and lolled my head up at the sky. An infinite cloud of grey descended upon me from the heavens. I lolled my head to the side. The girls were screaming and shuddering. Their insect wings couldn't take the cold. They writhed on the floor, leaf dresses totally unsuited to this temperature. Those little gossamer wings ain't going to cope with this I thought. As they rolled the wings splintered in tiny glass fragments. and screaming so high pitched I wasn't sure if I could hear it or not filled the air. Apocalypse in fairy town.
I hear the cottonwoods whispering above my head and the freeze descending upon the place. My body becomes a recumbent landscape, going into hibernation. Lazily I grin and begin rubbing the cool frost all over my body. A jumble of thoughts fight for consciousness in my brain, but somehow I know that the frost will keep me safe from the Big Cold that's coming. My lips turn Violet Beauregarde. The sweet woodland ambience of the place had vanished, turned into a still nightmare hell. Frozen fairies with silent screams frosted onto their faces stared at their ruined world. It all gets furry and indistinct. No sympathy for the devil riiii? Uh.. wait Buy the ticket... take the ride? god their big pacifist eyes beautiful in their fairy skin not understanding the sacred fallacy of the hypo culture and you know someone must be tending the light at the end of the tunnel when you stand on the edge of her feather expecting to fly to learn the real secret of the wings.............
The grey skies opened and my chest tore open and an injection of light filled the world as the golden fairy dust snapped back into life and high definition full Real D ThreeD everything jerking into frantic clarity and I jerked bent double in two. Fairy land had been a lame Sunday morning fuck around! A waste of time! A big fat hypodermic poked out of my split sternum my veins bulged obscenely all over my body a doctor stepped back looking frightened as a nurse hid behind him. A cop stepped up to the party and slapped a handcuff on my wrist. I was just with-it enough to laugh and spit my rancid bile in his face.
It was all worth it. All the shock, hate and horror. It grew me. It changed me. I am improved.
'Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings' is on general release from Friday 14th December
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
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| Brian Paddick and Peter Hitchens |
‘Drug Laws in Britain – a waste of time, or an essential barrier to grave danger?”
The Tom Olsen lecture this year wasn’t a lecture at all but rather a debate between two very different men on a very contentious point. In one corner, 54 years old, born in Balham, twice the candidate for Liberal Democrat Mayor of London, former Police Commander of Lambeth and controversial instigator of a lenient policy on cannabis possession Brian Paddick! In the other, 60 years old, Mail on Sunday columnist, author and self described “brutal, sexist, racist, homophobic monster"* Peter Hitchens.
*just to be clear, he was joking
St Bride’s church was lit spectacularly for the occasional. It’s a beautiful place anyway, the dramatic purple lighting gives a certain import to the occasion that you just don't get if you're in some lecture theatre. The presence of the religious iconography (most prominent of which is a rather hunky psychedelic Jesus Christ emerging from what looks like a bit like a rainbow vulva) gives proceedings authority. Many of the arguments we hear tonight are filtered through a manichean lens; Hitchens at least has a strong sense of what is good or evil, something he applies not only to the drugs themselves, but to the moral standards of the people who take them.
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| hmm |
After brief introductions by the Vicar we're off. In his opening statement Paddick explained how his experience as a Police Commander led him to conclude that drug laws lack credibility among the public. In particular he highlighted the public's confusion of the consequences of being caught with a small amount of drugs for personal use. Much is left to the discretion of the arresting officer or custody sergeant, so it's hard to say whether you'll have the drugs confiscated and be waved on your way, or whether you'll end up with a criminal record. Underlining many of his views is the assertion that the vast majority of drug users in the UK cause minimal harm to themselves and others.
Paddick is obviously a confident man when it comes to speaking about this subject, and his years on the beat dealing with the users and dealers show. Throughout the night he sticks rigidly to examining the consequences of drugs law "in the real world". This pragmatism is perhaps best illustrated when he explains the implications and consequences of busting street dealers: inevitably they'll be replaced almost immediately, this replacement may well be someone from a rival gang thus creating a potential future violent confrontation as drug dealers vie for territory. His solution to the problem is to target the suppliers. He explains that in the late 90s there was a period after the IRA had become dormant and before the World Trade Centre Attack. During this period security services focussed on the international drugs trade, apparently successfully. It’s this top down attack on the suppliers that seems to inform his philosophy when it comes to enforcing drug laws. As Paddick sees it, targeting users only leads to distrust of the police, racial discrimination and social misery.
All of this is anathema to Peter Hitchens. He opens with a joke about him being “arrested for crimes against political correctness”. The crowd is literally silent as they try to work out whether this was a joke. Someone coughs nervously. A tumbleweed rolls past the stage. Oh dear.
Hitchens sketches for us a nightmare world. A society gone mad, where powerful forces conspire to render the public at best insensate and at worst irreversibly mentally ill. Their tool for this is cannabis, which he regards as a drug as dangerous than heroin, cocaine or any other class As. Even though this is a debate about wider drug laws, Hitchens narrows it right down to cannabis time and time again. He explains how a series of bills promoted by powerful lobbyists over the latter half of the 20th century have sought to downplay the physical and social harm of this demon weed. The very fabric of society as we know it is at stake and as he puts it "this is the last chance to change things".
The contrast to the Paddick’s pragmatism couldn’t be more pronounced. Hitchens occupies a world of unbending morality and sees certain courses of action as paths of good or evil with not much of a grey area in between. These days it's rare to hear someone espousing a philosophy like this, and to be fair to Hitchens he genuinely seems to believe that views like his will save the country and his countrymen from social ruin. This unbending certainty that he's right ends up tripping him up, particularly when he cherrypicks scientific studies based on whether they support or harm his conclusion. He repeatedly brings up medical research which proves that smoking cannabis at a young age can adversely affect brain development in children, yet simultaneously dismisses any evidence that there’s a physical component to, say, heroin addiction. He never explains the logic behind why he believes one scientific study is more worthwhile than another, and this inevitably means that when it comes to discussing data rather than morality he becomes woolly.
Hitchens sounds most convincing and passionate when he brings up Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ with its population addicted to the fictional drug Soma. Hitchens is probably right when he says that those in power would like nothing more than a dozy, malleable and doped populace. His argument is that drug use robs its users of those human qualities he holds most dear; inquisitiveness, creativity, motivation and the will to stand up for what you believe in. Whether he's right or not at least in a roundabout way he's got a good handle on what he likes about humanity.
After the two men have their say we move onto a quite extensive question and answer session. There seem to be a fair number of people in the audience who work with drug users and addicts in church groups and in prisons. By and large these people seem to side with Hitchens, and take a very negative view of recreational drug use. It seems to me pretty damn obvious why they hold such opinions: if you work in prisons or addiction groups then you’re inevitably only going to encounter those whose lives have been affected the most adversely by drugs, with the result that you end up suffering from confirmation bias. Some of these questions drift into the realm of the barmy, with one woman’s credibility plunging off a cliff when she outlines her opinions of how drug use negatively affects the crucial balance between our sober yin and our raging yang.
What I found to shed more light on the men's views were questions that address specific aspects and effects of drug policy on society. I asked a question about what would they both consider to be a suitable sentence (if any) for possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use. Hitchens explained that he’d give them one caution and then on a second offence they’d be sent to prison for six months. He made it unnecessarily clear that he wasn’t talking about 3 months in prison, and 3 months out on licence, and then launched into a pretty tired old diatribe about how prison should be entirely about punishment rather than rehabilitation, about removing flat-screen TVs from cells and so on – the usual Daily Mailesque boring prison bumph. It’s typical of his arguments that while he seemed pleased with his blood and thunder approach, he also ignores that it’s entirely unworkable and undesirable to lock up vast amounts of people for non-violent behaviour that largely impacts only upon themselves. It's a shortsighted opinion that doesn't consider the longterm impact. When people are released from prison they're economically crippled for life: who wants to employ an ex-jailbird? This inevitably creates a huge section of society reliant on welfare, trapped in a downward spiral of poverty which invariably leads to high levels of drug use. Hitchens' policy results in an recursive loop of misery, a snake gorging on it’s own tail and loving the taste.
Paddick, in my view correctly, identifies that harsh punishments for possession of amounts of drugs intended for personal use disproportionately impact upon black youths. It's a sad indictment of the Metropolitan Police that if you're young and black in London you're far, far more likely to be stopped by police and searched than if you're white. So if you're white and carrying drugs, you stand a much better chance of 'getting away with it' than if you're black. The consequences of this inevitably result in a breakdown of relations between the police and the community, and the consequences of that should be obvious to anyone on the streets of London in August 2011.
It's pretty easy to pick a winner of these two men tonight: Hitchens' arguments have holes so big you could drive a truck through them. In addition to this, he comes across as weirdly insecure. Someone asking a question of him says they think one of this statements was "stupid". Immediately he goes on the defensive, angrily asking if the person asking the question is calling him stupid. It's an oddly reflexive response, and we see similar behaviour from him later in the evening when someone asks what importance we should attach to the views of a newspaper columnist and an ex-politician, and asks as to whether a scientist might have made a better debater. Hitchens turns on the man, asking him what gives him the right to question him. Looking a little confused, the questioner replies that he's a solicitor. They're brief moments, but it feels like Hitchens' erudite, confident mask has slipped and it's disconcerting to see him lash out so readily.
It's clear who made the better case last night. Hitchens' argument suffers from the fact that as far as I can see, he's begun with the conclusion that drugs (particularly cannabis) are very bad things and worked backwards from there. He's very selective about the science he uses to back up his case, and this eventually begins to feel intellectually dishonest. Paddick on the other hand has arrived at his point of view through a career in the police service dealing hands on with the consequences of drug use and the effects of drug law. I doubt very much that a policeman of all people would come to a conclusion that drugs law as it stands is ineffective and illogical without some very careful consideration.
It was a fun evening, and even though I disagree with pretty much everything Peter Hitchens stands for at least he's not boring. Stewart Lee once accurately described Jeremy Clarkson as "someone who pretends to have opinions for money". Ill thought out and wonky as they are, I have no doubt that Hitchens sincerely believes in what he preaches and at least on some vague level I can admire him for that. In contrast Brian Paddick comes across as a practical man, someone who's confident in his conclusions because they reflect his professional experience. He may not be as rhetorically flashy as Hitchens, but he's an infinitely more substantial speaker.
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