usenetposts
08.04.06, 23:07
This article in today's online Telegraph was so good I just had to swipe it
and trample all over their intellectual property rights in pursuit of the
greater good.
Enjoy:
Only someone on drugs could think 'Just say no' would work
By Sam Leith
(Filed: 08/04/2006)
There was a solid thump as the back of the hippie's head hit the wooden
floor. The hippie was lying on his back, confused. His mouth was open and his
eyes were staring glassily at nothing much in particular. A member of the
venue's staff with a walkie-talkie crouched by him.
"Dude," said the man with the walkie-talkie. "Can you hear me? Hello, dude.
Do you know where you are?" The hippie continued to stare at the ceiling,
conscious, but not communicating. "Can we get a medic over here?" the man
said into the walkie-talkie. He set about trying to raise the hippie's head,
and pour water from a bottle into his mouth.
This was Tuesday night, a rock venue in Cambridge, where we were seeing
Mogwai - a band that specialises in producing ear-bashingly loud yet melodic
walls of guitar noise. They are the sort of band, the downed hippie had
obviously decided, that might sound particularly nice on ecstasy. Cabbaged
before the main act had even come on stage, he had to sit out the remainder
of the gig on a low stool, sipping quietly from a bottle of water and staring
benignly into the middle distance.
If you think he had problems, what of Mr A? Mr A is a 37-year-old who, we
learnt this week, claims to have taken 40,000 ecstasy tablets over nine
years, including 25 pills a day for four of them. Bloody hell. If we take
this - admittedly questionable - data as read, that represents a twentyfold
improvement on the previous documented record of 2,000 pills in a lifetime.
Mr A is unlikely to get it together to contact the Guinness Book of Records,
however, because he is a gibbering wreck. His short-term memory is so bad, he
can't go to the supermarket because he forgets what's in his trolley. He
suffers hallucinations, depression, and muscle seizures so severe he
sometimes can't open his mouth.
Unfortunately, the conclusion many will have drawn from the tale of Mr A is
exactly the opposite of the one its shock-horror presentation hopes to lead
us to. They won't think, wow, this drug must be really bad for you: the man's
a gibbering wreck. Of course the man's a gibbering wreck: he was taking 25
doses a day of a drug with a powerful impact on the central nervous system.
They will think, instead, wow: gibbering wreck or not, he is still alive. It
suggests to the layman, in fact, that the toxicity of ecstasy is
astonishingly low.
I am not a pharmacologist. But I'd guess if you drank 25 large espressos a
day for four years, you would be a gibbering wreck. If you took 25
paracetamol tablets a day for four years, you would like as not be stone
dead. The effects of taking 25 Imodium a day for four years do not even bear
thinking about.
This is not to say that ecstasy is good for you. Just ask Mr A, if he can
concentrate for long enough to give you a straight answer. There are
indications that long-term use is associated with depression and memory
problems. In the short term, it causes mood swings. Its use is also
associated with very perilous behaviour, such as dancing maniacally until you
overheat and collapse, or drinking so much water you poison your system.
Nasty adulterants are present in most pills. It would be best if nobody took
ecstasy.
How to stop them, though? Not the way we're currently going about it. The
iron orthodoxy in public life is to treat all illegal drugs as if they were
morally and pharmacologically identical. This is counterproductive nonsense.
Talking about any illegal drugs calmly or even positively is regarded
as "irresponsible", and suggestions of drug use are a cheap way for the press
to seek a political scalp. Drugs are regarded as a blanket evil.
Perhaps this is a reasonable position to take for the public good. The
trouble is, it's a position that will serve the public good only if the
sizeable minority of people who use one or several of the wide spectrum of
different drugs available believed it for a second. And they don't.
Every time a raver reads that "ecstasy kills", they will look about them at
hundreds and thousands of their contemporaries, or even at Mr A, and they
will think: "No, it doesn't." Every time the example of Leah Betts is wheeled
out, they will consult their dim understanding of statistics and wonder what
it means that the totemic instance of a death from a drug taken by the
million, over nearly two decades, happened in 1995 - and was from water-
poisoning, not directly from the drug itself.
Thousands of people continue to take ecstasy because it can produce feelings
of great spiritual and somatic warmth and wellbeing. And they take it because
they calculate, rightly, that it is very unlikely to kill them. If we want to
stop them, we're going to have to do better than repeat, like South Park's Mr
Mackey: "Drugs are bad, 'mkay?"