Sherlock and the BBC's war on plot

Since I refuse to fund the media wing of a paedophile ring – ie I don’t pay the BBC Licence fee – I had to wait until today to watch the Sherlock New Year Special. It was good. Better than that, it was great, done in the definitive style of Granada’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett, the definitive Holmes, with a gothic mystery it seemed only Holmes could solve, with witty references to Watson’s publication of Holmes’ adventures in The Strand.

Then suddenly and inexplicably we are in the present day on board a private jet and Holmes is delivering an impassioned defence of recreational use of illegal drugs. How depressingly BBC. The theme of the episode was women’s rights, particularly in the context of the invisibility of women in the late 19th century.

Really? Wasn’t this show broadcast by the same BBC that dropped former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’ Reilly like a hot potato when she started making noises about misogyny and ageism in the Corporation? That has form in hiring pretty young female current affairs presenters and weather-girls then throwing them on the trash heap when they no longer look like Barbie? That forced Martine McCutcheon, while in Eastenders, to do a lingerie photoshoot for lads’ mag FHM without a female chaperone?

Although the programme aired at 9pm on New Years’ Day, right on the watershed, there were several explicit scenes of suicide, which will be watched by teenage fans throughout the iplayer availability slot. Is this really appropriate?

The theme of suicide was part of a postmodern thread going through the program drawing attention to the fiction-within-a-fiction gothic tale within the “real-life” tale. As soon as I worked this out I saw the connection with the theme of Santa Claus recurring throughout the dreams-within-dreams thread of the inspirational Dr Who 2014 Christmas Special Last Christmas – and it turns out both episodes were produced by the same man, Stephen Moffatt. Is there such poverty of talent within the BBC that they have to recycle old plotlines?

Postmodernism, the view that there are no facts except those things we decide (ie the Establishment decides for us) are facts, and there is no right and wrong except those things we decide (is the Establishment decides for us) are right and wrong, but when used to underpin plot so heavily it allows a war against plot that amounts to an excuse for lazy writing and producing.

And in the last analysis, given the problems the world faces at the moment, it’s salutary to remind ourselves that people who believe in facts and that they are on the side of right will always win against people who have surrendered their powers of discernment to hypocritical Establishmentarian bureaucracies like the BBC.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Women in News and Public Affairs Broadcasting House of Lords Select Committee, Miriam O' Reilly's evidence begins from p171

Kim Reid and Jimmy Sinclair: rest in peace

A very sad news story has been developing in Cambridge over the last few days concerning the deaths of two members of the street community who were due to be married, but, as the Cambridge News' Raymond Brown reports, were found dead on Jesus Green on Tuesday 16 July.

The couple – Kim Reid and Jimmy Sinclair – are thought to have taken the former "legal high" (but now a class B drug) Methoxetamine. This is a dissociative anaesthetic, chemically related to the "horse tranquilizer" ketamine; but Methoxetamine is far stronger than Ketamine and like K it can react dangerously with alcohol and cannabis.

What is especially sad is that people in Cambridge are saying remarks along the line that these two got what they deserved and were "lowlife". As a former drugs worker I have to wonder if any of the people making these remarks, some of which can be viewed on the comments section of the two Cambridge News articles linked to below, were so morally upright about Methoxetamine before it was illegal? Or would they say such things about a couple who had been found dead in a house on a leafy suburban avenue?

Nick Ross nails the root of the drugs crisis in his recent and unjustly-maligned book on crime: drugs are used widely because they are available. Many people who have never taken drugs are lucky enough never to have been offered them. Of those who have, some will try drugs and decide against using them again. Others will continue to use, not necessarily through any moral deficiency but rather a constellation of complex factors including abuse in childhood, trauma in adulthood, mental health issues, prevailing – and often conflicting – messages on the acceptability of taking drugs (eg from Establishment figures)…the list goes on, and some of the items also militate towards becoming homeless or vulnerably housed.

May Kim Reid and Jimmy Sinclair rest in peace.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Tragic couple found dead by Cambridge river were to marry - as fears of fatalities from 'death capsules' increase - Cambridge News

Two suspected drug-dealers arrested after double death tragedy when bodies found by Cambridge river - Cambridge News

Methoxetamine on the Frank site

Nick Ross' Crime

If you’re reading this review of Nick Ross’ Crime: How to solve it – and why so much of what we’re told is wrong, chances are it’s because of the Daily Mail's manufactured furore misquoting that passage about rape.

I don’t agree with 100% of what Ross writes, but would hope that holds true of any thinking person reading any text. Ross deplores rape utterly, and he goes nowhere near the Mail’s recurring theme, based on "evidence" that would never have met his rigorous standards, that women are to blame for being raped; they only have themselves to blame; it’s the victims’ fault.

As an ex-drugs worker I was interested in his positing non-punitive detention for drugs users. I remember the US once imposed this on a man thought (wrongly) to have XDR (extremely drug-resistant) TB. Human rights concerns were raised, and rightly so, but in the face of the prospect of a treatment-resistant illness that evokes fears of horrible suffering these were somewhat restrained.

Ross consistently attacks criminology and its disciples for their determination to blame society for individuals’ criminality at the expense of victims’ needs and anxieties, which I think is seen as his real crime; but he doesn’t let right-wingers, pointing to personal responsibility, off lightly. Chicago’s stock exchange has as many cocaine-users as its poor black areas…guess which ones are easier to catch? By way of his thesis that opportunity to commit crime facilitates its occurrence he cites something close to my heart: the explosion of postal voting.

If you’re angry at what you think Ross has said about rape but haven’t read Crime, I would suggest you’re not quite angry enough to engage your own critical faculties. Buy or borrow Crime, read this ground-breaking text on the causes of and solutions to crime, and make your own decision.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click for reviews of Crime on amazon.co.uk

the crimebook.com - an internet supplement to the book

Blog attached to the above - catalogues what one post calls "the rape row"

Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London - co-founded by Ross, dedicated to the memory of his Crimewatch co-presenter; a multi-disciplinary approach to evidence-based solutions to crime

smart drugs: Limitless?

Tonight Channel 4 showed Limitless with Bradley Cooper, Anna Friel and Robert de Niro. The film’s about a down-at-heel writer, Eddie Morra, who hasn’t managed to put a single word on a single page.

A former drug-dealer introduces Eddie to a new "smart drug", NZT-48, that changes the way he synthesizes disparate pieces of information while under its influence to produce insights and predictions people not on NZT can’t match. To cut a long story short, he overcomes his problems and by the end of the film has customised the drug to minimise the side-effects that has caused others to fall after sudden rises to fame, thus freeing himself from the need for a supplier.

It’s a story that would have warmed the hearts of those Enlightenment philosophes like Condorcet and Bentham who, in their different ways, believed humankind was endlessly improvable. Grumpier and more realistic individuals like Hume and Voltaire, however, would be more satisfied with the book on which the film is based. In Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields, a sinister thread of growing conflict between the US and China is threaded through the book and, at the point of dying through withdrawals, the protagonist sees the US President on the TV, gorged on the drug, announce a war.

Smart drugs exist. Oxbridge Biotech argues that popping a pill to help you access more of your brain-power is no different from paying for private tutors. I disagree. Passing an exam - tutors or not - involves engaging your own mind and working hard to learn, because that is how to organically lay down neural connections that didn’t previously exist. The brain is the universe’s most complex machine, and boosting its performance with even the most smartly-engineered chemical is fraught with peril.

Where did I put that coffee?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Check out reviews for Limitless on Amazon.co.uk

Check out reviews of The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn on Amazon.co.uk Smart Drugs: Are you Tempted? - Oxford Biotech

300 needles found: why the surprise?

The Cambridge news reports that 3,000 dirty needles have been found in a flat in the east side of Cambridge. OK, I’ll bite and point to the elephant: in our high-surveillance society, in the middle of a city infested with CCTV cameras, why is Cambridge City Council surprised at such a large find?

Cllr Paul Saunders gives assurances that one user can generate a large amount of needles, and that’s true, especially when injecting a stimulant with a short half-life. But given how hard it is to evict somebody these days, I would guess that there were numerous complaints and a fairly sizeable body of police intelligence.

I don’t talk of eviction lightly. The psychology and biology of addiction cause a person’s life to turn around what they’re addicted to, and when they get that thing the chemicals released in the brain’s reward pathway make them believe they’re happy. When somebody beats an addiction, it’s almost always because they’ve experienced how bad things can get, often more than once. The former tenant now has a goal to attain: to get back into long-term housing. I wish him or her well, and hope the neighbours have a quieter life.

The same report quotes Cllr Simon Sedgwick-Jell advocating a "shooting gallery" where addicts can safely inject. This might yet be unavoidable as part of a treatment program using drugs prescribed after individual assessment, especially as heroin and cocaine production can only be interdicted by the international community.

But while a drugs-worker, users complained to me that prisons are full of drugs, even if they weren’t, stays for possession and even supply don’t last long enough to get clean, and some homeless shelters can be full of drugs. I would add that those remaining residential rehabs are finding survival ever more difficult: and these are all problems solvable within our borders.

Gerry Dorrian 300 words

ecstasy trial: a silenced voice breaks through

In 1997, the Independent launched a protracted campaign to legalise cannabis. Ten years later, an avalanche of evidence about the damaging effects of cannabis upon mental health forced the paper into making an apology for their previous stance. The latest fallout from Channel 4’s two-part documentary on Ecstasy shows that the station has not applied the Independent’s lesson to itself.

Professor Andy Parott from Swansea University’s Department of Psychology has said in a letter to the Telegraph that he agreed to take part in the programmes "with the proviso that I would be given time to summarise the scientific evidence on the damaging effects of the drug on the human brain. Unfortunately this did not occur."

Certainly, a couple of indications of sinister side-effects of the "hug-drug" in the first part of the documentary could have been explored but were left hanging. Firstly, one member of the audience who said he takes ecstasy regularly shared that he’d seen people die in front of him due to having taken the drug.

Secondly, a tendency to form good impressions of people while under the influence of E was found to linger a week later, after all traces of the drug would have left the body – indicative of a lasting effect upon the way users think, possibly even arising from changes in the connections between cells in the executive frontal cortex of the brain.

There’s a popular view, expressed by an anonymous commenter on my post on the first documentary, that "there's absolutely no evidence that legalizing drugs will create more harm". In a limited amount of cases it might not be possible to falsify this statement, but "drugs" covers a colossal range of substances and issues, and to make a blanket statement about even one led the Independent into an apology. Channel 4, take note.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click to read Professor Andy C. Parrott's letter to the Daily Telegraph (last letter on the page

Drug Live: The Ecstasy Trial Channel 4 - Part 1

Drug Live: The Ecstasy Trial Channel 4 - Part 1

Cannabis: an Apology - The Independent 18 March 2007

Why Channel 4's Ecstasy trail left me depressed - 300 words

why channel 4's ecstasy trial left me depressed

Ecstasy may for some live up to its name, but as a former drugs-worker I was left rather depressed by Channel 4’s Drugs Live: the Ecstasy Trial.

The programme seemed geared towards presenting Ecstasy (MDMA) as a tool for treating PTSD, although there is a body of research proposing doing the same with the cheap and non-addictive beta-blocker Propranolol.

It has to be remembered that this is also a nightclub drug that has killed. It wasn’t until nearly the end of this first part of the documentary that a psychiatrist in the audience pointed out the difference between using MDMA in a clinical setting and to enhance a night out.

One of the presenters is Dr David Nutt, who was spectacularly fired from his post as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for publishing a scientific paper claiming that horse-riding is more dangerous than Ecstasy. Then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith decided he was being disrespectful towards E’s victims, and suggestions that drugs policy be made by scientists instead of politicians were met by Daniel Hannan MEP with "Perhaps we should abandon democracy and be ruled by Prof David Nutt".

Ecstasy is part of the amphetamine family, a tribe that brings us little except pain. It can cause a temporary psychosis whereby people feel compelled to repeat actions, which may have caused Leah Betts’ death after compulsively drinking water following ingestion of one E.

Spend the weekend in an A&E department: most of the substance-based attrition you see will be due to alcohol, a legal drug. Whatever Ecstasy/MDMA’s therapeutic potential, I’m left with the feeling that Nutt is in pursuit of unfinished business in terms of legalising more drugs, which he seems not to understand will be used by people in non-clinical settings and will create more harm.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Watch Drugs Live: the Ecstasy Trial on channel4.com

Equasy – An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms by David Nutt, Journal of Psychopharmacology

Propranolol treatment of traumatic memories, Advances in Psychiatric Treatment

"the bevvy": Scotland fiddles with prices as England watches

I took this photo on a visit to Glasgow. The poster hangs over an exhibition in the city’s People’s Palace marking Glaswegians’ ambivalent relationship with "the bevvy", whose price the Scottish Executive plans to raise with a minimum price on units of alcohol bought in shops and off-duties.

If I were Alex Salmond I’d concentrate on home-made and smuggled drink, but the Daily Mail’s Simon Richards hits home when he says the Executive includes all Scots in a "'we are all guilty' society". Alternatively, cracking down on the law-abiding is easier, and maintains the illusion that we don’t live in an out-of-control society.

Richards continues: “"politicians] penalise those living on much less money than themselves by increasing the price of one of the few pleasures ordinary people can still afford...making little old ladies suffer when they buy their weekly bottle of sherry, alongside the hardened drinkers who need medical help".

Working in the addictions sector in Scotland, I saw that if somebody’s drive to obtain alcohol by definition rules their life, they’ll go on pouring their and society’s capital out for it.

Ominously, History Today’s Last Orders demonstrates a historical precendent when the 18th-century Government taxed gin punitively to decrease Londoners’ calamitous consumption: drinking increased as the poorest sought solace in back-street "hooch".

Alcohol use is too complex a phenomenon to just whack with a big stick. Where’s the carrot?

The price-hike will print money because use will not fall in inverse proportion – so why not use the extra revenue to bring down the taxes on drinks in pubs? Surely the best way to control drinking is to move it back into pubs, where the landlord faces losing his licence if he doesn’t apply some sort of brakes? As England watches Scotland’s war on the bevvy, I hope this is the lesson she learns.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

The future of Cambridgeshire's addictions services

Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) doesn’t have its troubles to seek. Not long ago the mental health trust it was criticised by the Care Quality Commission for failings regarding in-patient care, but later passed by the same body.

Now CQC’s successor, Monitor, has hit CPFT with a much more damaging indictment: "lack of strong leadership at board level".

This will be especially morale-draining for workers in the addictions service which, according to Cambridgeshire’s Drug and Alcohol Action Team, changes providers on 1 April. The service is currently run by Addaction until 31 March. And betting people in Cambridge say the tender will return to the NHS – specifically CPFT.

Before Addaction won against what had been seen as a strong NHS tender towards the end of the last decade, staff who had decided to jump bore disturbing tales of senior managers holding barely-veiled threats concerning pensions over workers’ heads should another body win the tender. Morale, driven round people’s ankles by multiplying cover-ups and management layers, went through the floor, until the threats were exposed as toothless.

(On cover-ups, I wonder if it’s coincidental that the Trust was initially passed by the CQC, fronted by Cynthia Bower, who not only looked away from the massacre at Stafford Hospital while head of its strategic health trust, but was probably chosen to head the CQC when selective vision was a positive quality in NHS aristocracy.)

If the CPFT does take over the running of Cambridgeshire’s addiction services from May 1, CPFT’s Board of Directors will have to exercise real control over sector managers to prevent a relapse into oligarchy. If it can do that, people on the ground will be able to exercise the vocation of helping people with broken lives – and those around them – find healing without another millstone round their necks.

Joe Daniels
300 words

acupuncture as justice gives society the needle

When a drugs worker I saw many people helped by acupuncture, and so was interested to see it used on teenagers who terrorise communities. The articles didn’t mention whether the therapy had been requested by the criminals, or had been imposed upon them by courts like an ASBO.

This would have been a crucial piece of information, and it’s significant that the mother of one boy – Sonny Grainger – was reported in May as having "urged police to be tougher on her son".

When used on people who want to overcome harmful behaviour, acupuncture and other therapies do not work in a vacuum: they are holistic proceedures, meaning that the relationships between patients and between patient and therapist are just as important as the treatment. If somebody doesn’t want to be there, the treatment will not work. As a drugs-service manager once commented, you can’t sentence somebody to counselling, and this is no less true of any other holistic therapy.

All too often, people need to discover how bad things can get before they see the need to find a way out of behaviours that harm themselves and others. Our liberal, middle-class judiciary help neither victims nor perpetrators by assuming that the objects of their "progessive" justice will respond as if they themselves were middle-class liberals.

This is one of many reasons why I’ll be voting for the British Freedom Party at the next elections: their crime and justice policies put the rights of the victims before the rights of the perpetrator. This is not just good for society but will eventually pay off for those perpetrators who have been given the chance to touch rock-bottom a sufficient number of times to want to stop their own pain. Then acupuncture and other therapies, if freely chosen, might actually have a chance to produce results.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

drugs damage piles up under the moral high ground

Cambridge News has reported about drugs needles being found beneath university preparation organisation Cambridge Seminars College.

What surprised me was that anybody was surprised by paraphernalia lying about: this happens all over the country.

More depressing was the News’ scrambling to the moral high ground, while its coverage of calls to legalise illegal drugs is heavily biased towards being in favour.

Campaigners are right to point to the harm caused by alcohol and tobacco, but fail to see that this argument undermines itself: alcohol and tobacco are no less harmful for being legal.

True, legalising hard drugs would help ensure that they aren’t "cut" with noxious substances, but we’d still see overdoses and complications of administration, while usage would still fuel crime and endanger the vulnerable: for example, legal narcotics would still be procured by pimps to encourage risk-taking behaviour among their victims. (And just as alcohol is sometimes still "turbocharged" with meths, so substances would still be added to legalised drugs to strengthen/elongate the experience.)

As things are, however, there’s a better case for increasing the prescribing of heroin to long-term users – to be taken in a secure environment at the users’ risk – than for legalising cannabis, or at least its superstrong variant, skunk. Most of this is home-grown – with Vietnamese gangs not being averse to using trafficked child labour as gardeners – whereas heroin comes in from Asia, largely through Pakistan.

Hard drug-use is here to stay until politicians realise that it cannot be brought under control within our borders. Until robust policies – like those proposed by the British Freedom Party – on drugs are enacted, harm-reduction is all we can hope for. Facing up to a problem starts with acknowledging its scale, which is not helped by newspapers pretending an everyday occurrence happens once in a blue moon.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words