Akmal Shaikh - one among many victims of heroin

It's started already. Have a read:

Where is the medical research that says that being bi-polar impairs your judgement as to what is right and what is wrong? Do you think that if I decided to go out now on the streets and start dealing drugs when I end up in court I could say to the judge; "Oh please your honour, I didn't know what I was doing- as I have bi-polar!" It is a pathetic excuse and can never be used in a court of law to excuse a crime.

This was, curiously, posted on a football website, about the execution on 29 December of Akmal Shaikh in China for bringing 4kg of heroin into the country, having been allegedly "duped" by a chap in Poland. I don't personally have a problem with believing that: a friend's son was offered a wad of money to take a package from A to B and, having been stopped by the police, found that the "easy money" had been payment for his being stupid enough to transport a class-A drug. So he served his time in prison: paid the price, you might say, according to the law of the land he was arrested in.

What the fellow says in the quote at the top of the page isn't all that far off-target, but where I take issue is with the phrase "pathetic excuse" as part of a description of a serious mental illness, one that I have myself. I prefer the more measured reasoning of the Telegraph's Richard Edwards:

The episodes [of extreme mood swings] can last several weeks or months and at worst can include psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions that one has special powers or abilities...There is debate in legal circles as to whether those affected can claim it as a defence to their actions because bipolar [disorder] affects mood rather than cognition, and therefore does not necessarily affect a person’s ability to know right from wrong.

Shaikh's supporters pointed to the lyrics of a song for world peace inviting a rabbit to pray with him as proof of his mental illness, and even Reprieve, the prisoners' human rights charity, called the song "bizarre" and "terrible". But if insipid songs voiced by grandiose personalities indicated serious mental illness, there'd be still more pop stars on medication than there presently are - even among the hubris-scarred Live Aid veterans, whose pomposity was outdone only by the scale of the hair and shoulderpads. (Actually, Syd Barrett produced some rather brilliant stuff in the florid phase of his illness.)

While I was in hospital and in the grip of a delusion that was urging me to break the law, a psychiatrist advised me that should I do so then my treatment would continue in prison, and that was enough to keep me on the right side of the law. The same principle has applied here in reverse: Shaikh broke the law not just in China but in its Xinjian Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the treatment of Christians such as Alimujiang Yimiti, bravely exposed by ChinaAid, show that compassion there is especially a stranger in a strange land.

But there we may be hitting the nub of the problem - the Establishment's pavlovian response to selected shibboleths of diversity. Had he been called, say, Joe Bloggs and not Akmal Shaikh, and been born in Penzance instead of Pakistan, would Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Foreign Secretary David Milliband and Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis (who professed himself "sick to the stomach") have joined the howls of protest from Amnesty and Reprieve?

Another villain in this tragedy is British drugs policy, especially as relates to celebrities who use drugs. We've seen supermodel Kate Moss cut lines of cocaine and not be arrested; Amy Winehouse hospitalised after a multi-substance overdose and Billy Joel describe the routine nature of rehab for substance abuse disorders as "mental floss". (And sacked chair of the Advisory Board on the Misuse of Drugs, David Nutt - who seems to be trying to break into the celebrity circuit in his own right - admits to experimenting with highly-addictive benzodiazepines before giving lectures.)

All of this is no comfort to the Shaikh family who, presumably through no fault of their own, have lost their loved one. It might be worth noting, though, that in the UK, the 4kg of heroin he was carrying would be worth £40,000 ($63,700) at current prices before it was cut with potentially lethal contaminants to make it go further and earn up to ten times as much.

So should China have executed Akmal Shaikh? You could say that what he was carrying in his suitcase, knowingly or not, was as life-destroying as a bus ploughing through a crowd; like a suicide-bomb in slow motion. I cannot find myself condemning China for the move, but that doesn't mean we can become less suspicious towards the murderous tiger, whose colonial claws are already gripping swathes of Africa, nor can we pretend not to see the abuses towards its own citizens who may be members of house-churches that don't officially exist, or perhaps aren't even born yet. SPUC director John Smeaton highlights our own complicity in this:

The UNFPA's participation in China's forced abortion one-child policy is well-documented. Furthermore, when Colin Powell (a supporter of abortion) was US Secretary of State, the State Department verified the pro-life Population Research Institute’s allegations that the UNFPA was cooperating with China's coercive abortion programme...The UK government gave over 40 million US dollars to the "regular funds contributions" of UNFPA in 2007 (the latest report available), about 10% of the total income China received in regular donations from over 180 countries worldwide.

Presumably the diplomatic and political row over the execution of Akmal Shaikh will lumber on as China saves face while Gordon Brown searches for a figleaf to cover the intellectual, moral and political paucity of his position; and meanwhile, the products of the Afghan opium fields alone kill 100,000 people a year - the equivalent of over 1900 executions daily. Where are the wailing politicians?

cocaine: heartless, soulless waste

The UK has just achieved an unattractive prominence: according to the Telegraph's Tom Whitehead, Great Britain is now the world's capital for cocaine use, says a UN report (which I haven't been able to locate on the organisation's byzantine site).


Ironically, we've just seen the publication of a report by Nottingham Trent University, in conjunction with the Nottingham Crime and Disorder Partnership, which focussed on an aspect of occaine-use that's often overlooked: the marriage of cocaine and alcohol to form a substance called coca-ethylene, which is toxic to the heart and the liver.

The research, I think, hits the nail on the head with its title - Heart and soul of the Party? Unfortunately, I think many of us will have had the displeasure of seeing somebody emerge from the WC at a party or in a pub far more cheerful than when they went in, talking twelve to the dozen and on the edge of starting fights because they have lost any conception of personal space.

The worst thing is - I heard again and again from users trying to recover when I was a drugs worker - it feels that one can drink the place half dry and not feel that one is drunk. Not feel is the operative phrase: co-ordination might be less affected than if one had not had cocaine, but judgement goes right out the window, leading to more consumption of alcohol/cocaine and impulsive behaviour like fighting, or sex that is often unsafe and may lead to an unwanted present being transmitted to one's partner. (And that's assuming that the sex is consensual.)

The reason I mention sex more than once is that cocaine affects the brain by piggybacking on the reward system in the midbrain that makes sex, for one thing, feel enjoyable. The desire to take cocaine very soon inserts itself, cuckoo-like, as a drive. That's why the damn thing's so addictive that the brain doesn't really settle down until after about six months of abstinence.

That's the reason I spit feathers when I read articles by liberal-minded journalists who chide society - whatever they think they mean by this - for criminalising black people who take crack (the smokeable form of the drug) while turning a blind eye to white people who use cocaine. (I speak as somebody who met one black crack user in many years in the job.) The reason for my reaction is that if we see the council estates raided, then shouldn't we see the same happen to the Stock Exchange and the bankers' parties (like the one which saw the birth of derivatives)?

I can't disagree with the vice-president of Colombia, Francisco Santos Calderón (left), that "Every user that snorts a gram of cocaine kills 4.4 square meters of rain forest"; so I wonder why Minora comes back from school reciting the relative prices Colombian farmers can make for cocaine and traditional crops.

I think that Cambridgeshire Constabulary is going down the right road by squeezing pubs with a name for cocaine use with an amalgamation of new technology and old-fashioned policing. As Operation Ortolan, mounted some years ago, showed, big fish and small fish are relative: in the end, there are only fish, some bigger than others, most aspiring to become bigger than they are. The Force's drugs lead, Chief Inspector Gary Goose, said:

"The dealing of heroin and cocaine is an appalling trade. It destroys people's lives and can also make life a misery for those who become a victim of associated crime such as burglary, robbery and anti-social behaviour. We do not want our communities to suffer the effects of drug misuse and we will do all we can to make the city a safer place to live and work.

The lesson of all this can be found, I believe, in Genesis 3. I've heard users say many times that they wished they'd never tried cocaine: there's such a thing as forbidden fruit.

And well done to the Nottingham Trent University students who have worked with Nottingham Crime Disorder Partnership to bring out this timely report. You can read a summary of it at Drink and Drug News.

the bug letter: when 1 is more than 63,000

Recently, I got a letter from a friend who lives in a nearby old fen and, like me, used to work with people who use illicit drugs. Inside were two letters from the BBC to him, in response to two letters of complaint he had sent about an objectionable song by The Beastie Boys called She's on it turning up on Dale Winton's show Pick of the Pops, which airs on Sunday afternoons from 2.30-4.30.

My friend, Iratus, was unhappy with those of the lyrics he managed to make out, and so looked them up on the web. When they did, he found the vocabulary of a situation that unfortunately is not uncommon today: a young lady (in the song a schoolgirl) being given cocaine in return for sexual favours. He wrote to the BBC, complaining that while he realised BBC Radio 2 did broadcast challenging material, this usually happened later in the evening and always with a warning.

Iratus received a prompt reply from the BBC, stating:

We are of course concerned if our programmes offend people and we never set out to offend but of course our public service role includes reflecting the world as it is...

I appreciate the strength of your views on these matters. Accordingly, I would like to assure you that I have registered your comments on our audience log. This daily report of audience feedback is circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers. The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape future decisions about future programming and content. They are also published on the BBC's intranet site, so are available for all BBC staff to view.

Thank you again for your interest in the BBC..."

When I took the letters to Professor Calculus to look over, upon reading the first he threw back his head and laughed, exclaiming: "They've given him the bug letter!"

Seeing my puzzled look, Calculus told me a story about a passenger on a cruise-ship who complained to the owners upon finding a bedbug. He got a reply stating that the member of staff responsible had been sacked and the captain reprimanded and, stuck to it, was his original complaint, with the words written on the back: "Give him the bug letter."

It was an amusing story, and when I investigated further I found that "the [bed]bug letter" had an interesting life as an urban legend. Anyway, Iratus didn't need any pointers to enlighten him to the fact that he was being fobbed off, and therefore iterated his complaint, adding that to give cocaine in return for sexual favours was to commit a criminal act.

This nugget appears to have exercised them down at BBC complaints. Their second reply to Iratus stated:

Having considered your further comments...I raised your concerns with senior management at the Radio 2 network. They acknowledge the record was not appropriate and suitable for this show. They pass on their apologies for any offence and thanks for bringing this matter to their attention.

Calculus and I looked at each other significantly like a pair of '70's detectives at this. So much for the "audience log" referred to in the bug letter!

Today, Andrew Porter interviewed Shadow Culture Media and Sports Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who was attending the Conservative Party Conference. Hunt questioned why the BBC should expect to receive a "£3 billion guaranteed cheque" every year and press onwards with a "lack of vision" regarding how it can help people and government tackle the pressing social issues of the day: "the rise in knife crime, gun culture, broken families".

He also referred to the £100 million per year that it takes to run BBC3 for "miniscule audiences". Too right. We bought a Freeview box in not in anticipation of the proposed switch from analogue to digital TV, but because it frustrated me to pay the license fee every year for so many services - BBC's 3 and 4, the childrens' channels, the digital radio stations - that I was unable to receive.

One way in which the BBC could help heal our broken society, which was Mr Hunt's main topic, is not to attack the backbone of our Christian society, which is still its religion. I'm thinking mainly of its decision to air Jerry Springer: the Opera in the face of the most complaints it had ever received prior to its being aired (it was already in the public realm as a stage musical).

There was some discussion about the actual number of complaints, but this was put to bed by the BBC Press Office, which reported that it received about 55,000 complaints prior to the show's broadcast and 8,000 complaints afterwards, with about 2,200 messages of support.

In other words, there were around 30 times more complaints than pats on the back: in spite of this, communications regulator Ofcom found in its meeting on the subject that "The Content Board...suggested that whilst the programme would have offended some people, the requirements of freedom of speech were such that it must be permissible on occasion to cause offence."

I accept the principle, but it isn't practiced. In autumn 2006, a summit looked at the requests of performer Sacha Baron Cohen, who was invited to throw his pet hates into the bin in the BBC's Room 101. Cohen, a fair man, chose kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bible and the Koran. Almost everybody at the summit, including the show's producer, agreed that all of these items could be binned except the Koran.

Andrew Marr, senior journalist with the Corporation, was admirably honest:

“The BBC is not impartial or neutral...It’s a publicly funded, urban organization with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

The BBC, in fact, has also been criticised roundly for its anti-American and anti-Israeli stances from both internal and external sources. William D Rubinstein, formerly of the Social Affairs Unit, asked at the time why no politician was willing to take serious action to tackle the BBC's bias. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt is in the vanguard of politicians who aren't afraid of the big bad Beeb.

Anyway, Iratus should be pleased; I don't know how many complainants got past the BBC's bug letter in the battle against Jerry Springer: The Opera, but in his own fight to get the BBC to admit it was wrong he's succeeded where 63,000 failed.

Related posts:

what the hell was all that about?

strictly sociopathic - the bbc has bullied us enough

death, taxes and the comedown

Right now, every time you pick up a newspaper there seems to be news or rumours concerning the collapse of another financial institution and how this will affect the taxpayer. As the burden becomes ever more Sisyphean, I wonder if Labour MP's still sing The Red Flag as each company sinks, as they did with the Northern Rock affair?

The concept of Tax Freedom Day was first posited by The Tax Foundation, a US educational body, and identifies the day when, if you paid your taxes continually from January 1st, you would stop paying taxes and start earning for yourself. This year, Tax Freedom Day was 23 April in the US, and 2 June in Great Britain (calculated by the Adam Smith Institute). I expect many will await the setting of next year's tax freedom days in various countries, as a measure of how the present crises have impacted on taxpayers.

In the context of skyrocketing taxes, The Sentinel Stars by Louis Charbonneau poses a unique but dystopian solution to the dilemma of one's tax burden being so high that working it off within one's lifetime may not be an option. Written in 1963, the book is set in a post-apocalyptic world where babies are born with the inheritance of their parent's tax burden, which they must work off - in addition to the tax they accrue through their lifetimes themselves - before they can become Freemen, if they live that long. (Alternatively, a lucky few are Freemen at birth, as they are born with an inheritance which is in credit.)

At 156 pages, The Sentinel Stars is shorter than a Mills and Boon novel, but, like much speculative fiction from the mid-50's to around the mid-70's, is bursting with ideas.

TRH-247 is the 247th person to be born with the name Thomas Robert Hendley in the Organisation, an outfit roughly analogous to Oceania in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the difference that conflict has ended in TSS with the Merger of East and West.

Thomas meets Anne, loses her, and meets her again when he is sent to a Freedom Camp for a day as moral therapy - his importunity having been to go for a walk when he should have been at work. Having looked at some extreme sports, such as golf, he finds himself in a nightclub where the clientéle are in search of more lubricious pastimes. Anne explains:

"I have long legs and I'm athletic and I can dance. And I have a pretty face. I was picked out when I was ten years old. Every day since then I've done the right exercises and eaten the right foods and had the right creams massaged into me. Every day! Some of the girls are lucky. They stop growing too soon, or they get dumpy or their skin ages too quickly, or they just don't turn out to be as pretty as they seemed in the beginning. They're transferred out of out section. I wasn't."

Like Rabelais' Abbey of Thélème, there are no clocks in the Freedom camp, and no rules. Thomas, stuck in the Freedom Camp, is besieged by terrible freedom on every side, and finds himself dreaming of a return to too much government to escape the anarchy of too little. Eventually a doctor in the camp arrives at a diagnosis explaining his inability to accept the Organisation's norms. Genetic therapy, which is usually inflicted on the unborn disguised as prenatal screening, has not taken in Thomas' case. He is normal.

Surprisingly, illicit drugs feature only marginally in the novel. A habit-forming opiate called "the weed" is smuggled into Freedom Camps - Thomas asks, rather naively, "here there are no pressures, no worries, no frustrations. Why would anybody be driven to using drugs?" He appears unaware that in describing an anomic society he's answered his own question.

Unfortunately, drugs are a pedestrian reality in our real-life world and infest all walks of life. However, some professions are liable to do more harm when under the influence of mind-altering substances than others. Just over a fortnight before the Northern Rock privatisation story broke, the Financial Times published a piece by Stanley Pignall about drug use at work, in which Pignal stated: "The new data suggest cocaine use is no longer limited to bankers working long hours. Suspicions of widespread drug use in the City are common, but few firms conduct random drug tests." US lawyer and political scientist Ted Becker describes the additional obstacles law enforcers face in bringing higher-functioning drug users to book:

Apparently, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had set up a sting operation with the intent of ensnaring a large number of overwhelmingly white professionals - lawyers, physicians, stockbrokers, professors, CEOs - in a cocaine ring. They were the “buyers” who called the dealers and had amounts of pure powder cocaine delivered to their homes in New York City like pizzas...The DEA had hard evidence on all these elite buyers including “wiretaps, on videotape, on phone records.” It had taken a year to obtain all this evidence

...The result: “Prosecutors are contemplating stern letters to the suspects warning them to keep their noses clean” (Barrett 2001). “Sources say that since the dealer’s arrest...many of the buyers have hired lawyers who have bombarded officials with phone calls, insisting their clients not be charged...”

However the present crisis is resolved, whether it be through a Capitalism 2.0 or by some other means, I think the best we can hope for is stronger structures in place to buffer the bust which will follow the next boom. Those dealers (by no means all of them) who have projected their comedown onto society as a whole will not be caught. If, for example, they were asked to give a hair sample, they would reinvent the skinhead hairstyle.

Maybe I'm being too pessimistic. After all, life's stranger than fiction.

The Sentinel Stars
Louis Charbonneau
pp 155
Bantam, 1963 (US)
Corgi, 1964 (UK)

Victor Conte and Dwain Chambers' secrets

It appears that Dwain Chambers is the latest athlete to fall foul of the temptation to take an undetectable performance enhancement drug.

This drug - THG (tetrahydrogestrinone) - has been found to be more potent than the most powerful natural androgen (anabolic steroid), dihydrotestosterone, which - like high doses of any form of testosterone - has been linked to aggression in males.

It wasn't a test that rumbled Chambers, it was the desperate manipulations of his candyman, Victor Conte, to minimise sanctions after he'd been exposed. In other words, he squealed on his clients to epic proportions, which was perhaps not the best business move for somebody selling illegal substances. As the Express reports,

"Today Conte...sell[s] legal performance-enhancing vitamins and minerals while the young athletes to whom he supplied his sinister offerings are left trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered careers."

"Sinister offerings" is the right phrase. Although ingestion of substances which the athlete believed would lead to enhanced performance has been known since the original Olympic Games began in 776BC, athletes now take more steroids in one cycle than athletes in the 1960's would take throughout their careers. It's about being in first place, and if I may be a little cynical, it's about pulling an ambitious athlete's strings to get the shirt emblazoned with sponsors' insignias on the world's sports pages breaching the finishing line.

There are several versions of the history of the phrase,"There's no such thing as a free lunch". Whoever said it, it's true. Anabolic steroids can give gains in strength, muscle mass, stamina or adonisation - but at a price. Steroids, if they are anabolic, share one characteristic: they are analogues of testosterone, but much stronger. It is not unknown for the male body to cope with massive amounts of exogenous testosterone by converting the excess to oestrogen, the female sex-hormone, a process called aromatisation. Most needle-exchanges worth their salt will inform body builders that, should they ever need the service, Marks & Sparks provides free bra-fittings.

A very popular performance-enhancing drug that is not a steroid is HGH, or human growth hormone. The problem is, a lot of the people who take it assume that it does what it says on the tin, is makes your muscles grow. That it does, but not directly. It causes various tissues in the body, but predominantly in the liver, to secrete insulin-like growth factor (IGF1). The science regarding the effect of IGF1 on the body isn't all in yet. One way to inject (pun unintended) cognitive dissonance into an HGH-user's mind is to ask him if he's sure his supply was made in a laboratory. Then to explain that some of us remember how HGH used to be obtained, ie drilling through the back of a corpse's head and harvesting it from the pituitary gland, and the subsequent relation to the risk of cjd-like viruses which might be present in the "donor" brain. If I want to have to twist sideways to get through a doorway I'll go to a car boot sale and buy shoulderpads left over from the 1980's - compared with the prospect of a lingering descent into dementia and paralysis, looking like a cross between Joan Collins and Margaret Thatcher suddenly doesn't seem that unattractive. Besides, although I don't generally howl about animal rights (although I like cats), the way anabolic steroids' effects are quantified leaves me cold.

The standard argument in favour of steroids has been that there has only been one known death, an Italian footballer in the 1960's. However, an Italian judge is now investigating the death of around 70 football stars from the steroids their football clubs gave them. Perhaps, after a nasty tackle, a player should choose to change places with a substitute rather than submit to the tender mercies of the magic sponge.

Steroids - or "roids" are, in the US, the drug of choice in the youngest and the oldest groups of drug users. Drugs worker Pat Lenahan, head of the drug and sport advisory service at John Moores University, Liverpool, whose book Anabolic Steroids is the most recent authoritative study of British steroid use, once did an exercise in a British primary school where children were shown an archetypal picture of a burglar carrying his "swag" bag, telling the children to write down what was in the bag. Beside the usual suspects of videos, DVD's, laptops, etc, a significant minority of the children wrote "steroids".

Steroids have been known to be used by doormen in clubs. A subset of these also use cocaine to stay awake. This is alarming, as cocaine can sensitise the heart to the effects of adrenalin for up to an hour after administration, possibly leading to a heart attack after the surge of adrenalin related to roid rage; and of course, if the paramedics don't know that the casualty's taken cocaine, it's not impossible that should the cardiac arrest be unresponsive to defibrillation, adrenaline will be administered, although cocaine involvement in cardiac arrest, possibly with steroid use, is becoming so common that medical teams are now becoming reticent as regards the administration of adrenaline.

Perhaps the villain here is not steroids or any other drug, but the notion that it is acceptable to stretch human performance by introducing exogenous factors to the human body, ie enhancements, a favourite concept of Professor John Harris, whose aquarian theories I've sat in the draughty old fen and chewed over before. I can envisage a world within my crusty old lifetime where athletes who do not partake of performance enhancing substances will be banned from the contest not because they will lose, but because if they win the purveyors of dangerous dreams will have a lot of questions to face.

Related post: The real predator hides behind the Tiger

silly season for addled idiots

So here we go again, some eejit with nothing better to do thinks it's time to legalise all drugs, because Welsh chief constable Richard Brunstrom has called for legalisation and regulation of all drugs, describing the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 as 'not fit for purpose' and 'immoral', urging its repeal."

There is a very good case to be made for decriminalising heroin under some conditions and prescribing it to people who are already addicted. It would vastly reduce the misery suffered by the victims of burglary and dealing, and moreover would make great inroads into reducing street-prostitution, as well as taking the most vulnerable (predominantly) women and girls out of situations where they might fall prey to the sort of scum who profit from their abuse at the hands of scum who use street prostitutes.

But what about stimulants?

This is the point at which pedants jump up and protest that caffeine's a stimulant. So it is, but caffeine never dissolved a nasal septum, bled calcium from bones, nails and teeth, induced impulsive crime and aggression or was to blame for unintended or even non-consensual sex. Cocaine does the first, amphetamines the second, both of them (and also methamphetamine) the third, and all three plus ecstasy the last - although a skinful can do the last two for less layout. Ecstasy, moreover, carries the perverse risk of death by drinking too much water due to its well-known effect of dehydration. Nobody in their right mind drinks a lethal amount of water, but if you have a roomful of people who have dropped E's then you will find nobody in their right mind.

Steroids turn the level playing field that sport should be played upon into a quagmire, lead to aggression and baldness (ever wondered why slapheads are moody buggers?), but on the upside, M&S will give any man brave enough to enter the lingerie section a free bra-fitting. And they shrink testicles to the dimensions of peanuts. Talking of which, as they are illicit and therefore not regulated, the carrier-oil can be anything...like peanut oil. Ouch.

And then there's the last refuge of the warm fuzzy liberal, cannabis. You know, the stuff that Bill Clinton put in the reefer that he tried to play the flute with. Trendy politicians push each other out of the way to offload that they did inhale once upon a time, and do not take it into account that cannabis has been selectively bred in the last two decades to maximise the amount of THC, the main one of the 60 or so psychoactive ingredients. Kids are ending up in psychiatric wards because they never had a chance in the face of huge amounts of psychosis-causing chemicals and of the collusion of their elders.

If the 1971 Act is not fit for purpose, it is precisely because it has been chipped away at by the cool, if unintended, products of middle-class upbringings stirring up sub-working-class sentiments to satisfy their need for publicity and controversy. Nothing wrong with being middle-class, of course (some of my best friends have fondue sets!), but when somebody with the means to spread their articulate attention-seeking propaganda among the fuddled masses pulls strings, we get the sort of Greek tragedies that have been inflicted upon the world by Marx, Lenin, Franco, Mosely, and not to forget St Clayre-Rayner, patron of professional victims.

In the draughty old fen, our hard-working sergeant is at pains to point out that recent drugs seizures don't mean we have an entrenched drug problem. Which is a good thing, as the tender mercies of John Barleycorn Esq upon some of our young folk keep the police busy. Mr Brunstrom should listen to his police officers and PCSO's on the ground before he gives the green light for the nation to get high.