Afternoon:
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The London media world of Natasha Collins and Mark Speight is mine to an extent and I know its codes and taboos. For instance, the apparently simple act of eating out at a restaurant is a minefield. The meat has to be free range, to lessen the suffering of animals, the vegetables organic, to lessen the suffering of wild flowers, and the coffee Fairtrade, to lessen the suffering of peasant farmers.
In the last years of Natasha and Mark's lives, the Government made sure they couldn't smoke not only in restaurants but in any enclosed public space. In their last months, liberal Londoners pushed their sincere commitment to ethical consumerism further by championing Fairtrade clothes, which didn't exploit textile workers, and locally sourced products with a small carbon footprint.
Yet the cocaine that killed Natasha Collins and, by extension, provoked Mark Speight's suicide, escaped the disapproval of London society.
I noticed this strange omission when I was still a smoker. Those who lectured me loudest about giving money to tobacco companies saw nothing wrong with supporting drug cartels. It was social death to put a cigarette in your mouth but not a line of coke up your nose.
The double standard is born of a bohemianism which makes vaguely arty, slightly trendy Londoners wary of being on the side of the police. But the determination not to appear square makes a mockery of their ethical pretensions.
Carbon footprints and organic croprearing are not, after all, gangster concerns. And as Sir Ian Blair pointed out a few years ago, those who say they want to fight poverty in Britain shouldn't be funding a trade which turns estates into ghettos.
The counter-argument that if the Government legalised cocaine, respectable companies would replace the mob strikes me as cowardly. Drugs would have to be legalised everywhere for international crime to be pushed out, and it is unimaginable that, say, the Americans will contemplate an end to prohibition.
Meanwhile, those who think what people do to their own bodies is their own business should remember that it is not only the Speights and Collinses who suffer. After a drugs gang shot up a bus in Honduras, killing 28 men, women and children just for the fun of it, a local writer wrote an open letter to British cocaine users. "Thank you for your drug money," he began. After the "military hardware and paedophile tourists", it was "another thoughtful donation to our ailing country".
He'd heard that at London dinner parties "an after-dinner toot has taken the place of your traditional pudding". The "very same people who claim to care so deeply about the poor Third World" were "chopping out lines on world-music CDs".
But, of course, they don't care. If they did, they wouldn't drink Fairtrade coffee, then snort - or excuse - foul-trade cocaine.
Reader views (1)
You're quite right that any double-standard that condemns eggs from caged chickens but accepts cocaine from the drugs mafias is as indefensible as it is absurd. Moreover, recreational cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines are intrinsically immoral because they are harmful when used as intended. Of course, that's also true of tobacco use.
Cannabis and liquor fall into another category: drugs that are harmful when abused but can be used safely in moderation. The beauty part of cannabis legalization is that it enables users to grow their own and eliminates the corrosive effects of the illicit marketplace. That seems like a fair trade on several levels.
- Adam Holland, Brooklyn, NY, United States Outlying Islands, 17/04/2008 18:19
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