Tonight:
4°c
Nice people take drugs." These are the four words considered so dangerous, so irresponsible, that advertising authorities have banned them from appearing on the side of London buses. Pathetic, no?
The slogan - part of a campaign by the drug charity Release - was a bit childish, admittedly.
Lots of things, although quite true, look odd if put on the side of a bus without any context. "Paedophiles pay taxes", for instance, or "Hitler made Germans proud".
Release should have added "too" onto the end or "some" onto the beginning.
But censoring it is more childish still - and entirely in keeping with the idiotic public policy of refusing to countenance any statements, true or not, seen as undermining an anti-drug "message".
When the World Health Organisation study into cocaine reported that "occasional cocaine use does not typically lead to severe or even minor physical or social problems", the US bullied the WHO into suppressing it.
When the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit reported that prohibitionism was failing, the Government sought to suppress its report.
When an independent RSA commission, after two years investigating drug policy, recommended a change of tack, its report was ignored.
When the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs - whose investigations are ordered by the Government and are paid for by you and me - recommended reclassifying cannabis, it was ignored.
When it recommended reclassifying ecstasy, it was ignored. And when its chairman observed in the peer-reviewed Journal of Psychopharmacology that MDMA is less risky than horse-riding, the wretched Jacqui Smith publicly denounced him.
The war on drugs is a prime instance of the old saw that no plan of attack ever survives first contact with the enemy.
Yet out of a mixture of political machismo and moral cowardice, policymakers are determined to stick with the plan to the grim death.
Drugs are bad (they're illegal, right, so they must be). So only losers (because drugs are bad) and criminals (because drugs are illegal) take drugs. So the way to stop people taking drugs is to tell them that only losers and criminals take them.
That's the current position. So when the average teenager looks about him and sees numberless ordinary people taking drugs, having lots of fun, and neither dying, stabbing eachother or living in a wee-stained cardboard box in a Waterloo underpass, he thinks: "Eh? I'm not sure. These anti-drug people know what they're talking about."
So off he goes, scoffs 16 pills and - if he's extremely unlucky - pegs out on the spot.
You're fighting a war using the weapons that you would like to work rather than the ones that do, and pointing them where you would like the enemy to be rather than where he actually is. Is it any wonder that you're losing?
Wimbledon can bear the grunts
As Wimbledon approaches, there is fresh talk of penalising professional tennis players for grunting on court. Lovely Maria Shaparova, according to a chart I found on the internet, makes a noise nearly as loud as a snowmobile.
Some players claim to be put off by the sounds of their opponents grunting. Yet the grunting players are themselves put off- probably rather more so- by the effort of not grunting.
Proper breathing - as ballet dancers and those of us planning to give birth in the near future know - is a vital part of physical effort. There's no easy solution but earplugs seems to be the best one yet thought of.
Personally, I find all that grunting rather stimulating and I would be sorry to see it go.
A new engine for my set
Wonderful news that an unpublished children's poem by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes has been discovered. It's a peculiar thing that - as a poet with an apocalyptic imagination - Hughes wrote so charmingly and well for children. Timmy The Tug, which will be published in facsimile in September, was Hughes's verse adaptation of a story written by his then-flatmate Jim Downer to impress a girlfriend with his suitability as a father.
Telling the story of a little tugboat called - obviously - Timmy, it joins a quirky microgenre of children's writing that gives forms of transportation personalities of their own. It will sit on my shelf alongside Ivor the Engine, Thomas the Tank Engine and, um, Budgie the Little Helicopter.
* American gay rights campaigners are complaining that Bruno, the Austrian fashion designer played by Sacha Baron-Cohen in his new film, is in danger of reinforcing stereotypes.
I've seen a bit of this Bruno. He wears mesh vests, leather chaps and waxes his unmentionables, but so what? There's no reason a straight man shouldn't do those things.
If Bruno is gay, his sexual preferences will come as news to those of us who don't leap to conclusions based on his wardrobe.
I rather think they are his own business in any case. Bruno recently pushed his bare bottom into the rapper Eminem's face at an awards ceremony.
Eminem seemed very cross at the time, but was later revealed to have been "in on the joke".
So, I'm sure, will America's Gay And Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation turn out to have been.
Reader views (1)
Drugs - spot on. The current strategy does not work because the politicians are too scared of the tabloid headlines to change it.
Grunts - who cares?
- Martin, City, 15/06/2009 16:08
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