a bottle of fight the world

A website about Buckfast's source locality, Dartmoor, informs us that

a popular Scottish phenomenon is the 'Buckie Commando' who is an intoxicated, aggressive, fearless consumer of the Buckfast Tonic Wine... There now are numerous aliases that the wine is known by, some printable examples are; 'Commotion Lotion', 'Wreck the Hoose Juice' and 'Bottle of Fight the World'.

Strathclyde police confirm that there were

448 mentions of "Buckfast" in reports of murders, attempted murders, serious assaults and common assaults in 2008-09, out of a total of 7,483 violent offences. That equates to 6% of the total.

Of these 114 involved the use of a Buckfast bottle as a weapon. This equates to 1.5% of the total

A BBC investigation adds

This echoes a study carried out in 2007 at Polmont Young Offenders Institution. It found that of those offenders who had been drinking immediately before their offence, more than 40% had been drinking Buckfast.

The man who conducted that research, Alasdair Forsyth, says the findings were remarkable. "This is a product, a brand which unusually for any product, is always trumpeting how few units they sell, that they sell less than half of 1% of all the alcohol in Scotland," he says.

This has led to moves within the Scottish parliament to ban Buckfast in the country.

As Monty Python observed, 'contemporary government applies one standard to violence within the community and another to violence perpetrated by one community upon another'. There are times when that enhanced, fearless fighting spirit comes in handy. Are you being bombed by Nazis? Bucky will make it all palatable. This advert ran in the British press during the Second World War.

Buckfast Tonic Wine is made by a secret process and to a formula perfected by the monks many years ago. It is still made with the same unhurried care at Buckfast Abbey in the calm of the Devon Hills. Its recuperative properties are invaluable to meet the strain of war time conditions.

Nerves and depression are largely physical, the result of an unaccustomed drain on your strngth and vigour. A wineglassful of Buckfast two or three times a day will quickly restore your energies and help to maintain your strength and mental poise.

They were not the first to spot its propensity for making people confident in violent circumstances. Those commanding the first world war knew that turning petrified shellshocked boys into Buckie Commandoes would be good for the chances of victory. According to Lyn Macdonald's book Somme, British troops were issued with an English-French phrase book sponsored by Wincarnis Tonic Wine with the slogan 'for the relief of nerves in the trenches'.

Indeed, in July 1916 as the Battle of the Somme was raging the British Journal of Nursing listed Wincarnis, saying

the primary effect is immediate stimulation and invigoration of the system, and the secondary an upbuilding of mental and physical vigour, and that as the secondary follows immediately after the primary effect, the upbuilding of bodily vigour occurs before the stimulating effect has worn off

A bottle of fight the world indeed. Wincarnis was originally called Liebig’s Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. The subsequent brand name 'win-carnis' means 'wine-meat'. These days they make it without actual meat, and nothing of Buckfast's altercation-inviting caffeine avalanche, but it's still a right radge tipple.

We should perhaps be grateful that Buckfast only augments its alcohol with caffeine. When tonic wines became popular in the late 1800s, many of them

used potent, poorly understood and often addictive ingredients. These included strychnine, morphine, opium, quinine, lithium salts and cocaine.

Buckfast with cocaine? Imagine the possibilities.

Graham Harding's book A Wine Miscellany informs us that

Coca wine, with cocaine, was already flourishing in late nineteenth-century America when Dr. John S. Pemberton created his “French Wine Coca” in 1886. He was a latecomer to the market, which was dominated by Angelo Mariani’s Coca Wine. This product, conceived and marketed by a French priest, added cocaine to wine.

Pemberton added both kola nuts and damiana (a natural aphrodisiac) to his drink and marketed it as an aid to overcoming morphine addiction. It was advertised as an “intellectual beverage” with the capacity to “invigorate the brain.”

Cocaine was removed from the drink in 1904, though the Coca-Cola Company continued to use “decocainised” coca leaves as flavoring for some decades. It is possible that they may still do so.

In 2002, the Bolivian authorities authorized the export of 159 tons of coca leaf to the United States “for the manufacturing of the soft drink, Coca-Cola.” The company was equivocal in its response to inquiries. “The formula for Coca-Cola is a very closely guarded trade secret. Therefore we do not discuss the formula.” Make of that what you will.

munt for wells

The Liberal Democrats, like the other parties, produce a standard format poster for their candidates. It's an orange or yellowy square on end, like a Baby On Board car sign, or an Australian road warning.



Dunno about you, but I'd rather see a camel as prime minister with a cabinet of kangaroos and wombats than have the LibDems in power.

Anyway, they usually plump for having the candidate's surname emblazoned across the middle.







But they've made a solitary killjoy exception, opting to use the forename of their candidate for Wells in Somerset, a certain Tessa Munt.

Just imagine. These posters could have been soooo much better. Miserable buggers.

the carbon footprint of whisky

If you want a definitive answer or even any numbers on this one, sorry.

Strangely, when I did the post about the carbon footprint of beer, I touched on studies for wine yet it never occurred to me to look for my favourite bevvy, whisky.

Whilst brewers have commissioned proper reports into their carbon impact and there's an authoritative American one for wine, I can't find anything for whisky. In fact, it almost seems like a deliberate ignorance. I can find references to

the whisky industry’s growing concern over its product’s carbon footprint, thought to be one of the highest for any food or drink.

but nobody's volunteering any actual figures.

Bruichladdich on the Scottish island of Islay is a fiercely independent and independently minded distillery, not needing to be asked twice to do something innovative. They're installing anaerobic digesters to turn its yeasty waste into methane to burn and generate electricity.

The project's being touted as part of some green credentials, but Bruichalddich ships its whisky in some of the heaviest bottles I've ever seen, with a bottom of solid glass a centimetre thick. And then they put each of these anvilesque items in its own metal tin.

A cardboard box is enough for comparable whiskies from Ardbeg or Lagavulin. In fact, blended whiskies come without any box at all, and they seem to do fine. It's just extraneous packaging to make you feel like you've bought summat posh. Unless you're needing a cantenna to hack your neighbour's internet, there's no need for the Bruichladdich tin.

THE ISSUES WITH WHISKY

Put simply, whisky is made by brewing a sort of barley-only beer, then boiling it. The alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so they catch the first lot of steam, cool it and it turns back to liquid. This stuff is about 70% alcohol. It gets left in oak barrels for a few years, then diluted to the desired strength, bottled and sold. Most distilleries send casks to bottling plants for dilution, a few - Bruichladdich is one - do the whole thing on-site and use their own source water for dilution.

(So when anyone wants to get snobbish saying that putting a drop of water in your whisky is somehow sacrilegious, point out that it's already watered down and is most likely one-third tap water from some Scottish industrial estate).

It's clear that boiling a liquid will be higher carbon than not boiling it, so whisky will probably be pretty high-carbon. However, there are a few significant mitigating factors.

The largest part of beer's impact is from the manufacture of glass. The second largest is transport. These figures are also true for wine. It's a reasonable guess they're big parts of whisky's impact too.

When I worked out the stuff about the iron content of stout and red wine, it was unfair to compare it ml for ml because you drink stout by the pint but wine in smaller servings. Well, usually anyway.

By the same token, it's not the quantity of whisky in a bottle, but how much drinking it represents. Beer is 95% water. Whisky is, roughly speaking, beer concentrate. If you and I were having a large night we'd get through a bottle of whisky. But to consume the same amount of alcohol, we'd drink 16 bottles of beer. That's a lot more glass and transport. As it's 8 times stronger, it'll have one-eighth of the glass and transport impacts (heavy posh bottles notwithstanding).

Scotch whisky also wins points for being pretty local. As with wine, there's no excuse for Europeans to be buying the American stuff (even before we discover that American whisky basically just tastes of corn and wood).

Also, the way most whisky is only diluted and bottled at large, centralised distribution points reduces the impact further.

Whether this cancels out the extra energy use in distillation is another matter, but it's certainly not as clear cut as it first appears. Nonetheless, getting a specific measure of the carbon footprint of whisky wouldn't be much harder than one for beer, wine or any number of other products for which figures already exist.

AND THERE'S MORE

Whilst the anaerobic digesters are laudable, whisky's impact could be reduced much further by not wasting other by-products of the distillation process, such as heat and barley husks. Just across the bay from Bruichladdich, the Bowmore distillery in the island's main town uses the waste heat from its distillation to heat the municipal swimming pool.

Drinks giant Diageo - owner of many of the best-known names in Scotch whisky - installed a Bruichladdich-style anaerobic digester at the Glen Ord distillery in 2001.  They're now setting up a new distillery that not only has anaerobic digesters to generate methane for electricity and cleaning water, but saves the waste husks of barley for burning as biomass in a combined heat and power (CHP) plant.

This will drastically cut energy consumption, and it's one of those things that government says is always the case, where acting sustainably saves a lot of money (let's just ignore the times when it costs more, eh?).

It shows what can be done. Such drastic changes of technology are usually more expensive to retrofit than to build from scratch. And can these projects deliver the cuts we need, in the region of 90%?

Scottish and Newcastle's brewery in Manchester, home of Foster's, Kronenbourg and Strongbow, installed CHP last year, resulting in an 87% reduction in the site's carbon emissions. They're planning to roll out the change to their other breweries.

This is a hard-nosed profit-driven major corporation, not a co-op of niche-market, fair-trading new agers. If it works for them then it should work for every major brewery and distillery in the land.

prozac for dogs

Does your dog bark or whine when you're not there? Chew the furniture?

Your pet is not a bad dog. Your pet's behavior is the result of separation anxiety.

Can this be cured? Why yes, and with a product that has a reassuring name, too - Reconcile.



Well that's a relief.

What is Reconcile?

a once-daily, chewable, flavored tablet for the treatment of separation anxiety in conjunction with a behavior modification plan.

No really, what actually is Reconcile?

Fluoxetine hydrochloride

You may already know that by its brand name. Prozac.

the carbon footprint of beer

After that last post about 10:10, a comment was left from Dunc who said

I'm a craft brewer, and at least 10% of my domestic electricity use is for brewing. I could eliminate that overnight, but if I'm still drinking beer, I'm pretty sure that would actually increase my overall emissions (the bulk of the emissions from commercial beers being located in transport, packaging, and the retail environment, all of which I completely eliminate by brewing at home).

My gut feeling is that he's right about the bulk of emissions not being from the beer itself, but surely I could find some concrete evidence out there.

The Carbon Trust said

The carbon footprint of off-trade beer, the majority of sales, is dominated by its packaging (which for standard size units represents at least 50% of product-related emissions), with the overall footprint of a traditional disposable glass bottled beer generally higher than that of aluminium cans and PET bottles.

Coincidentally, in reading up about 10:10 I came across this article about Suffolk brewers Adnam's.

I've heard of numerous green initiatives they've undertaken in recent years, and my impression is of a company actually trying to cut things rather than just do a little greenwash. (But then, giving you such impressions is the mark of successful greenwash...)

Anyway, this caught my eye.

Adnams has reduced the energy used to produce each barrel of beer from 51.4kWh in 2007 to 46.3kWh in 2008.

The inclusion of an exact figure article set me off on a little arithmetic.

If we take 51.4kWh per barrel as average for beer, and presume that's a normal 72 pint barrel, we're looking at 0.714kWh per pint.

The UK electricity supply emits 460g of carbon dioxide per kWh of electricity.

This makes 328g/pint. That's the same as driving the average car about 2km, or eating four bags of crisps.

I then found the dependable Ask Umbra had covered alcoholic beverages.

Sapporo has started labeling beer cans with carbon footprints; their estimate is that a 350ml can of Black Label beer emits 161g of carbon.

That's about 261g/pint.

Umbra points us to a 2007 study for wine that showed that, in America, transportation accounts for about half of wine's carbon footprint, and the manufacture of bottles a further quarter. It's put numbers on something I've said before, that there's no excuse for Europeans drinking non-European wine.

In 2008 the New Belgium Brewing Company had a serious study done of a six pack of their beer (6x12floz bottles). They found it was a whopping 3,188.8g. By my calculations, that's 889g/pint*.

Perhaps there's something amiss in their having such a huge impact. Then again, it feels more likely that it's due to it being an exhaustive full life-cycle study. Emissions from the company’s own operations and the disposal of its waste accounts for only 5.4 percent of their emissions. They found the biggest single element was pre-chilling beer in those stupid open fridges in shops, accounting for more than a quarter of the carbon.

There are solutions to this, and not just by the obvious move of buying local, unrefrigerated beer (or brewing your own like Dunc). In San Francisco there's Carrotmob, who touted round local stores and had everyone go to the one that would give the greatest amount of the profits to energy efficiency improvements to the store, a total win-win.

THEN THERE'S THE WATER

The really alarming figure in the Adnam's article was this

It takes 8 pints of water on average to make one pint of beer.

(Adnam's have got it down to less than half of that, by the way).

There's so much cleaning of vessels and pipes to be done. But where does this figure come from? Does it include 'virtual water', the stuff used to make the ingredients and containers?

It's something that first hit me four years ago with the Independent's front page that said

The real cost of a bag of salad: You pay 99p. Africa pays 50 litres of fresh water

In soft drinks, made from crops grown in hot and artificially irrigated conditions, the figure can be astronomical.

Coca-Cola's Chief Executive E Neville Isdell said in 2007

it now only takes 2.54 liters of water to make one liter of Coke, compared with 3.14 liters five years ago

However other sources say that

there is as much as 250 litres of water used once growing the sugar cane used in the drink is factored in.

For many places, water is a pressing issue and will become all the more so as population increases and climate change intensifies. Even in well-watered parts of the world, treatment and pumping are large users of energy, so 'embodied water' in a product is part of its embodied energy and carbon emissions.

= = = = = = =

* 3188.8g divided by 2040ml (12floz), multiplied by 568 (number of ml in a UK pint)

guinness is indifferent for you

Last yuletide I did a piece about second-day drinking tactics, saying

grasp the fact that you’re not going to eat properly any time soon, so it’s essential to have something that feels like nutriment. To this end, neck a pint of stout.

People will tell you that women on labour wards used to be given stout after childbirth to replace lost iron. The fact is that it’d take gallons of the stuff to get your RDA, but that’s not the point. To you in your mentally pliable state – and, in all likelihood, to those women – it feels true, and that's what counts.

But hang on a minute. I'm basing my assertion that it'd take gallons on what a mate (admittedly a seasoned Irish lifetime career drinker) told me once in the pub. To paraphrase Jermaine Jackson, let's get rigorous. Time to do a bit of number crunching.

How much iron do you need?

The government says

adult men need 8.7mg of iron a day. For women the figure is 14.8mg

A 2003 government report into toxicity (around 100mg of iron can be lethal apparently) says

Estimated average daily iron requirements in the UK are 8.7 and 6.7 mg for males aged 11-18 and 19+ years, respectively. For women in the 11-50 years age group the estimated average daily iron requirement is 11.4 mg, whilst that for postmenopausal (50+ years) women is 6.7 mg.

The American government's page breaks it down into age groups, but it basically says adult men need 8mg a day, pre-menopausal women need 18mg.

A little variation there, then, but we get the general idea. Now we move on to the source.

How much iron is there in stout?

An Irish health insurance company says there is 0.3mg in a pint of Guinness. That's about the same as a bite of wholemeal toast or a solitary dried fig.

A pregnancy nutrition site confirms the figure (well, near enough at 0.28mg a pint), saying there is

0.05mg of iron in 100mls of stout, compared with 0.9mg in 100mls of red wine

Of course, you don't drink equal volume of stout and wine. We need to compare by units of alcohol or drink for drink. But even then, red wine's the clear winner.

By the iron figures they give it works out as:

Stout - 0.28mg/pint or 0.12mg/unit
Red wine - 1.58mg/glass (175ml), or 0.75mg/unit

So whichever way you cut it, red wine provides substantially more iron than stout - 18 times as much per millilitre, or more than six times as much per unit of alcohol. No surprise, then, that red wine is the only booze to make it on to the UK government's dietary iron for dummies page.

How much do you need for your daily iron?

If there's 0.28mg in a pint and if we play with the present government iron numbers (8.7mg for men and 14.8mg for women), to get your recommended daily allowance of iron you'd need to drink:

Men - 31 pints of stout a day
Pre-menopausal women - 53 pints of stout a day

If you slurp the other stuff its;

Men - 967 ml of red wine a day
Pre-menopausal women - 1645 ml of red wine a day

There's another consideration that's been the room-contained pachyderm here, though.

How much iron can alcohol safely provide?

The (unrealistic to expect even if they are actually right about what's good for us) recommended maximum alcohol consumption is 3-4 units of alcohol per day for men and 2-3 for women.

Stout can safely provide a maximum of:
5.5% of a man's iron
2.4% of a woman's iron

Red wine can safely provide a maximum of:
34.5% of a man's iron
15.2% of a woman's iron

alternative medicine

I don't want this blog to turn into Monbiot Watch or anything, but he's said summat again that makes me go 'hang on'.

He points out that many environmentalists are meticulous about their climate science yet get laughably superstitious about things like homeopathy. In doing so, he sweepingly decries 'alternative medicine,' a term too broad to have much meaning.

It's remarkable how agribusiness has us using the term 'conventional farming' for practices that are barely fifty years old and even now only used in certain parts of the world. All other methods are, by implication, unconventional - a bit weird, dippy and/or ineffective, they should be abandoned or catch up.

By the same token, if it's not pharmaceutical-surgical, it's 'alternative' medicine, batty and useless hippy nonsense, unlike the real thing. This attitude prevails even when big chunks of pharmaceutical medicine are seemingly based on shonky foundations.

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

The term 'alternative medicine' is used to describe a vast jumble of practices. Some of them we have no evidence for and nobody uses, like leeches; these are lumped in with popular yet still evidence-free stuff like crystals and homeopathy, together with ones that do indeed have some real evidence of their effectiveness like acupuncture and herbal medicine.

Herbal medicine is complementary to 'conventional' medicine. If you turn up at a herbalist's with something very serious, they refer you to a doctor. Herbalists can treat a wide range of minor conditions, but as a sole prescription it's clearly for eczema and depression rather than rampant cancer or open heart surgery.

It is so complementary that it overlaps to a sizeable degree. The development of new pharmaceutical medicines is often just isolating the active part of a plant already used in herbal medicine.

Acupuncture can also be complementary to Western medicine. I recently spoke to a GP who refers patients and says that it not only works on minor conditions in a less sledghammery way but can actually cure one or two conditions such as chronic back pain that pharmaceutical medicine often cannot treat, only mask.

Homeopaths, on the other hand, tend to distrust modern knowledge of physiology and believe their medicine can treat anything.

The theory is that the more you dilute the active ingredient, the stronger the medicine becomes. Many pills are so diluted that they would need to be bigger than your entire body to contain a single molecule of the active ingredient. Some would need to be bigger than the earth.

One person I know who studied homeopathy was told by her lecturer that if you cannot get the active ingredient then just write the name of it on a piece of paper and use that instead. Not only can water retain more power of a drug the less it contains, but it can read any language in any handwriting too.

Homeopathy defies all scientific reasoning, and indeed it defies the results of proper trials. There's no real evidence homeopathy works. Despite this, homeopaths will tell you they can treat anything and will happily send you into a malaria zone inoculated with tiny sugar pills.

Clearly the scientific methods used to discern what works should apply to all medicinal disciplines, but when it costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to get a medicine on the EU approval list, you're only going to shell out if you own the patent rather than someone growing valerian root.

This is why so many things from the pills and potions aisle in Holland and Barrett make no claims for themselves and only say they 'should not be used as a substitute for a varied diet'. Some of these substances work, others probably do not, and we don't know which are which or what a real effective dosing regime should be.

Perhaps where there's considerable anecdotal evidence for a non-patent treatment the EU itself should pay to have it properly evaluated. Given how much we spend on health care, and how much we'll save by having cheaper non-patented treatments available, it would likely be a comparatively small sum of money soundly invested.

passionate friend on acid

Issue 3 of the mid-90s drug zine Heads And Tales had an indispensable little feature called Ten Rules For Tripping.

1 - Cars can hurt you.
2 - You cannot fly.
3 - It's never 'a good day to die', no matter how amazingly dramatic it sounds.
4 - Taking your clothes off will draw attention.
5 - Keep mouth shut at all times in public.
6 - Although you may see things that are not there, you won't NOT see things that aren't there.
7 - Don't forget how to burp.
8 - Only carry a house key, some loose change, and your address in your shoe.
9 - Nobody can tell you're tripping till you tell them 'I'm tripping'.
10 - No matter how fucked you think you are, you'll eventually come down.

It's rule 9 that we're going to illustrate here.

On the surface, this appears to be just Teardrop Explodes doing Passionate Friend on Top of The Pops in September 1981. Because, unless singer Julian Cope tells us 'I'm tripping,' we're none the wiser.



In his autobiography Head-On, Cope describes what was going on from his perspective.

= = = = = = =

We piled into the Toppy studios for what was to be a 'live' broadcast. Of course, we were still going to be lip-synching but it was screened directly to its regular 10 million viewers.

Gary [Dwyer, drummer] and I took huge hits of LSD during the afternoon and our dressing room had a vague narcotics lab feel about it, what with Droyd and Bates and the head of [record label] Phonogram TV punishing large quantities of powder.

We lurched over to our set. I was going to perform the whole song on top of a grand piano, in bare feet with leather pants and a shit embroidered top that I'd made from a Columbia hotel pillowcase.

I climbed on to the piano and freaked. No way. I could barely stand up on the ground. Up on the piano I felt like Basketball Jones, the cartoon kid from the Cheech and Chong video who keeps getting bigger and bigger. I looked up into the ceiling of the studio, the lights twinkled like distant stars. From my elevated position on the piano, studio technicians and members of other groups looked grotesque.

The acid heightened the fake tans of everyone in the room and only accentuated the paleness of the Teardrop members. Of course, if they'd had a chance, Alfie, Jeff and Gary would have been sun-worshippers, but I had to keep those bastards in check.

We ran through the camera rehearsal and loped back into the dressing room. The next few hours were spent smoking spliff and everyone trying in vain to persuade me from wearing the orange pillow case. 'Okay, Copey, five minutes and you're on'. Uh? Wow, Batesy was right. I sat, head down, with the front of my leathers undone. Sweat coursed down my belly and I mopped it up with my shitty top.

I was paranoid as hell. The BBC make-up woman had scared the shit out of me. They had asked me if I'd just come back from the Bahamas and said they loved my tan. Of course, irony is lost on someone who's tripping his brain out, so I figured that I must be turning brown.

'I'm not too dark really, am I?'

'Fuckin ell Copey, you're dead pale, honest'. Gary was trying to make me feel better, but what did he know? He was tripping too and I didn't want people placating me. It was time to go. I wasn't ready. We had to go. I wasn't ready. Why aren't you ready? I don't feel tall enough. Well, you're gonna be standing on top of a piano. Is that tall enough for you. Eh?

They led me reluctantly out to the studio floor. It was total chaos out there. People were running around and freaking out and winding everyone else up. I suddenly felt very becalmed. A group called Buck's Fizz were doing their thing on the other side of the studio. They were a two-boy, two-girl, fun group with cutesy expressions and dance routines. We were to follow them.

[The Buck's Fizz song was One Of These Nights. The TOTP performance doesn't seem to be archived online, but it must've been pretty darn similar to this one]

I watched fascinated. Then as time moved slowly on I felt sucked into their scene. God, they were brilliant. I wanted to be in Buck's Fizz. I rushed over to Gary and hit him with the idea. The two of us should join. Imagine an acid-soaked dance group with showbiz routines, it would be incredible.

It was two minutes to our performance. We had to be exact as it was live, so no mistakes. Bates dragged me to the grand piano. Shit, it's like an ocean liner. The piano was exquisite and moved gently past me as I walked around it. Little girls ran over towards me as I climbed aboard the piano. I smiled my most ridiculous and inane grin and, after much manoeuvring, scrambled to the top of this vast and polished plateau.

The finish of the piano was unbelievable. I waded in its high gloss black syrup, my bare feet sinking deeper and deeper into the surface like hot wet tar on a newly completed road. It was all I could think about. 'Don't jump around too much, Copey. It'll cost us a fortune if you wreck that thing'. Oh, thanks a lot, Batesy. Thanks fucking loads. That's just what I want to hear when I'm tripping on live TV.

The boom camera swung away from Buck's Fizz as their song faded out. Everyone was in position and I forgot to duck as the camera crane whizzed past my head, nearly knocking me from my dubious perch. Okay, I'm not in Buck's Fizz. I'm not. Better remember.

'The friend I have is a passionate friend, but I can't see you buying...'. Passionate Friend doesn't have an intro or anything. It just starts - vocals, drums, guitar, everything. All together. In a split second, I was fighting for my life up on the piano. I looked back at Gary who was off his head. His blond quiff was hanging straight out over his face, jiblike and starched and strong like a newly creosoted fence. I wanted to climb on to it and walk along its length, like a sailor walking the plank.

Around me, the song waged war with itself. So much going on. How can I keep this together? Who cares, I'm doing fine. I looked down at Jeff, thousands of feet below me at the piano keyboard. He looked ridiculous to me, like the phantom of the opera or some such shit.

Now, Passionate Friend is also one of those songs that has a reprise. See, the whole song builds to a climax then we come to a stop, and start the whole thing again. Suddenly, I was miming, 'the friend I have is a passionate friend, but I can't see you buying...'. Hold on, I thought. What's all this? My mind did double-takes and I battled for some sense of reality. Maybe this was the real start of the performance. Maybe I'd imagined the first half of the song. What the hell is going on?

I felt the song disappearing into a tunnel. It was fading out and the Top of The Pops audience was cheering. I felt as though I had been up there for days. But I'd done battle and I seemed to have won.

more dirty pop

Having passed on the recipes for assorted dirty pop, the ideal drink for the second-day munter, there’s a new one.

Victorian literacy rates were much lower than in the present day, so there was a neeed to have visual clues for important instructions. Also, really really important warnings needed to be glaring so that they cut through any daydreaming and mindfog. Hence, in the apothecary’s dispensary and the chemist’s shop, substances that were poisonous were stored in blue bottles.

The blue bottle has recently returned to public notice. The advent of cruelly strong and chemically dubious white cider (has it really ever been near an apple?) has given the adolescent experimenter, the street drinker, and all others interested in the best price per millilitre, a new favourite.

I used to wonder why it is sold in blue bottles. This is not one brand after all, it is a synchronicitous industry standard. Then it hit me; this is a folk-memory. It harks back to the Victorian glass bottles. It says ‘Warning! Poison! Unfit for human consumption!’.



And yet, as with the cheeky vimto that makes blue WKD into something not just drinkable but actually pleasant, it is possible to perform alcoholic alchemy.

Cheap and boozy ginger punch

6 litres of ginger beer
4 litres of strong white cider
1 litre-ish of really crap whisky
slices of orange and lemon

Combine ingredients, ladle into glasses and drink. Repeat until there’s none left.

As is essential for the second-day dirty pop, it has novelty, it is unchallenging, not bitter and packs a bit of a woof. Clocking in at around 6% alcohol, it’s ideal for staving off sobriety without getting you too splattered.

And,as with the Alcoholic Dr Pepper, it is cheap to buy so you can afford to get it in for everyone, refreshing not only your inebriation but also the team's bonds.

keep death off the roads

Last summer, in what may or may not have been called Operation Fish-Barrel, police were on the southbound M5 looking for cars going to Glastonbury and searching them for drugs. Two people who got caught with their stash were given 12 months in jail.

Taking drugs at Glastonbury, those guys were no real danger to anyone but themselves, and even then their biggest injury risk would probably be sore ribs from hugging each other too hard.

It can be argued that they knew the law and chose to break it so should be prepared to take it on the chin.

Except that the same thing's true of speeding drivers. I have to wonder, in the time the police were searching that car on the motorway, how many speeding drivers were going past?

The same cops were ignoring the speeders in order to catch a smaller number of criminals whose crime, more importantly, was less of a threat to innocent people.

As a society we have decided that the enormous threat from cars is worth the death they cause, but not the smaller threat from taking recreational drugs.

As John B says

If something provides sufficient net quantities of fun, it is easy to see that we do rate it as worth the death of one or several innocent people. How’s that? Easy. Such beneficial-only-because-fun activities that kill the innocent and non-consenting as funfairs, fast cars, aviation, skateboarding, allowing men out at night, swimming pools and serving margarine to kids are both legal and socially acceptable.

Hence, society (here meaning 'everyone who is capable of even the most basic level of moral debate') agrees that if enough fun is provided, the deaths for fun trade-off is acceptable. The only moral question left is over the necessary fun-to-killing ratio.

But still, we limit the fun. There are safety laws around dangerous items such as guns, funfairs, swimming pools and motor cars. Those who flout them are greeted with public opprobrium, with the curious exception of speeders. Those same Mail-Express newspapers that use the word 'criminal' to imply a total lack of personal worth are ferocious in their defence of the criminal activity speeding.

Witness the recent hoo-hah about the Commission for Integrated Transport’s report into the use of speed limiters, a sat-nav system that knows where speed limits are and makes your car obey them.

For several years trucks have been limited to 56mph, with a resultant drop in accidents. Why not extend this to cars? The Commission says we could introduce them voluntarily – maybe offering incentives such as a reduction in car tax – and see how we get on.

The evidence is certainly compelling. Mandatory speed limiters would reduce injury accidents by 29%. It would be most effective on roads that have cyclists and pedestrians. In other words, this isn’t about taking away people’s right to risk their own safety; it’s about reducing their ability to injure others.

That statistic conversely means that it would affect accident reduction less on motorways. However, there it has a different reduction in the deadly effects of cars. Whilst obeying speed limits on normal roads would deliver no real difference in CO2 emissions, if motorway drivers stuck to going under 70mph they'd reduce their carbon emissions by around 6%.

The AA attacked the idea, with their president Edmund King saying

Many may worry that a voluntary Government system may lead to a Big Brother compulsory system that tracks us as well as our speed.

Sorry, but since March 2006 they've been doing exactly that. CCTV cameras across the country are networked, covering all motorways and main roads as well as towns, cities, ports and filling station forecourts. The system reads 35 million number plates a day and stores the details for two years on a police computer.

But the AA and the other motorist groups didn't make a fuss about that. It's not the surveillance they fear, it's the fines. It's not about our collective liberty, just the motorists' money.

More to the point, the limiters can and do work without any logging technology. It does not mean an increase in government surveillance.

The Daily Mail tories hate speed cameras calling them 'a blatant tax on the motorist'.

Well yes, as they target motor vehicles they tax some motorists. However, as they only target speeding vehicles they are a more accurately a tax on motoring crime. Fines for speeding are no more a general tax on motorists than fines for headbutting are a tax on people with foreheads.

Speed cameras are installed where there have been several serious accidents. Their primary purpose is not to catch speeding motorists and tax them, it is to discourage drivers from speeding through blackspots. That is why they usually have bloody great big signs warning a driver as they approach.

Personally, I think this has a default of ceding the rest of the road network to speeding. I don't see why they don't have a vast amount of hidden speed cameras elsewhere. Those who obey speed limits would never be penalised. As the Conservatives always say when infringing liberties, the innocent have nothing to fear.

In those circumstances the politicians are usually bringing in some anti-terrorist legislation. As the brilliant performance poet Danny Chivers has pointed out - in rhyme, no less - Mount Snowden kills as many people as terrorism. Whereas in the UK cars kill as many people as the 7/7 bombings every week. Even the appalling massive toll of the Madrid bombings pales when you find out that the same number of Spaniards are killed by cars every ten days.

Infringing on the right to criminally kill cyclists, pedestrians and other road users is something I can live with.

dirty pop

Here comes New Year's Eve, traditionally a night of going on a hell of a bender.

If, like me, you periodically find yourself having been up all night with friends, there is one essential consideration; how to keep going.

A key thing - if alcohol has been involved - is to avoid sobering up. However, it’s easy to take the path of least resistance and end up nursing a half empty can of hand-temperature flat cornershop lager. In your psychologically vulnerable state this makes you feel fundamentally tragic.

Instead, with a bit of forethought you can make that impressionability work for you. Firstly, get drinks that feel like pop. A gin and tonic is a good place to start.

Next, grasp the fact that you’re not going to eat properly any time soon, so it’s essential to have something that feels like nutriment. To this end, neck a pint of stout. People will tell you that women on labour wards used to be given stout after childbirth to replace lost iron. The fact is that it’d take gallons of the stuff to get your RDA, but that’s not the point. To you in your mentally pliable state – and, in all likelihood, to those women – it feels true, and that's what counts.

But as well as avoiding sobering up, you need to have a novelty factor to keep your psyche buoyant. I present you with the simple, elegant solution.

The Breakfast of Champions

Pour a can of stout into a pint glass, and drop in a depth charge of ruby port.

For those unfamiliar, a depth charge is a shot glass of a different drink dropped into a pint. When you down the pint, the last gulp has the extra woof of the different drink.

Pour out your measure of port, gently drop it into the pint, when you hear it clink on the bottom neck it in one. Your stomach will feel nicely sorted and you can get on with the day.

Incidentally, for those who need to give sobriety a wider berth there are stronger versions of all these Day Two drinks. They all sacrifice some taste in order to gain some potency.

A Breakfast of Champions can be amended to a Full Irish Breakfast. Simply replace the normal stout with Guinness Foreign Extra.

For some reason best known to themselves, Guinness is brewed at a mighty 7.5% in Nigeria. They make it like that in Dublin now too, and both are found in offies in areas with large African and Afro-Caribbean populations. Go for the Dublin stuff, it tastes smoother than the Nigerian as well as cutting down on your beer miles.

As an optional twist, you can change the depth charge to the deity of Day Two drinking, Buckfast. There are etymologists who believe that the words ‘buckfast’ and ‘breakfast’ share a common root.

Alcoholic Dr Pepper

Pour a measure of amaretto into a pint glass, fill it with half cola and half premium lager. No need to be a stickler for brands. Your tastebuds are shot and you’re mixing it with a soft drink that tastes like cold battery acid, thus it's pointless to splash out on Stella or Kronenbourg. That said, as you’re about to dilute the beer, don’t settle for non-premium lager. None of your pissy Carling here. As long as it says 5% on the can, you’re in.

Because this one involves a lot of cola it’s not only cheap but also scores caffeine points, its doubly good for the sleep deprived.

If you’re going to down it in one, have a depth charge of more amaretto.

Downing in one makes a good group-bonding exercise, essential for keeping everyone’s brain up on the level. Also, as this drink is so easy on the wallet, you can afford to get them in for everyone, which bestows additional group bonds and keeps that team-on-the-mission/we-are-the-Famous-Five element to the fore.

For the strong version, try the malty tang of a super strength lager. As with the premium lager, don’t be seduced by brands or any objective standards of taste. Forego this once the classic panache of Special Brew or the glitz and glamour of Tennent’s Super. Skol, Kestrel, Lynx; as long as clocks in at 9% or thereabouts you’ll be fine.

Cheeky vimto

One of the most popular dirty pops is the blue WKD and port cocktail known as cheeky vimto. Indeed, this one’s so mainstream that you can get it at Wetherspoons. The question comes in the ratio. Wetherspoons give 50ml of port to two bottles of WKD, which seems blatantly stingy to me. I favour putting 100ml of port in a pint glass and dropping one WKD on top of it.

To make it a 'dirty vimto' follow replace the port with Buckfast.

Made by monks and drunk by punks, Bucky actually contains less alcohol – 15% compared to port’s 20%ish – but that’s not the point. As anyone who’s ever drunk it (or been in the blast radius of a consumer) it’s not about the ABV. They import cheap French wine and then do something to it. Nobody’s sure what but it’s an ancient monastery, it’s got to be some Latin incantations with some weird creepy relic and the kind of wrongness that Buffy puts a stop to.

If you can’t get blue WKD, just pick something at random from the cleaning products aisle of the supermarket. I mean, what the fuck is the stuff made out of anyway? Toilet Duck and vodka if you ask me.

Bucky and blue WKD – pure filth in a glass. As marvellously tasty and fearlessly intrepid as it is utterly utterly wrong. Just what you need when your awakeness outstrips your judgement and you want to keep it that way.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

UPDATE 5 Feb 09 : Don't miss out on more alcoholic alchemy with the boozy ginger punch that turns white cider into something fit for drinking!

it's a made-up drug

Anyone familiar with Brass Eye's drugs episode, an especially the use of Cake, may get a sense of deja vu as life imitates art.

If you're not familiar with Cake, check this:



The mighty officers of Thames Valley Police recently sent out a warning to schools about 'strawberry meth', a strawberry flavoured version of crystal meth being given away outside school gates by dealers.

It was, of course, a load of arse. The cops retracted it and apologised.

Chief Inspector Dennis Evernden said: "One of our officers, who is new to his post, received the e-mail internally in good faith and forwarded it on to the schools in West Oxfordshire to warn them"

I love the last line in the report that tells us 'the force would not be holding an internal inquiry over the incident'.

Shouldn't they be curious about how such blatant Cake twaddle could be taken seriously by someone in a position of power? And hopefully go on review what else they tell people about drugs, with an eye to whether that's a load of made-up bollocks too?

sunday drinker wine reviews

Harry Hutton's blog, Chase Me Ladies I'm In The Cavalry, remains one of the funniest things I ever read. Usually - but not always - making a point and - always - with a great comic slap. His recent post on the cost of the Iraq war observed

If Bush had spent that $3,000,000,000,000 on shoes, no American child would ever have to wear the same shoes more than once. Or he could have bought everyone in Iraq an Aston Martin. Those would be the actions of a madman, of course, yet still more sensible than what he actually did do.

In turn, Hutton's taste in other people's work is superb. He posted an embed of a Sunday Drinker wine review without comment, as it needs none. However, there are a further two Sunday Drinker wine reviews of equal comic calibre, so I hereby give you the lot.

independent rests on sunday

Starting in 1997, the Independent on Sunday ran a campaign to decriminalise cannabis that they promised would only end when it was successful. They devoted huge amounts of their paper to it.

They staged a debate getting respected figures on both sides to talk it out, which Godhaven Ink published - it is objectively neutral, and in so being it ends up being the most persuasive piece of pro-legalisation propaganda. It has all the tough points from both sides, and any reasonable person can't help but see who's right.

The campaign petered out eventually. But recently the Independent on Sunday followed its run of cannabis scare stories with an outright apology for ever running that decriminalisation campaign. Its reasoning rests on one idea, the mounting evidence that cannabis can trigger certain mental health problems for a tiny proportion (0.01%-0.2%) of its users.

Considering these people, Gyrus wonders,

What else was going on in these people’s lives? Was cannabis really a direct cause? Was it more of a catalyst for something simmering away due to other factors? How many people out there would be driven crazy by their jobs if it weren’t for them being able to wind down with a spliff in the evening?

All good points. But let's say we know, for a fact, without a shadow of a doubt, that cannabis was wholly and unquestionably the cause of these people's psychotic episodes.

Firstly, let's be glad the hospital got to them before the coppers did. Imagine descending into schizophrenic paranoia and then getting busted and jailed.

Why do we put people who are on drugs in jail? They're SICK! They're not criminals. Sick people don't get healed in jail.

- Bill Hicks

But more, there is an underlying assumption that the Indy on Sunday - and indeed other newspapers - aren't mentioning. They presume that more stringent laws mean less users. This is just plain wrong.

Is that clear enough? Greater criminalisation does not lead to less consumption.

Cannabis was legally downgraded several years ago, from Class B to Class C. The Home Secretary in the aftermath of reclassification was Charles Clarke. Like anyone taking up the post, his instinct was to repress and restrict. Yet he had to concede that

contrary to my personal expectation, reclassification has not led to an increase in use

In fact, it has gone the other way. The government found that use among teenagers fell by 16% in the year after reclassification.

Even this isn't the whole story. Usage has been falling across society since the late 1990s. Reclassification hasn't made a blind bit of difference.

After the Netherlands decriminalised cannabis in 1976, use went down for six years. It has risen a little since, but no faster than in countries that have harsher regimes. Despite the greater availability, Dutch people are around half as likely to be cannabis users than Brits.

Jim Bliss tackles one of the hackneyed myths of cannabis consumption in a way I'd not heard before.

there are those (the UK Conservative Party for instance) who still trot out the “gateway theory” as a rationale for criminalising cannabis. The theory being that those who use cannabis will be more likely to use harder drugs due to some undefined biochemical conditioning that occurs in the brain. This is simply absurd and — when taken to a logical conclusion — rests upon the assumption that our neurochemistry is aware of which drugs are legally proscribed and which can be legally prescribed.

Seriously… think about it…

- “Cannabis leads to heroin!”
Wow, really? So does alcohol lead to heroin?
- “Of course not!”
Well, does tobacco lead to cannabis maybe?
- “Not a bit of it! Cannabis leads to heroin which leads to speed, ecstasy and cocaine.”
Er… do any of them lead to prozac?

In reality the “cannabis gateway effect” (which does exist in many places) has been demonstrated to be sociological rather than biological. It is the prohibition of cannabis which places it into the same supply-system as the harder drugs. Those who smoke cannabis are more likely to have regular encounters with those who sell hard drugs than those who do not. It’s all quite easy to understand when you actually think about it rationally for a second.

I've covered much of this stuff before (though in the face of the same old - let's use the right word - lies, it still needs saying).

For all this though, the thing that's prompted me here isn't the message, it's the messenger.

The Independent on Sunday has not only apologised for the brilliant cannabis campaign, it's now running a new one, The Military Covenant, running stories about how homecoming soldiers in America get tickertape parades and asking why that doesn't happen for our boys.

It's turned into a conservative rag akin to the Express. This has been no more starkly illustrated than at the Camp for Climate Action.

In the run-up, the IoS's Cole Morton extensively interviewed a couple of Camp organisers. He came along to one of the public meetings the Camp organised in villages near Heathrow to meet with local residents and explain what the Camp would be. They received 100% support.

Hip to what much of the media would be saying, Campers also went round thousands of houses in the area handing out letters explaining what would really be going on and why. Again, they got not one complaint and cartloads of praise.

Into this atmosphere stepped Cole Moreton. Despite appearing to understand climate change, despite the openness of the Campers, he did a stitch-up. He wrote of how the Campers were dark, shadowy anarchists hoodwinking the locals about their intentions. One of them wore a smart dress to the public meeting to lull the locals into a false sense of security. Another deceptively wore a T-shirt with a peace dove on for the same reason, apparently. Nothing to do with these being the clothes those people wear ordinarily.

So far, so irresponsibly sensationalist. But he then took a turn into the despicably tabloid, ringing one of them up saying, 'oh, your friend says we need to dismantle capitalism before we can tackle climate change, would you agree with that?', trying to coax out some outrageous quote to fit his story.

The friend, of course, had said nothing of the sort; quite the opposite, in fact. As she put it, 'revolution or survival, which one do you think we need most?'.

This from a paper that's supposed to take climate change seriously. As opposed to being staffed by the sort of journalists who follow children home from school pretending to be mummy's friend so they'll get a good line, or shout through a letter box 'we know you're in there' as a woman cries behind the door.

Then during the Camp a call came in from the IoS's Jonathan Owen. His opening gambit was to be clear the IoS wasn't like other papers because the weekday paper writes about climate change a lot. He wanted to run a story with depth for the Sunday of the Camp's conclusion. Something with purpose, something that others wouldn't be writing.

Having been told about the way the police were using the Terrorism Act to stop and search people coming to and from the Camp, he declared his outrage. 'This is supposed to be a fucking democracy,' he railed.

He saw that the attempted injunction - the widest ranging ever sought in this country - seen with the misuse of terrorism powers against people who were clearly not terrorists, and the smear campaign being launched via the Evening Standard were three parts of one story. They showed how the establishment responds to anyone who openly and peacefully stands up and makes demands merely for the emission cuts that even the government admits are necessary.

Numerous calls were had over several days, a personal relationship developed and Owen came to the Camp and met with people there. He declared himself impressed with what he found and, in keeping with all he said and all he'd been told and the Independent's support for action on climate change he went and wrote his piece.

He filed 1400 words whose main point - that unique angle he was looking for, something that encapsulates the urgency of the issue and the potential of this new movement - was that Swampy had come to the Camp. At least Heat magazine is open about valuing celebrity above other concerns.

Audacious front pages, Robert Fisk and whatever might make it an intelligent and thought-provoking weekday read, but on a Sunday, it has a day off.

buckfast

To make truly mad alcoholic drinks, you need to be really dedicated. The demands of modern capitalism mean profit takes precedence over all other concerns, so if it takes a long time, they won't do it. Hence all these pissy weak beers coming out like Beck's Vier, Peeterman Artois and - you what? - the 2% Carling C2, which appears to be a soft drink for those who find Carling too strong and full-flavoured.

Seriously, what is wrong with everybody? I understand the invention of Guinness Extra Cold; it's for people who like the brand but don't actually like the beer, so need it superchilled to remove all flavour. Why would you need flavourless diluted piss like Fosters extra cold?

The promotion says it's pretend beer for when you need to be seen with a pint but can't actually have one. Mind you, the same promotion calls it 'the great tasting mid-strength lager'.

'Mid', as any user of the English language will tell you, means that which is in the middle, neither the top nor the bottom. As opposed to that whose value is lower than any other. Rather than being a lunchtime pint, I suspect it's more to do with the fact that you can brew it inside of a day and get the gear making a new batch, maximising profit.

At the other end of the scale lie the drinks that can never repay the time invested, so they can only be made by those with all the time in the world going spare and no concern for monetary reward. Monks. All those insanely strong thick beers from Belgian trappists. Is it just a coincidence, or is there a shared etymological root with 'Belgium' and 'bludgeon'?

In the UK, we have our own. Buckfast Tonic Wine.

The label starts you worrying even before you unscrew the cap. "The use of the words 'tonic wine' does not imply health giving properties".

It's made in a a big monastery in a small village, Buckfastleigh in Devon. They import continental wines and do something secret and weird to them, probably involving rituals from books like the ones Giles from Buffy keeps on the upstairs shelves.

What comes out is a lunatic thing that makes the drinker howl like a werewolf drag queen being boiled alive.




The makers surely realise it attracts the more, er, insistent type of drinker. The availability of Buckfast seems inversely proportionate to the proximity to Buckfastleigh Abbey. They know full well what it does to people and they don't want it anywhere near them.

Find it in Devon? No chance. By Birmingham it's in a few choice offies, but you have to know where to look. In Glasgow it's practically delivered with the milk.

And so it is that we come to Berkeley Street in Glasgow city centre and find this enchanting alfresco scene.

Some radge bugger's been getting their bits out and pissing on the pavement, and they've also deposited their empty bottle of, oh, what a surprise...

what goes up simultaneously goes down

As Paul Simon warned, 'taking downs to get off to sleep and ups to start you on your way, after a while they’ll change your style'.

Ah, but what about taking downers and uppers at the same time?

What kind of total loon would inflict that on anyone's system? What kind of crazed amoral drug dealer would sell such things?

In the 1930s Smith Kline & French brought out Dexamyl, a mix of amphetamines and barbiturates, a breathtakingly potent psychopharmaceutical pincer movement that would make Danny out of Withnail suck air through his teeth and wince.

The advert from the 1940s says just one fat dose every morning 'is of significant value in depressed and verbally inhibited patients'. No shit.

The thing I love best, though, is the illustration.



No addressing anything tricky like why she might be depressed and unfulfilled.

Give her medical grade speed to make her active and barbiturates to make her compliant - sorry, that's 'more approachable and communicative' - so she can get back to the robotic domestic enslavement.

If she finds her chores and lack of personal control of her own destiny upsetting, dose her up till she doesn't care!

Pack up your troubles in your old dust bag and smile smile smile!

upwards at 210 degrees

Media reporting on the use of illegal drugs is always prone to comedy.

However, I dislike the intentional comedy, low-grade punning headlines about cannabis policy 'going to pot' or 'up in smoke' and the like. The criminalisation of cannabis sees thousands of people incarcerated and tens of thousands convicted (thus unable to take many government jobs, work with kids, etc) when they've usually done no harm to anyone, not even themselves.

But even in the netherworld of shoddy journalism characteristic of drugs stories, this BBC report of a police crackdown on cannabis growers stands out both for unintentional comedy and the how-did-any-journailst-get-paid-for-this factor.

With a tinge of hypocrisy I revel in the unintentional comedy, most especially the low-grade punning.

The sidebar has links to related stories, including one headlined 'Cannabis policing relaxed'; yep, it even relaxes coppers.

It goes on

Allan Gibson, of the Association of Chief Police Officers', said it was an "increasing problem which must be nipped in the bud".

Let's see, it's about a police crackdown on drugs, so what should the BBC's subeditor have as the pull-quote in big letters? Information about the raids maybe?

'A lot of people who grow the cannabis are illegal immigrants'
- Det Insp Neil Hutchison

'A lot'? How many is that exactly? They don't say. And in fact don't have that quote anywhere. In the actual quote in the article 'a lot' is only 'sometimes';

The proceeds are used to invest in other crimes, Det Insp Hutchison said, and illegal immigrants are sometimes trafficked illegally to the UK in order to grow the cannabis.

'illegal immigrants are sometimes trafficked illegally' - there's some other way to do it?

But more to the point, why the fuck would anyone risk importing an illegal immigrant to do an easy job that doesn't take much time? Even if it happens a bit, do we really think it's so common that it should be seen as a noteworthy part of drug-growers' strategy?

It's just more of that thread of racism that gets quietly woven into news stories, like when Radio 4 covered the conviction of a driver who'd killed a pedestrian by saying, 'An asylum seeker who killed a woman when he drove...'. Associate one lot of bad people with another, whether there's any truth in it or not.

Police are already using thermal imaging cameras to spot the factories, which can be up to 10 times hotter than a normal house because of the heat from the lights.

Let's say the average house is 21 degrees. Does this mean houses growing cannabis are at around 210 degrees? Are they sure about that?

Not so much need for thermal imaging, just look for the front doors with the fulminating paint blisters.

In the UK, the type of drug which is mainly grown is known as skunk, a strong variant of the drug which is potentially harmful.

Gotta love that, 'potentially harmful'. Can we expect crackdowns on other potentially harmful items? Forks, shampoo, wine glasses, cotton-rich socks?

There are many risks associated with illegal drugs. And a serious proportion of them are entirely caused by prohibition. Drugs being cut with harmful substances (or the flipside, being usually cut so when a pure batch comes through people overdose). People being uninformed or misinformed about the effects. People having to buy from profiteering gangsters who don't give a fuck about them, as opposed to getting quality stuff at a price commensurate with production. But one I'd never thought of was the house fires.

The gangs who run these farms often steal electricity using wiring set-ups which can carry a risk of causing fires.

Then they have a table of 'tell tale signs' so you can shop your local grower.

gardening equipment left outside or a pungent smell coming from the building.

That's my dad - a keen gardener and wonderful cook - fucked then.

Politicians and prohibitionists always weasel out of anything that corners their absurd approach to drugs by saying 'we can't say anything good about drugs because it would send out a confusing message'. Leaving aside the volumes it speaks about their incredibly patronising view of us (you morons only understand THIS IS GOOD or THIS IS BAD), how fucking mixed is this next bit?

In January, the government decided to keep cannabis as a Class C drug...

But on Monday Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said: "Those who use and sell cannabis will face tough penalties - up to 14 years for cultivation and dealing.

The same law that declassified cannabis increased penalites for supplying it! 'We don't think it's so bad for you to have it after all, so it's important that we're harsher on people who give it to you'.

There is no reason for cannabis to be illegal. None. Really, absolutely none. Get everyone who thinks there is and put them versus me, on my own, on live global TV, stoned off me nuts and I'll still win the debate. Prohibition delivers none of the things it is supposed to do, there is no evidence that it will or can do so, and in the mean time it demonstrably causes a great deal of harm.

This isn't just about smoking dope, or even the right to do what you like to your own body. Just like my high school's banning of boys wearing white socks, it's about normalising the persecution of random activities. So, like new army recruits being made to march round and round for no reason, no matter how much we dislike it, we learn to obey authority.

I could go on all day, but I've written about this elsewhere before, and there's been recent excellent eloquent posts at The Quiet Road and Rhythmic Ginger which between them say all that needs to be said.

The so-called War On Drugs is not a war on pills, powder, plants and potions, it is a war on mental states - a war on consciousness itself - how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, who gets to control it.

- Casey Hardison speaking in Hove Crown Court court, 2005. He was convicted of manufacturing LSD and sentenced to 20 years.

coming for your nuts

First they came for the smokers, and I did not speak out because I was not a smoker. Then they came for the peanuts...

Last Thursday The Independent published a truncated version of my post about cannabis reclassification on their letters page.

The next day there was a response:

Peanuts in peril

Sir: Merrick Godhaven should be careful (letter, 12 January). Peanuts are banned on major airlines because of their potential to cause injury to a few passengers. The airlines led the way in banning smoking, soon to be ubiquitous. Peanuts may be next.

PETER JANIKOUN
HOLYPORT, BERKSHIRE

talking shite on cannabis

Independent columnist Deborah Orr agrees that the proposed re-grading of cannabis back up to Class B is daft.

She points to the supposed motive for the plan - the mounting evidence that cannabis can trigger psychotic episodes in people predisposed to them - and notes that the link seems to be stronger with skunk than with weaker forms. So she concludes, 'I'd be happy to see skunk and hash given different legal classifications.'

Firstly, there is hash made from skunk that's every bit as strong as the simple herbal stuff.

But ignoring that, let's take the point that the stronger forms are somehow more dangerous. Cannabis users do not toke and toke until it's all gone, they hit a point of feeling high enough. Stronger cannabis means the user uses less cannabis to reach that desired level.

As smoking is by far the most common form of ingestion, weaker forms mean more smoking and more smoking-related ailments, ranging from bronchitis to fatal cancer.

Also, herbal cannabis in plant form cannot be cut with adulterants. Resins and processed products, however, have bulking agents added. I'd readily wager that the paraffin wax and plastic and assorted other crap mixed into resin do more harm than smoking pure resin.

She also challenges the idea of 'no victim, no crime'.

so many people are untroubled by the idea of taking part in illegal acts that they perceive as being damaging only to themselves. (Not true, of course, since the international drug trade is so ruthless and pitiless).

Increasingly, people in the UK are growing their own cannabis. Home growers do not process their crop into hash, that's something for those who want to ship it around the world, the ruthless and pitiless people Deborah refers to. This is another way in which herbal cannabis does less harm.

The trap both she and the Home Secretary have fallen into is the presumption that legalisation implies endorsement and encouragement. This would be no more true of legalising cannabis than it was of repealing the Suicide Act.

When cannabis was decriminalised in the Netherlands, use went down for the following six years. Today, despite our different legislative approaches, Dutch people are approximately half as likely to use cannabis as a British citizen.

Legalisation brings the production and distribution under control, thus eliminating the ruthless pitiless gangs from the picture, and the toxic adulterants from the product.

Prohibition increases the damage done by recreational drugs and completely fails at all of its stated objectives.

Even if the evidence of cannabis as a trigger for psychotic episodes in the predisposed does turn out to be absolutely true, it is still no reason to change the legal staus of the drug. As I've said previously;

Millions of us enjoy peanut products every day, but for a few people with undiagnosed latent allergies, peanut use is very damaging, even fatal. There has been a massive increase in peanut allergies in recent years and the government has done nothing, effectively encouraging this dangerous peanut use.

How dare the government be soft on peanuts. How dare these people who use peanuts recreationally - not one of whom truly needs the nuts - want them to be freely available and thus allow those with latent allergies to be exposed to the dire consequences. Pubs and supermarkets across the country are pushing deadly peanuts, profiting from the suffering of innocent children. Those who call for the legalisation of Star Bars and peanut butter M&Ms are calling for peanut-allergic children to fall dead in the playground. Ban these evil peanuts.

no thanks, i don't do the horse

As my friend Justin has pointed out, 'due to the alarming rise in humans partaking of ketamine, the black metal-enhancing drug which rightfully belongs to horses, the equine kingdom has decided to wreak its boozy revenge':






Ketamine is a weird one.

It's commonly used as an anaesthetic for horses (not merely a tranquiliser as is commonly said). This is stuff that makes animals the size of horses so out of it that you can cut them up with knives and saw into their heads or delve around inside their guts without them noticing. The slightest misjusgement in your dose and you are rendered immobile.

There are facets that hold great value for the intrepid mongonaut. It's dissociative, so it pushes boundaries of space and self and can give mad visions. Unfortunately, this can objectively manifest as spending hours drooling whilst sat in a curdling pool of someone else's sick.

The other day, in the first piece of overheard conversation I felt compelled to rush-transcribe since that day in St Helens, a friend was on the phone saying, 'K hits me really hard, I was a bit of a puddle, I did that line without thinking and next thing I knew it had all gone... I was in queer 1930s Berlin in a writhing mass of people of indeterminate gender... It was great, actually'.

Doing it without thinking was how I last did K. I was DJing at a festival last summer and did a nice set of soul, disco and pop for munters at sunrise. The people on after me asked me to show them how the decks and mixer worked, so I ran them through it. They then dug a key into a small paper packet and pulled it out with a little cone of white powder on. Placing it less than three inches from my nose, I was asked the one-letter question, 'K?'.

Caught by surprise, like a fool I did the obvious. Two minutes later I was useless. The rig I'd just been using for two hours was a minefield of buttons and faders. And that was on one little toot. My colleagues, who'd been hoofing great snorts, were having trouble getting a CD out of its box. And there were two of them trying.

Their set opened with them randomly flicking a fader between a 7inch single of Brown Girl In The Ring and a CD of industrial noise. I don't mean industrial noise as a musical genre. I mean really industrial noise, like wearing a fleet of hoovers gaffa taped round your head while clinging on to the underside of a speeding train.

Why did I take that toot? It's one of those things like poppers. Amyl is never, never, never a good idea, and if someone suggested buying some you'd mock them into the floor for their buffoonery. But if that same person already has the poppers and gets it out, approaches you with their thumb covering the open top, well, it takes a peculiarly self-disciplined and puritanical presence of mind to decline.

But what the fuck is the point? You feel like someone's pulling a balloon over you scalp for ten seconds, then have a sharp headache for half an hour. At no point is it fun or anything else that could remotely approach qualifying for the label 'worth it'.

Ditto K at parties. As a psychedelic voyage, or as a way of being cosy on a comedown fair enough, but really, at something where it's all about interaction and energy, taking something that dissociates isn't going to fit with the vibe.

Indeed, so well does it break a sense of bouncy unity that it could almost be designed as such.

The CIA put crack into American black ghettoes in the 1980s.

At the same time in the UK, just as the tories turned on travellers as their enemy a cheap and plentiful supply of heroin found its way on to travellers sites across the country.

By the same token, I do wonder about the appearance of ketamine in dance culture. The establishemnt was terrified of dance culture when it began. A generation were growing up not drinking alcohol, not going to profitable mainstream drinking clubs, but were instead doing free warehouse parties and festivals and taking ecstasy.

The response took many forms. Despite the tosh in tabloids, alcopops were never aimed at schookids. Schoolkids don't have a lot of spending power. Like street drinkers, their primary and probably only concern is maximising the cost:alcohol ratio. At £1.20 a bottle, why get an alcopop when you can get white cider in double the quantity and strength for the same cost?

Alcopops were a way to sell alcohol to a market that had never forced themselves on to drinnking at 16 years old and thereby acquired the taste. They were aimed at the E generation.

Simultaneously, they massively increased the penalties for holding illegal rave parties, jumping at a stroke from £2,000 to £20,000 and six months in jail (an Act introduced by Tory MP Graham Bright; the head of his local Conservative Association was - what a coincidence - a director of Whitbread).

They arrested ravers again and again. A single party in Yorkshire in 1990 had 836 arrests, one of the largest mass arrests in British history. And just for the criminal activity of dancing in a field.

Then they brought out the Criminal Justice Act 1994, which actually defined the music it opposed, 'sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats'. It was outlawing the predominant youth culture. It's as if the UK was run by that 1950s Alabama White Citzens Council who published the 'Rock 'n' roll will pull the white man down to the level of the negro' posters.

By contrast, in Berlin in the early 90s they began the Love Parade, 300,000 people in one big dance music party. The authorites not only allowed it, they had it technically defined as a demonstration in favour of world peace; a party would saddle the organisers with the large clean-up bill, whereas a demonstration made it a government responsibility.

If the British government - the same one's who'd used MI5 to break the miners, the same ones who'd got smack to travellers - were so ardently opposed to rave culture, there's no reason they wouldn't also do the CIA/crack, travellers/smack thing. Ketamine would be ideal.

In many ways, ketamine is the opposiite of ecstasy. People on pills hug and dance and talk to each other, enthusing and listening. People on K, if they can move at all, stumble oblivious and bewildered, like an arthritic pensioner on acid.

Where E encourages euphoria, enthusiasm, communication, a sense of unity, love and empathy, K subdues, dissociates, dislocates and makes then user effectively absent from where they are.

If you wanted to break that strong bond of people at ecstasy-fuelled parties, if you want to make all-nighters look really ugly, stick a load of K up the punters noses. That'd send anyone with the urge for a sociable good time back into the pickpocketing hands of the mainstream drinking culture.