“One minute I’m waiting for Kate to arrive to join me in the Jacuzzi for a romantic evening. The next thing I can remember is doing cold turkey in a vomit-filled cell.”
Babyshambles’ hell-raising singer-songwriter, Pete Doherty.
The human race has always exercised a healthy compulsion to experiment with body and mind altering substances, and the laws prohibiting our freedom to choose to do so are definitively disingenuous and systematically perpetuate social problems.
It was impossible not to feel acute sympathy for the parents of Essex teenager, Leah Betts, who tragically died on her birthday more than a decade ago while under the influence of ecstasy, like several others before and since her short life came to an abrupt and untimely end. Nevertheless, ecstasy deaths remain extremely rare, and even more so when compared with alcohol-related deaths.
It is partly due to the passionate crusade by Leah’s grieving parents, and others who have lost their loved ones to drugs, that there is much greater public awareness of the potential consequences of recreational drug taking than there was ten years ago. Even among those with fame and notoriety for hedonistic excess.
Ex-Libertines frontman, Pete Doherty, is doing nothing more than his literary idols, Keats, Shelley and Byron, became infamous for, except that it is no longer fashionable for ex-public schoolboys to die young in a frilly shirt and a pool of their own vomit.
Doherty, at least theoretically, may survive the copious amounts of heroin and crack cocaine he ingests by maintaining the purity and controlling the strength of his supply, as did writer William Burroughs, during his heroin habit of more than fifty years, as well as the novelist, Will Self, who claims to have injected in a cabin toilet on a flight he shared with the former Prime Minister, John Major.
Addicts without the financial means to support their addiction are usually forced into crime by their inability to handle withdrawal and cold turkey. Doherty may have stolen from his best friend to pay for more drugs, but it’s difficult not to feel that his motivation was attention-seeking, rather than borne out of sheer desperation for his next fix. A plea for help from Doherty’s mother resulted in a quasi intervention by Kirsty Walk, during an interview on BBC’s Newsnight. It is difficult to imagine this happening to a homeless heroin addict from Edinburgh.
Needless to say, Doherty’s drug-taking continued despite his character assassination by the tabloid press, as did his romantic relationship with the world’s most fashionable model, Kate Moss, whose career prospered greatly after her own cocaine confessions were plastered all over the mainstream media.
The fact that while they were together Doherty and Moss were widely considered to be the coolest Brit-couple of their generation, significantly reinforces the mystique of the illegal drugs culture. The laws clearly don’t work, otherwise it would be considered uncool to take them, and the careers of famous users would go into free-fall. Alleged drug problems and a husband in prison certainly hasn’t harmed the sales for Amy Winehouse’s award-winning album, REHAB. This is undoubtedly a reflection of the general public’s attitude towards recreational drug-taking.
According to the 2006 British Crime Survey, the number of people who admitted consuming cannabis in the UK was almost twelve million, despite government propaganda about the unsustainable causal link between dope smoking and psychosis.
It was estimated during the previous year by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction that there were more than sixty million cannabis smokers living in the European Union.
According to statistics published by Transform Drugs Policy, there were around 1,500 illegal drug-related deaths in the UK in 2005, the vast majority of which were caused by legal substances mixed with low-grade heroin, morphine or methadone, while 1,300 people died in 2005 from overdoses of legal anti-depressants, benzodiazepines, zopiclone, barbiturates, aspirin and codeine.
During the same year there were more than 6,000 alcohol-related and 86,000 tobacco-related deaths. Of the estimated 13 million tobacco smokers in Britain, at least 5 million will suffer from life-threatening cancerous growths that would probably not have occurred were it not for cigarette smoking. Millions of those people will eventually die as a direct result of their recreational habit. The lethal hypocrisy is criminally self-evident.
In Holland, all recreational drugs, including the highly addictive ones, have been completely demystified by a government policy that reflects the public’s largely tolerant attitude towards them. This policy has been tested in Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, South and Central America, where crime has often been significantly reduced in places that were once considered no go areas by the police.
You can still get mugged or ripped-off by a crack-head in the Red Light District of Amsterdam after dark, as you inevitably can in London, but we are yet to hear about gangs of stoned psychopaths marauding round the canals of Amsterdam, the way gangs of drunks punch, puke and piss their way through British cities every Friday and Saturday night.
