THE LEGAL DRUGS DON’T WORK
That is the conclusion offered by Ben Goldacre in Bad Pharma. It is just one more reason to re-examine the illogic of the War On Drugs...
The Hog, 23 Oct 2012
It’s strange, isn’t it? Famous, rich and successful people can frequently get away with stuff that would put others behind bars. Whether from context, talent, determination or fortune, they develop an aura, a kind of untouchable-ness, of unquestionable-ness. It doesn’t always hold. But a lot of the time it does.
The odious Jimmy Savile is a case in point. The Hog never met him but even from a distance there was something wrong about him. Come on, you must have thought so too. The ridiculous flamboyance, the big cigars, the over-egged charity work, living with his mother all his life…
But he was famous. He was a star. So, even though some people, possibly even many, knew of his predatory tendencies and the fact that he was abusing vulnerable individuals, nobody did anything about it. The oul’ bastard was a kind of latter-day saint, a Mother Theresa of the North, so to speak. How do you out a toad like that? He was a bit like a priest, come to think of it, a Carnaby Street Fr.Michael Cleary perhaps...
Lance Armstrong was another. His offences weren’t of a sexual nature but they were on a colossal scale. The United States Anti-Doping Agency has said it had “undeniable evidence” that Armstrong was one of the ringleaders of a sophisticated and elaborate doping programme that took him to the top of the cycling world.
People have been muttering about it for a long time. But Armstrong too was a kind of latter-day saint. He was a winner and the world loves a winner. Not only that, he was a cancer survivor. Even better. And to put the tin cap on it, like Savile, he too fronted up charity works…
The world may take a minor comfort from the fact that he was caught and that this particular ‘war on drugs’ has claimed a notable scalp. Sophisticated it may have been, but in the end the truth emerged. Maybe the drugs don’t work after all…
But if you turn to the other, and bigger, war on drugs, things are more hazy… if you’ll pardon the pun. There is no comfort in the rising death toll from the more-pure-than-usual heroin that has been sold for a few weeks now. Yes, the irony is clear. The purer, the riskier – though that in part at least is because people are used to getting less of the real thing in their powder…
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