Drugs

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The unkindest cult of all

When I was 22 I met a man called Yisrayl Hawkins who said his coming had been prophesied in the Book of Isaiah. Yisrayl (born Bill) lived with his many disciples and several wives in a compound carved out of the red dirt scrub near Abilene, Texas. His cult was called the House of Yahweh, and as a sign of their commitment, his 400 followers had all changed their names to Hawkins. Yisrayl was a narcissist, as most cult leaders are, and this made him tremendously boring. As he droned on about being chosen, and his conviction that Satan was in fact female, I watched the ferrety little Hawkins children

Thursday

Neil Armstrong

Kids’ stuff | 6 October 2016

When a new TV channel calls its flagship food show Fuck, That’s Delicious, we might surmise that the Reithian ideals are not foremost in its corporate philosophy. You probably haven’t heard of Viceland. You certainly haven’t watched it. It seeped on to the airwaves with little fanfare and few viewers. Viceland is the new 24-hour TV channel of Vice Media, the Canadian-American outfit that describes itself as the ‘world’s preeminent youth media company and content creation studio’. Vice began in 1994 as a magazine but now encompasses a news division, a record label, a film studio and myriad digital ventures. It prides itself on being ‘alternative’, ’disruptive’, sticking it to

Duncan Fallowell

Nazis and narcotics

Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were shrinking violets in the drugs department. We smoked cannabis, ate opium and sometimes took strong LSD; lines of uncertain content went up nostrils; and we swallowed countless uppers (speed) and downers (tranquillisers, sleepers for looning on). Speed was amphetamine sulphate. Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Methedrine were the three original brands, in rising strength. Soon there were many other names, including slang: Desoxyn, Durophet, Durophet-M (speed with Mandrax), French Blues, Purple Hearts, Black Bombers. Many were prescribed by doctors who didn’t regard them as outrageously dangerous. I

Thursday

James Woodall

1976 and all that

Forty years ago, I spent 14 hours in a large field near the A1 in Hertfordshire. I had just taken my O-levels, liked Be-Bop Deluxe, Genesis and Rachmaninov, and often danced my head off to The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. I was confused about girls and worried that I’d chosen one wrong A-level (Ancient History). In the nation at large, Harold Wilson had resigned as prime minister in March. Under James Callaghan, Britain would wobble further into a strife that marked the late 1970s like a purulent eczema. Pop music would start, rather violently, to reflect it. In the polity these were not confident times. Friends had persuaded me

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Ways out of recovery

Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like each other — hardly surprising, since they are fighting each other for such a lucrative business. You can make bigger bucks out of selling ‘recovery’ than by peddling drugs. That’s not to imply moral equivalence, but the two do have one thing in common: plenty of repeat customers. In any media report of a celebrity’s battle with substance abuse, the words that you’re most likely to read before ‘rehab’ are ‘in and out of’. Ah, say the addiction gurus, but that’s because they’re suffering from a disease. This is one

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 4 August 2016

The Daily Telegraph revealed on Tuesday that Michael Spencer, the chief executive of Icap, has been blocked for a peerage by the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac). All the indignation just now is against David Cameron’s resignation honours list, packed with his ‘cronies’, who allegedly include Mr Spencer. It is misdirected. The real anger should go against the pharisaical bureaucracy which has been imposed upon patronage. No one is allowed to know why Mr Spencer has been blocked, yet the world knows that he has been because, supposedly, he has ‘the wrong sniff’ about him. His company was fined by regulators for transgressions in relation to Libor, but he

Thursday

Liam Mullone

Hang the DJs

Electronic Dance Music is dying. You may not have noticed. It may not affect you directly. But it’s a really big thing and, unless your teenage children have already told you, then you heard it here first. In fact, your teenage children are probably still in denial about it, so go and tell them. Get them back for scratching the car or vaping in the kitchen or whatever pitiful infractions pass for rebellion these days. Tell them: sorry, but electronic dance music is dying. Your rave is going to its grave. Ibiza now exerts the same cultural pull as any other barren 220 square-mile island, including the Isle of Man.

David Horspool

A five-ring fiasco

The ambitions of the founding father of the modern Olympic Games, the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin — that they should be ‘the free trade of the future’ and provide ‘the cause of peace’ with a ‘new and mighty stay’ — were at once wildly optimistic and strangely prescient. Considering that they were first conceived of as a festival of sporting excellence in a spirit of internationalism, the Olympics have had an enduring habit of stirring up displays of humanity at its worst. To anyone who believes that the excesses of the Games over the past 50 years or so have betrayed a purer original legacy, these two books by

Saturday

Ross Clark

Do we really want Portugal’s drug laws?

‘The war on drugs has failed,’ asserted Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public health in the latest propaganda coup for the pro-drug lobby. Her society, along with the Faculty of Public Health, have parroted the familiar call among metropolitan liberals for drugs to be decriminalised. Their argument is that we should drop our punitive approach to drugs and be more like Portugal, which decriminalised drugs in 2001 and now, it claims, has fewer deaths from drug use that. There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly, drug decriminalisation in Portugal is only a success if you cherry-pick your statistics carefully. If you want to make

Thursday

Gary Bell Qc

A QC’s guide to cocaine

As a defence silk, I come across some surprisingly intelligent drug dealers. Many of them are highly entrepreneurial and driven, and I’m often left wondering what they might have achieved if only they’d chosen a different career. Sharp operators are drawn to the narcotics trade because vast profits can be made in very little time. But then the consequences of failure, especially at the heavyweight end of the market, are rather worse than a tumbling share price. And we all make mistakes. I was recently involved in a case where a criminal mastermind had been jailed for 15 years for heroin importation, but had kept on running his empire from

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Vaping’s appeal isn’t about the nicotine. It’s about the gadgets

Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and look, let’s just move along. Even so, were there ever to be found a Platonic form of such a place, or, as the beer adverts might put it, If Heineken Did the Flats of 1990s Middle-Class Student Drug Dealers, then I now know precisely what such a place would look like. It would look like a vape shop. To be more specific, it would look like the vape shop I visited a few weeks ago in north London. It was perfect down to the last detail. Paraphernalia all over the

Thursday

Mark Cocker

Gods and monsters

Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little impact upon the prevailing western impression of this country. For many the mountain state remains steadfastly exotic and remote. This is not just a consequence of those sublimely unattainable Himalayan peaks. For generations Nepal was a source of western fantasy that bordered on the obsessive and carried an undercurrent of late-imperial eroticism. What had so stirred European appetites was the long-standing Nepalese policy of playing hard to get. A short, bitter conflict in 1814–1816 with the East India Company inspired its militant Gurkha elite to pursue the rigorous exclusion of

Thursday

Benjamin Markovits

Onwards and downwards

This is a very upsetting book. The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond spent a year and a half living in low-income housing in Milwaukee — first in a trailer park on the mostly white South Side and later in a rooming house in the black inner city. Desmond himself plays no part in the body of the story, but he reports what he saw and heard, using a digital recorder and filling in the rest with double-sourced eyewitness accounts and official documents. And what he saw was upsetting, though not always, or not particularly, in a dramatic way. The things that happened to the people he lived among happened too often

Thursday

William Cook

Confessions of a Saga lout

It’s chucking-out time at my local pub, and the high street is full of idiots. They’ve all had a lot to drink, but they’re in no hurry to go home. They’re looking for a party, somewhere loud and lairy to go on to. They’d settle for more booze, but some speed or skunk would be even better. It’s a scene I’ve seen a thousand times, but lately something’s changed: these tearaways aren’t teenagers — they’re in their fifties and sixties. Meet the Saga louts, those feckless folk who refuse to grow up even as they approach old age. Saga louts are a pain, and I should know because I’m one

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Who killed murder?

Pity the poor crime writers. Our earnings, like those of all authors, are diminishing for reasons far beyond our control. Our fictional criminals and detectives are being outsmarted by genetic fingerprinting, omnipresent security cameras and telltale mobile phones. Who needs Sherlock Holmes to solve a tricky crime when you have computers, with their unsporting ability to transmit and analyse enormous quantities of data and identify culprits? But the bigger problem for us novelists (if not for everyone else) is that murder itself is dying. The official homicide rate peaked in 2002, thanks to Dr Harold Shipman, and has since fallen by half — from 944 then to 517 last year.

William Leith

A sex vampire on wheels

The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked as a personal assistant to Michael Stipe, the singer in REM and, later, to Mickey Rourke. He also worked as a limo driver in Hollywood. A drug addict, he gravitated toward crystal meth, which can make you both wired and horny, sometimes for days on end. So we know to expect a particular brew of glamour, indignity and recrimination that perhaps some readers (including me) have come to enjoy. Sutherland certainly delivers — with a bit of glamour, an awful lot of indignity and not too much recrimination. But there’s

Thursday

Ed Cumming

School drinking is the best kind

Last December it was reported that Ampleforth and Rugby schools both have new on-site bars, where pupils are allowed to drink in moderation. ‘We are trying to create somewhere where [the pupils] can let their hair down but we’re all on call,’ said David Lambon, the school’s first lay headmaster. ‘It’s a fine balance with children of that age — they need to be treated like adults and feel independent.’ The only shock was that this was presented as news. Booze and sex are the death and taxes of adolescence: they’re unavoidable, so you might as well find a way to manage them. Schools have had provision around alcohol since

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Bottom Gere

The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes decent talents — Richard Gere and Dakota Fanning, most notably — for no discernible purpose and has you thinking throughout that whatever they were paid it wasn’t enough, and even if they’d been offered more, that wouldn’t have been enough, and so on, until all the money that currently exists in the world had been offered. And it still wouldn’t have been enough. The film is written and directed by Andrew Renzi and stars Gere as Francis Watts, aka Franny, a multi-billionaire philanthropist whose wealth is never explained and who

James Walton

Doomed youth

It’s often said that there are only seven basic plots in literature. When it comes to biographies of rock stars who died young, by contrast, there’s usually just the one: somebody mysteriously talented emerges from an unlikely background to achieve stardom, before being destroyed by drink, drugs and fame. Yet, as the film Amy proved last year, it’s a plot still capable of packing a real emotional punch — and, as Cowboy Song proves now, the life of Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy embodies it more vividly than most. Certainly, there’s no faulting the unlikeliness of his background. Lynott was born in 1949 to an Irish teenager who’d come to

Thursday

Koos Couvée

The gangs of north London

I covered another stabbing the other day, a particularly nasty one this time. An 18-year-old was repeatedly knifed in the stomach and beaten over the head with a baseball bat. Witnesses told me he’d been outside his mum’s tower-block flat in Islington, north London, when he was rushed by a group of about ten or 15 boys. He suffered serious head injuries and multiple stab wounds and was soon in hospital in a medically induced coma. By some miracle, he survived. Who would have committed such a brutal and pointless crime? A source told me police believed the attackers to be from two London gangs: the Hoxton N1 gang, whose