Fame at Last, Part 2!

The recent media frenzy over the "legal high" mephedrone that culminated in Alan "Postman Prat" Johnson's inevitable decision to ban it and other substituted cathinones prompted me to sent the following in to the Metro:

"In virtually every reported death linked to mephedrone, other drugs and/or alcohol were also involved. Louis Wainwright & Nicholas Smith drank all day, took mephedrone, and then took the opiate methadone. The latter was implicated in 378 deaths in England & Wales in 2008, so why is the media only interested in "blaming" the new/unfamiliar substance?

At the end of the day, the only thing that drives UK drug legislation is the puritanical moral conviction that if something gets people high, it must be "wrong," and therefore must be banned. Conversely, any adult can legally procure the means to drink themselves into either a liver-destroying stupor or a violent rage, or to smoke themselves into an early grave. Alcohol and tobacco together kill more people in the UK every two hours than all the deaths that have ever even remotely been linked to mephedrone and the other related cathinones.

All the non-scientifically trained ex-postman Johnson has achieved is to take the unregulated but largely legitimate and VAT-earning supply of high purity mephedrone and other cathinones, and handed it on a plate to unscrupulous criminals."

Considering most newspapers aversion to covering the subject fairly, I was minldly surprised when it appeared in the issue of Thursday 1 April, although obviously it was trimmed a bit:


More on this subject soon....