Drugs, Science and Freedom of Speech (by sarah)

I have the feeling this is going to be a long and involved rant were I may well side track myself, so hold onto your hats and here we go!

Last week Alaric told me of a Daily Mail article that had made him angry and sad and all the rest of it because of the plain stupid reporting of it. The representation of scientists alone is cringe worthy let alone the sensationalism of it. The misunderstanding that is going on between science and the public at the moment is a subject dear to my heart and the source of many of my rants as many of you know.

Now obviously I have already hit upon two subjects there worthy of their own essays or posts or what ever it is I tend to write.

But basically the main concern I have is for the independence of scienctists to actually have freedom to share their research results and opinions.

When I woke up this morning the radio was playing and the news started and what I heard frankly scared me. If scientists in an independent advisory body can not give impartial advise to the government and let their views be known to the general public and all of the public by mass media, this means then they are not independent and their results can not be trusted; they just become a tool of the governing body and the People lose a degree of freedom.

And yes I know that I'm sounding like a fanatic communist with the insertion of People there but think about this - we all of us are the people and if we are not careful we will end up in an apathetic totalitarian state, which is where we appear to be heading.

I may well be over-reacting but apathy is the biggest danger to a nation's freedom. Think on and look up how the Nazi's got into power in Germany. Think upon these things and see why I feel that in order to keep our nation somewhere that I am allowed to utter my thoughts out loud without fear of persecution I have to state my beliefs publically and fight in the only way I have (other than voting) for our rights as a nation as a people.

Ok, so what actually is my issue?

Professor David Nutt was sacked as chairman for the Drugs Advisory Council - why?

Because it would appear that he said things and wrote a paper that the government didn't agree with. But he was part of an advisory body which is supposed to be independent of the government. Why does it matter if the advisory body is independent? Especially if funded by government money - you'd think that it should be controlled right?

Wrong - for research into many many things, especially stuff that has a direct influence on the way a society behaves, then it is important that the research and investigations are carried out seperately from the government in order not to 'lead' the research. You can severely skew results by accident or on purpose by designing bad experiments - this is done by having a fixed idea of what the result 'should' be and so you exclude the things that might throw a spanner in the works. You study closed groups with no outliers and controls; you do many things that subtly skew and distort the actual system your trying to portray.

And the more complex a system you're studying, the easier it is to do this.

Society is a very complex system.

Then there is the matter that if a government, through power hunger or benign intent, decided a society should behave in a certain manner which may or may not be what's best for the society or what it wants. If the advisory bodies are 'controlled' by the government then they will give the government the answers they want to hear, often with deleterious effects.

Again, look at the science of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia - yes they achieved great things but they stunted their own technological developments and their 'industries' grew only at the expense of human life.

These things may seem the distant past now but History and its study are needed to spot these patterns to stop the same things happening over and over.

Ok so what about this Nutt dude and what he said - the government want to crack down on drugs he pointed out that there was more damage being done by things like alchohol. Which is correct.

The Daily Mail for one went off alarmingly over this calling Nutt a drug tzar and completely missing the fact that, yes, alcohol causes more damage than drugs.

This surely is a well known fact - ask the doctors and A&E nurses about drunks, ask social severces about the beaten and battered children.

Look at Edwardian times - when Opium was still readily avalible - it was Gin that had the police concern, Gin that turned mothers into baby killers so they could sell the cloths to buy... more Gin.

Now I am not denying that drugs and alcohol go together; in fact they are very much links mainly because, like it or not, alcohol is a DRUG - oooo controversial but it is. It alters our perceptions, our moods and our inhibitions, it makes us vulnerable and dangerous.

It is a big factor in many rape cases, and violent acts on the street and in the home, it takes up a lot of the precious ambulance time (don't believe me? check out this ambulence drivers blog). It leads to fitting if too much is consumed - I know I had to deal with more than one person in this state.

It can even lead to hallucinations though that is obviously in the extreme.

In the sort of quantieties most of us are consuming it in this country there are long term health effects and most of them bad - most of them leading to a lot of the costs placed on our struggling NHS.

Kidney, Liver, heart etc... are all affected by it. The toxins that give you a hangover are drying out your brain (I'm serious the fluid in the 'ventricles' of the brain shrinks due to the dehydration caused by the alcohol - this is one of the factors leading to the headaches).

And people often take it with other drugs - now this leads to an interesting point - it was thought that there was such a thing as a 'gateway' drug. This being a drug that leads the user into wanting to try different and 'harder' drugs - they thought it was cannibis. They did research and found that it was infact nicotine.

And were do we find nicotine? Oh cigerettes - those over the counter cancer sticks - yes those ones. It is them that get people hooked onto the concept of trying harder drugs.

So tell me way with all the medical research alcohol and cigerrettes are legal with their HUGE cost to the NHS and legal system when cannibis and the like aren't?

Becuase they are socially acceptable? Even though one scars your lungs and kills the poeple around you and the other leads to more anti-social and dangerous behavoiour?

When I worked at the Student Union I expected to see drug use - I expected to see badness arise from it - but you know apart from a sad incident of someone using Rohipnal on a student (this ended in long involved things with the police - the person preyed on students generally freshers) the main issue was alcolhol.

To the point that even before the government intervened there where things in place to try and encourage sensible drinking and even a mini bus service to stop people walking home on their own in states where they would have been easy prey.

Especially if mixed with sporting events the alcohol could result in things getting quite hairy especially when you're a 5ft female in the first place - but I was good at defusing potential situations and I had my radio and back up.

Now we had police and bouncer license people come in and give us lectures of drugs proceedures - ie if you suspect or see them - how the bars license could get taken away etc.... So it was something I was watching for.

Now this all sounds like I am saying "ban the drinks, ban the smoking" and though I am glad that bars are now non smoking becuase I don't really want lung fulls of smoke and I was having resperatory problems when I was working every night, I do not think these things should be banned.

And you know I don't think the drugs should be banned either. I will state at this point that I don't take drugs and I don't smoke and I rarely drink so why am I pro-drug?

Becuase if you push something underground you give it into the hands of the crime lords - you hand our youth over to some really very dangerous people.

You drive more people to experiment because its illegal, because its taboo and they are young (or having a mid-life crisis) and they want to 'rebel'. If its not illegal I believe less of them would take the drugs or even smoke in the first place.

If there are places they can pick up safely manufactured drugs that aren't cut with fertilizer and that have easilly seen strengths, the number of over doses and deaths by toxic substances would go down. The amount of crime to find the money to buy the drugs or secure favour with the 'pimp' would decrease. It would be out in the open.

It would be safe and boring.

Drive it underground and you have prohibition america, you have gangster rule, you make everyone a criminal just by association - if you know of something going on and don't tell the authorities you're a criminal. The Police themselves become criminals under this system leading to harsh punishments and divided loyalities - this opens the route to constitutional corruption and more cans of worms than I care to write about.

So...

Why all the hoohar over a scientist stating what I thought had been known for decades now?

Would it be something to do with taxation on the socially 'acceptable' drugs?

Would it be because we are slowely losing our freedoms in this country and the mass population don't seem to have noticed? Well who can blame them - they are working hard and slogging out a life and the big picture is rarely put in the news - instead they are getting bitesize pieces of information that on their own look perfectly harmless but there is a very scary trend and when I first came across it I didn't believe that it would lead to the loss of liberty. I now fear it will.

In what I term my 'year out', the one between Uni and getting married when I was working for Alaric's step mother, the Student Union and classifying meteorites at the Natural History Museum I discovered why my fiance's parents where moving out of the country.

The reason - certain laws had been passed which Lynne considered to be against our freedom of speach - these where mixed up with the new anti-terrorist laws.

Having been raised in South Africa and having parents who where imprisioned as anti-Apartheid freedom fighters she had a unique out look on the laws being passed. It was, she said, the beginning of a slippery slope and she could not live in a country that was heading that way.

I thought at the time she was over reacting, though I saw her point. But as I have watched things decay in this country I am really actually getting quite scared and worried about it.

Mix in the restrictions on freedom, our crumbling social systems and the dumbing down in the education system and I want to cry.

Half of the issue here isn't just the freedom of speech it is the general publics mis-understanding and fear of science. And publications like the Daily Mail don't help making people think science is this scary cold subject with little bearing on real life.

This is not the case, science and technology permeate our society in lots of ways people don't realise. But I am starting to come across people with A levels and AS in science subjects who know nothing of what 'science' is and have been turned away from science by the way it has been portrayed. With changes that have sneaked into the curriculum (and I don't by they way think all the changes are bad and I like some of them but...) the essence of science, of analysising of creative thinking - infact of thinking at all, and not just being good at recalling facts, is being lost.

We have a country built on the legacy of the Victorian scientists and engineers and we are raising a generation whose school education is stiffling their thinking and creativity. This makes was an easily manipulated population but doesn't bode well for future economic and global political success of the nation as a whole. And where do we think the Drs and nurses come from? And the teachers?

Nor does it bode well for the idividuals who would be creative champions - and I believe creativity is above science and art and that to do either you need creativity. My hope is that the internet and our struggling libaries will curb this trend but they will probably only make a dent.

As I have said before - whilst I can speak out about the ills of society that I percieve, I will. On the radio this morning the Drugs commision are basically all resigning but as one of them pointed out - the resignation was announced by the home office before they'd actually carried out the threat and sent the letters or announced themselves, and this was after a meeting where they were being told the government wasn't interfering and that they wanted a relationship of trust - how can you trust something that does that?

I welcome opinions by the way so feel free to leave a comment 🙂 and wow thats over 2000 words :/

The Journey Home (by sarah)

"I've hard road to travel and a ruff, ruff way to go..."

Ok so Sunday did not see the smoothest of ways home for me - I started in Gants Hill looking out over London from Clare's gorgous flat. I had been unable to sleep - we'd obviously gone to bed late anyway having chatted half the night away and looking at her photos of Tia Land but more than that my mind raced with ideas of paintings to paint from the songs we'd sung during the day.

Anyway after a couple of cuppas she walked me to the station - I was sad that I still wasn't going to see the kittens that are in another friends house in the area but got to the station in plenty of time and felt good about going home to get stuff done.

The journey across London was fine with a cute little girl keeping everybody entertained on the Hammersmith and City Line and my train was on time at Paddington. But I had 2 changes instead of the none/one.

So making sure I had the correct seat reservation in my hand I moved with the crowd to the train and boarded - and there was bedlam - people arguing and being confused about seat reservations. A couple where confronting a man in orange and yellow robs with flowers around his neck and paint on the bridge of his nose. He moved once he understood it was their seat behind but they where still fussing and blocking things up so I explained it was on their ticket and on the seat and stuff and then it turned out they where upset the man had moved to another reserved seat.

But they had not told him this! And I wasn't entirely happy with how they had said it was their seats I know there was lots of people and it was busy and stuff but a little patients helps - they werent a hundred percent sure of how the reservation system worked either.

Anyway I could just see what was going to happen to this guy he would keep getting slightly annoyed people moving him on so I explained to him about the white tickets and he thanked me - he hadn't known and he went off to find an intagged seat.

Then a bunch of youngish Americans got on (the dude in the robes was from America too San Francisco) - I have to confess it was a very diverse group and I would not have thought they were all together but they where but obviously something had gone wrong one of their seats hadn't got its ticket sticking out of the top so an Austrialian had sat in it thinking it was free!

They were trying to sort this out when a shirty lady told them to move in no uncertain terms and I thought to myself - Aren't we British supposed to be polite? Aren't we supposed to be the nation of queuers? And why is it all the foriegn people who are being tourists and spending money here bulstering our economy are being a lot nicer over confusion of a system they can't really be expected to understand becuase - well its the British rail network and it doesn't work properlly.

Anyway - to my suprise I butted in again only a little bit and stuff got sorted - trueth is it was too many people for the space :/ As trains towards this part of the country were bneing few and far between.

Anyway I settled back for the 40 odd minutes only to find my head phones had broken so had no music.

At Reading it turned out there was a bus to Swindon and not a train and that my ticket wouldn't let me out of the barrier and the only staff memeber was the guy letting people in through the barriers and he wouldn't let me out. With 2 minutes to go and no idea where the 'front' of the station and the waiting bus was I was being to panic but a staff memeber appeared, let me through and looked at me like an idiot when I asked the way to the bus.

But I got there before they started letting people onboard. This was becuase it was slightly delayed.

I had not taken my pain killers due to the stomache pains I was getting but these turned out to be the standard womens thing which was one of the reasons getting to the bus had been so tight in the first place.

Bus sits hurt my back far worse than the train - this is why I don't take the coach - a lady was also sitting next to me so I couldn't stretch out.

When we got to Swindon and she stood up - it turned out she had sat in chewing gum - ooowe yuck! She hadn't noticed so I tapped her and gave her a tissue not that it helped much and then came the next bit of my strangly eventful journey.

I got on the train at Swindon though there seemed to be a little bit of confussion as to which plateform etc... and the train announcements where not coming out onto the plateform and so where muffled nonsense.

But everyone else on board was execting it to go to Cheltenham, Stroud etc... and I so I phoned Al and he set off to meet me in Stroud. And the departure time came and went and we sat there and sat there and sat there and there where no announcements and then about 40 minutes later when people had started shouting on the plateform at the staff they informed us there was no driver and it was going to a 45 minute wait until one arrived.

Then it turned out a little train was due to go to through to all the same stations in 15 minutes instead so with a bit of shoe horning and the upsetting of a large family who had sat in the bit where wheel chairs and that go where told to move so bikes could come on board - this ment some of the kids ended up sitting the opposite end of the train to the perants which the kids werent happy with.

Alot of the people had been on the bus and the over crowded Reading train and tempures were fraying abit - including my own though I ended up in a nice conversation with a girl from York.

And we sat and sat and then we were off and finiallly I got into Stoud where Al and Jean had obviously been for while :/

It is things like this though that make me want to bang everyones heads together - things would have been far more pleasent from the outset if there had not been pushy arogant people (or disgusting cretins who put chewing gum on top of coach seats!).

There isn't really a point to this post I just felt the need to write about the journey.

London Pride Inspired Art (by sarah)

I have been working on a concept of a picture for a long time - since I was a teenager but could never get it right. Then yesturday I saw a friend's quotes as to why London Pride mattered and it sparked the desire to try and capture this picture again.

So I started painting - its not a picture about being gay or anything really that's linked to London Pride but it is about Intolerance.

Its called The Strange Fruit of Intolerance:

There is a bigger picture over on Salaric Craft along with how it was painted. The colours are a bit washed out due to me having taking the photo with flash - I'll attempt to get a better pic later.

Here are the twitter quotes that sparked it:

owenblacker: Gay Pride is important because we still don't have equality. And schoolkids (& Chris Moyles) still think "gay" is worthy as a term of abuse

scottbert: Gay Pride is important because of rising homophobia and violent attacks in East London #PrideLondon

serialseb: Gay Pride is important because lgbt people still get killed, arrested or sent to "reassignment" therapies and commit suicide

DavidWaldock: Gay Pride is also important as a way to take a stand against extremist, fascist political parties like the BNP and Tories

DavidWaldock: Gay Pride is important because there are still health inequalities faced by LGBT-types, and we deserve better. #PrideLONDON

I saw most of them as retweets but still!

As I said the picture is not about Gay Pride but it is about intolerance - and as those quotes show this is an area of great intolerance and as I have been watching this country enter a slipper slope of hate against those not percieved as main stream I felt it was time I started saying what I think and feel before we end up in a regime where this is not allowed. People do not realise how quickly a society can slip into a Nazi-esk situation do to apathy - people do not notice or bother with the little things like play ground name calling and posters up in the local boys school and then when it gets bad it is no longer safe to say anything and you end up with social scapgoats and mass murder.

So before this country slips into something like V for Ventetter I shall say what needs to be said because I am a chicken and once things are 'dangerous' I'll be as quiet as a mouse.

I am no great crusader.

The picture is full of symbolism, and is a symbol - this is going to be a long post I'm afraid!

It is called The Strange Fruit of Intolerance - during my GCSE's I had a set text called To Kill a Mocking Bird and I was so touched by this story that I kept the book and have re-read it many time. The entire book is pretty much about intolerance - most people know or see the racism in it straight away but it is full of other examples too - there is sexism, class-ism and with Boo a social recluse mental health and being just plain different is covered. The scorn of the old towards the young is also heavily featured.

I was disturbed by the out come of the American legal system in the book and so endlessly chatted about to anyone who would listen and started work on a fantasy story that was directly seeded from this noval by Mary Lee Haper.

As a result I ended up part of a team raising money for the homeless the efforts of which appeared in local newspapers and even got mentioned higher up the media chain - I also ended reading out bits I'd written about countries that still existed under totalatrian regimes earning me an evening at local church where we presented out, poetry and the like to try and raise awearness of the intolerances and inequalities around the world.

Obviously I also went to Kenya in 2000 and where I was horrified that the other young people with me discovered that street children even existed - I myself had been watching documentrys on Brizilian street children who at the time were being hunted down like animals and lived in the cities sewer systems.

When I say young I was 19.

Anyway I digress - in all of this at some point someone played me a song that wrapped itself around my heart I've only heard it once and it was from an old scratchy record - I remembered it wrongly it turns out but I will say what I remembered first:

What strange Fruit is this - blood at the roots and blood at the tips?

The actual words are:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

It is by Billie Holiday and obviously about the racism that was (I use the past tense in hope there) preverlent in the American South at the time.

There is a video of her singing it here

The lyrics themselves were based on a poem written by a Jewish school teacher after a lynching.

My picture shows a tress with strange fruit i.e. drops of blood that fall to make a tide of blood which well up into hearts and that are chained by barbed wire - the hearts get smaller as you go up until they fall as drops of blood on the tree which is also wrapped in the same loop of barbed wire.

The tree is white - it is bones of society laid bare, when the fruit become to heavy they distort the frame work of the tree pulling the branches down to the sea of blood. Some of the branch tips are not imprisioned by the barbed wire and are untouched by the strange fruits - these are the areas where hope lays.

The 'ground' is the past dark and murky reaching to a future clouded but as yet untainted by the violence. The sea also becomes deeper and more turbulent as you move away from the tree - this is to represent how on tiny drop - some insignificant unthinking piece of cruelty can lead to war.

The picture shows how intolerance chains our hearts leading to a cyclic cascade of volience and pain. Crippling society.

I am pleased with this picture - it has only taken a decade or so to get to this junksure, I have painted many of these white trees and some have the strange fruit upon them but this is the symbolism I sought.

The colours are more vibrant than the photo shows and the barbed wire which is a continual length with out end twisted around both the hearts and society is done in enamel and so shines matalic which can never come across in a photo.

Hopscotch (by sarah)

I found some chunky chalks for a pound in Stoud and bought them to draw hopscotch for Jean along the drive.

This was a resounding success - she loves it though she doesn't entirely get the games you can play. Of course this was before The Rains that visited upon us the last week or so but is is now drawn back on in pink this time.

I got Jean to pick which colours to draw the outline in and then we did different colours for odd and even numbers - interestingly she pointed out that I was colouring the 1 of 10 the wrong colour as its an odd number - this took some explaining and I don't think so go it but I was impressed that she recognised a one to be quiet honest.

We took some of my nice ornimental pebbles from off of the rainbow/space garden I made last year and used them as our markers - mainly Jean just threw stones onto (or at least attempted too) the hopscotch.

When Ted the Taxi Man and Mary came to visit they were impressed with the hopscotch and said that your not allowed to play it on the streets anymore - that it counts as criminal damage and two kids have recently been fined! That is quiet frankly rediculous - please I thought tell me its a joke or scare mongering...

So did a google search:

This one was in 2007 and involves the perants being told off for allowing the children to play in the streets - even though they were obviously keeping an eye on what was happening other wise they wouldn't have noticed the police :/

Now its not so much the police over reacting as they were doing there job - and they say once they realised what it was they knew it wasn't criminal damage as it was chalk and therefore not perminant - but why did the neighbour report it in the first place?

Can't they kids playing from thugs? This lot weren't even teenagers just littlys 🙁

This one on the other hang is quiet scary - did they really arrest a 12 yr old and put her in a cell for hopscotch?

People complain that kids are playing innocent games and are vandalising the street like they are not citizens of this country too and don't deserve to be allowed use of the facilities - a pavement is a facility provided by the council for goodness sake. Something is very very broken when hope scotch is band! Griffiti - really?

Both these reports are from a few years ago and I couldn't find any mention of the local incident where the kids were reputedly fined like £80 i think Ted said it was in Cotwold Life Magizine or something like that - if anybody could shed more light on this I would appreciate it.

If I had lived in a street I probably would have been sitting outside with Jean chalking the hopscotch onto the pavement - would I have then been made to scrub it off as Jean is under 10?

Chalk washes away for goodness sakes - when we played in the street there wasn't chalk in ready supply and the kids including me used to scrape the hopscotches onto the pavement with stones - no-one ever complained and I remember the police man who did live down our street giving us chalk so we wouldn't damage things.

People moan about teenagers and even kids doing actual criminal things but if we wont let them do the kid things then what do people actually expect to happen.

Plus we are breeding discontent in the youngster and how are they suppose to respect the police when the police are telling them off for playing hopscotch?

I try not to go on about politacal things too much but I'm mean really - how can we live in a society like this? A society that bans children from being children - they are kids not minni adults - they know more than previous generations it is true but they are still kids and they need to explore the world through play.

They need to be part of a society not seperate from it and if they are not allowed to at least interact with each other and learn how to be part of a social group then we are heading for trouble. I see this building on many sides with age ghettotization springing up - single mothers on the council estate and rich olds in retirement villages many of whom have never had proper social interaction with children.

We are human we are disigned to live in communitees with all ages mixed in together - seperating people into groups always leads to trouble or is this another case of use not learning from the past?

Sarah takes a deep breath and walks away from the computer muttering

Voting (by sarah)

Barbara gave me a lift up to vote - now I'd read the stuff that had been sent through but realised I had decided who I wasn't going to vote for ie all those nasty fascist parties that seem to be creeping out of the wood work but hadn't actually gotten around to deciding who I was going to vote for.

So I had to recall on the spot who has promised what and hope I got it round the right way and feel sad that no one actually represents what I want - there is no one I agree with entirely so have to go for close as without being scary - this does not strike as a partically good way of running things but never mind - at least I got to vote and used the right people died to give me.

I would also like to point out that going up in Mag (the sunshine yellow MG convertable) with Barbara felt I was risking life and limb as she doesn't wait for you to strap in ectera!