coke: it's no joke

Just to illustrate the problem with the drugs "debate", here's a Daily Mail article from this week following the broadcast of the latest episode (about cocaine) of BBC3's series How Drugs Work.

Basically the criticism appears to be that the programme - instead of being some sort of Reefer Madness-style cautionary tale involving gingham-clad rosary-clutching virginal types having a dab of coke at a party and instantly turning into slavering swivel-eyed knife-wielding shrieking bum rapists - tried to give a sober and non-judgmental factual account of, among other things, the reasons people take drugs like cocaine in the first place, which is that they make you feel good.

This seems so obvious and unsurprising and uncontroversial as to barely be worthy of mention, but doesn't fit in with the Mail's campaign to take us all back to some mythical imagined soft-focus 1950s utopia where everyone wears a suit to church on Sundays, children are seen and not heard, women KNOW THEIR RUDDY PLACE, and if either of them step out of line you can give them a bloody good hiding without the gay communist vegetarian Political Correctness Police breathing down your bloody neck all the time.

Amusingly, though, the statistics that the Mail quotes in the article torpedo its own argument somewhat - while a whopping 12 people have complained that the programme glamourised drug-taking, they do let slip further down that a further 24 people complained that it took an unreasonably harsh line against drug use. Presumably those people can be safely ignored as they are probably typing their opinions into the BBC message board while sat, drooling and cackling, in a pile of their own bloodstained AIDS-ridden faeces with a syringe hanging out of their eyeball, and are therefore not Our Sort Of People at all.