High time for honesty

by Greg McDonald

The Government's chief drug adviser is right that illegal drugs like ecstasy and cannabis are less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes - and it's high time we had the sober-minded sense to legalise the lot.

Professor David Nutt attacks politicians for "distorting" the research evidence, and singles out disgraced former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for contradicting his statement that ecstasy is no more dangerous than riding a horse.

Jacqui Smith misleading the public?! And pigs will walk!

Ranking Britain's drugs in a sort of Top 40 of harmfulness, Nutt produces an interesting chart - for while poppy-pickers won’t be surprised to find heroin and cocaine in the top spots, hardcore alcohol fans may be shocked to find their preferred hit keeping newer entries like cannabis and ecstasy out of the Top 10.

Dr Nutt’s brave honesty highlights a stark truth - the damage drugs do to our society is nothing compared to the carnage caused by criminalisation.

The tragedy of criminalisation is in transforming a curable sickness into an incurable cycle of crime, jail and despair - not to mention making out a £1bn annual cheque to crime syndicates.

But what’s really criminal about it is that the Jacqui Smiths of the world know this as well as the Professor Nutts - but their Governments are just too cowardly to confront the truth.

Cyclepath psychopaths

by Alan Tyers

Everyone should leap for joy and hug their nearest polar bear after the news that large companies are encouraging people to cycle to work.

It’s one of the most firmly held beliefs of your average liberal that cycling is a wonderful thing and we should all do it as much as possible.

Personally, I abhor this Cycle To Work scheme, and not just because it’s endorsed by the absurd Mayor of London. Perhaps Bonking Boris misunderstood the offer of “a ride with Kelly Brook”.

London cyclists are a plague and a menace to pedestrians and motorists alike. Is there any other group in society so wilfully hypocritical, so certain of their moral superiority?

They frequently ignore traffic lights and zebra crossings, nearly running down pedestrians on a daily basis. They cycle on the pavement when they so choose; this is unforgivable for anyone old enough to have removed their stabilisers.

Cyclists, as a group - and they are a group, with their irritating little group go-slows and militant demos that slow up the traffic on a Friday - need to make up their minds if they’re road users who should be treated like other vehicles, or pavement users with no such rights.

A bike is a fine diversion for a ride in the countryside, or as a plaything for a child. But it should not be promoted as a mode of transport in a large city. These two-wheeled maniacs must be stopped, not encouraged.

Time for a change

by Greg McDonald

If you're feeling gloomy today, you're not alone - for today our dark winter evenings will make half of us too depressed to get our work done on the most unproductive day of Britain’s year.

The murk gathering across Britain today is nothing to do with recession, unemployment, or even Nick Griffin, but the earlier nights resulting from turning the clocks back at the weekend.

But unlike recession and fascism, there's a very simple cure for Britain’s Winter Blues: we should ditch Greenwich Mean Time and switch to European Central Time. And not just for the sake of productivity.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa) recalls an experiment in the late 1960s where Britain spent two winters leaving work in the safer light of British Summertime.

Rospa’s evidence knocks the GMT argument off its bike: using European Time saw serious accidents fall by 2,500 a year.

And while back then opposition to abandoning GMT came from Scots unhappy to see their winter sun rise as late as 10am, today Lord Tanlaw’s Lighter Evenings Bill rightly proposes granting the Scots the devolved power to make their sun rise whenever they choose.

Moving to the same time zone as the enlightened Spanish and Portuguese would not only bolster the morale of those of us feeling gloomy today - it would boost our safety too. High time for a change.

Forever young?

by Greg McDonald

If you’re planning on doing anything risky before 2028 you might want to reconsider, because those of us still here in twenty years are going to live forever.

Yes, according to American scientist Ray Kurzweil, technology is accelerating at such a rate that we’re just two decades away from immortality as nanobots first halt and then reverse the ageing process.

And if you imagine Kurzweil is a crack-pot whose mum still irons his Star-Trek pyjamas, beam this up: twenty years into our mortal past the world laughed at some of the professor’s other crazy predictions: mobile phones, the collapse of the USSR, and the internet you’re reading this blog on.

It doesn’t stop there either: Kurzweil’s immortal cyber-men run fifteen minute Olympic sprints without drawing breath and dash off novels in minutes.

And if talk of modified super-beings sounds crazy, look around you – from Madonna to dear old Anne Robinson, technologically modified eternally youthful immortals already walk amongst us.

And it’s not just celebrities: at the UN rumours abound that Gordon Brown’s Youtube smile was actually a programming error in early nanobot technology, while leading members of the EU fear Peter Mandelson has already drunk the blood of eternal undeath.

So there it is. Start saving ready to put your nano-feet up on Jupiter as we enter the immortal age. Just whatever you do, don’t get hit by a bus in December 2028.

Fuming over Hockney

by Greg McDonald

Grumpy old artist David Hockney may “loathe Labour” for stopping him lighting up down his local caff, but two years after the smoking ban was introduced we should celebrate one of the Government’s boldest triumphs.

Recently deceased TV chef Keith Floyd, Hockney tells us, would have said, “Up yours!'' to Blair and Brown’s ban – presumably before he and Hockney began gasping for air and hacking tar into old tissues.

Yet since Hockney has the nerve to claim the ban has “interfered” in his life, let’s be clear: David, you’re as free as any other British adult to turn your teeth yellow and lungs black in order to die younger than you should in a cancer ward.

But poisoning others with your lethal passive smoke – especially the children having Yorkshire puddings down your local greasy spoon – that’s unacceptable.

And any Government which now sought to turn back the clock to the dark days when a quiet tipple after work meant waking next morning with the house stinking of someone else’s stale smoke, would rightly meet with overwhelming opposition from a public that now expects its public places to be clean and healthy.

With a leap of 20% in the numbers quitting – equivalent to 40,000 lives saved per year – the smoking ban has been a huge success.

And if it stops a selfish old git poisoning the kids down the tea shop, all the better.

Shopping around for a GP

by Alan Tyers

If there’s one thing guaranteed to get up the nose of the medical profession, it’s patients trying to dictate their own healthcare.

So health minister Andy Burnham’s plans to allow us proles to choose which GP we see, irrespective of geographical location, are sure to irritate the BMA.

The overriding principle of the NHS is that nanny knows best: medical knowledge is a mysterious, arcane thing best left to the experts, treatment is free (at the point of contact), and the patient should be grateful for what he or she is given. It might not be the best care in the world, but it’s on the house to all and we must all make do the best we can.

It’s the sort of idea that worked brilliantly in the austere post-War years when people were simply happy not to be getting shot to death or catching polio in the local swimming baths. These days, for good or ill, information is more freely available, and people have opinions, wants and lifestyles that influence – albeit often irrationally or idiotically – the service they desire from their medic.

The idea of people making choices and – through a sort of medical version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand  - pressurising practices which don’t cut the mustard by deserting them in favour of ones that do, is anathema to the NHS.

If you don’t like the way your GP is treating you, you’ll be able to go register with one across town that you do like. GPs who can’t keep the punters happy are going to lose them; lose enough and they’ve got money worries.

This is actually going to require a fundamental change in the way we think about the NHS: it seems to me that this idea that everyone gets the same treatment will just be dead in the water.

Informed consumers are going to fight to get into the good practices – maybe we’ll end up with the sort of skulduggery that the middle classes engage in to get their kids into a decent state school – and the unfortunate will end up stuck with the crappy doctors.

Competition in the NHS may be good, or it may be bad – but it is coming, whether the medical profession or the public like it or not. The world has moved on too far from the idea of fair and equal medical treatment for all.

Nil by mouth?

by Alan Tyers

The British Medical Association is going after the alcohol advertising industry – but what about the right to personal choice?

Doctors are casting their eye over the national patient and finding that he/she is still guzzling down far too much booze.

And the British Medical Association (BMA) has recommended a total ban on alcohol advertising, sponsorship and even – have some pity, Doc – happy hours.

The BMA has found that, across all age groups, drinking is on the up, while the young are especially swayed by advertising and the siren call of the cheap drink binge.

If the BMA can get that cretinous WKD advert off our screens, then I’m all for it. But otherwise, whatever happened to personal responsibility and freedom of choice?

Alcohol is the social lubricant that keeps Britain running. It helps us to have a nice time, forget our crappy jobs and ignore the weather. It is nothing less than our birthright.

But, seriously, there cannot be any adult alive who doesn’t know that drinking too much is probably bad for you in the long run. What more good can increased health warnings and sledgehammer campaigns actually do? 

Growth spurt

by Alan Tyers

Arguing about whether or not something is sperm: not necessarily one to ponder while enjoying your lunch, but that’s the debate exercising some of the country’s top boffins and eggheads this week.

The good people at Newcastle University reckon, in the interests of infertility research, they have managed to produce some sperm from a human stem cell.

Their rivals at the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge say they know sperm when they see it, and they’re pretty sure that whatever the people at Newcastle have grown in that little dish, it’s not the real McCoy.

Whether they’ve cracked it this time or not, it seems pretty likely that sooner or later, humankind will be able to grow sperm from stem cells, and that we will then have the capability to grow a human being in a laboratory.

This is not the Newcastle scientists’ stated aim, but once the technology is there, there is the chance, maybe the inevitability, that it will be used.

There is talk of legislation to control what could and couldn’t be done with the created sperm, but – like abortion or euthanasia – not every country will construct the same laws. One country might outlaw it, another might be growing humans like prize marrows.

Just as Einstein regretted the breakthroughs that allowed mankind to develop the nuclear bomb, once the techniques are perfected, it won’t be possible to unring this spermy bell.

Unfortunately, that’s the price of progress, and those who say it’s immoral to (possibly, maybe) grow a human are wrong. For science and medicine to develop, humankind needs to take risks, both moral and practical.

The use of stem cell technology and its offshoots could save billions of lives and cure previously terrible diseases. Distant, as-yet-unspecified sci-fi nightmares about clones shouldn’t stand in the way.

No MMR jab, no school – no doubt

With measles back on the rise, making children’s entry to school conditional on them having an MMR jab may just be the lesser of two evils.

Of course in an ideal world parents would raise their children free of state interference, but measles has as much respect for high ideals as a playground bully has for top teeth, and standing by while an outbreak duffs up another generation’s health is nothing to tell the grandchildren about.

That’s not to say those who decry conditional jabs as the nanny state’s latest attack on our liberty don’t have a point to make about freedom.

These libertarians are right that state compulsion with regard to our bodies is nothing less than slavery, from the discredited criminalisation of recreational drugs to the wretched tragedy of 800 Britons having to travel overseas for the freedom to end their lives.

But as we face the resurgence of diseases which we could and should have eradicated decades ago, the former chairman of the British Medical Association Sir Sandy Macara is right that making school attendance conditional is a trump card which real-world pragmatism demands to see played.

Ultimately measles doesn’t care if you failed to get your shots because parents took a sceptic’s view, or because they just couldn’t be bothered to organise it – and in that kind of world, the path of conditional MMR jabs is surely worth treading.

NHS faces public ire over Baby Peter

by Alan Tyers

The Care Quality Commission's report into the tragic case of Baby Peter stops short of finding any individual actually responsible and says that the repeated inability to spot injuries and abuse was the fault of the system.

Overworked doctors, poor communication between agencies, the alignment of Saturn with Jupiter… all the usual suspects are to blame for the death of the 17-month-old child.

Dr Sabah Al-Zayyat, the consultant paediatrician who saw Baby Peter two days before he died but failed to spot his serious injuries, must feel terrible.

Whether blame and anger is visited upon some harassed medical professional, or there is a lot of hand-wringing about the overstretched system, not a great deal will actually be done.

In my opinion, this is because you simply cannot create a system that’s flawless. When you have people so totally, irredeemably evil that they’re torturing their own child to death, what can society realistically be expected to do?

The unpalatable fact is that you get the odd human being who is just beyond hope or help and, as these people invariably seem to be keen on breeding, you’re going to get them being evil to their poor kids. It isn’t a nice thought that there are people in the world who are this innately despicable, but there are – and it’s beyond the ability of any state agency to deal with them.

The vast majority of people who work in the NHS are doing their best in very trying circumstances. But it goes beyond overwork, underfunding, Government meddling or whatever. Humans are humans, and a tiny minority are just wired up totally wrong. Very, very rare tragedies like this one are the inevitable result of human life.