Death by miaow miaow: whatever happened to British drug culture?
Posted on Thursday 18 March, 2010
Filed Under Society
YOU know you are getting old when you haven’t even heard of the stuff that kids are taking to get high these days. The possibility of death by miaow miaow or m-cat overdose was not one I had come across until this week’s extensive media coverage.
By all accounts, mephadrone is a stimulant that works much like cocaine or amphetamines, two substances of which I do have direct recollection. There is no medical evidence to suggest that it is qualitatively more dangerous than either.
While my condolences do of course go to the families of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith, the two Scunthorpe teenagers killed after snorting some lines of the stuff, I cannot help noticing apparent discrepancies in accounts of their demise.
By some reports, the young friends were ‘staunchly anti-drugs’ and had not taken them prior to last Sunday. According to others, the pair had additionally ingested heroin substitute methadone and then knocked back a few drinks to top up the hit.
Advanced mixing of pharmaceuticals on that scale is in a different league from the tentative toke on a joint that constituted the typical first experiment in my teenage years. Even in my substance abuse hey-day, older and wiser counsel would have steered me clear of that kind of mix and match.
If it is true that Wainwright and Smith were first-timers, what does that tell us about contemporary drug culture? It seems that where once the use of hard drugs was implicitly oppositional and regulated by group norms, it is now entirely commonplace. That is not necessarily a good thing.
Strange as the concept of ‘responsible drug dealers’ might now appear, back in the 1970s street suppliers would not have sold as much of a bag of grass to anybody younger than about 16, and would not have parted with the harder stuff to anyone not accustomed at least to inhaling a bit of blow.
The local head community would reach some kind of consensus as to whether or not some guy’s latest flakey squeeze should be permitted to sample lysergic acid diethylamide. There was, in short, a system of informal ethics in place.
Now there are shops that put the high into the High Street. One has to presume that their wares are effective, or they would not be attracting repeat business. If there isn’t one in your town, there’s always the internet. No questions asked; if you’ve got four quid you can get yourself a hit of plant food.
Meanwhile, hard drug abuse is no longer out of the ordinary among people not that far away from a bus pass. When I was growing up, fiftysomethings did not get wasted. They were suit-wearing, job-holding and often church going mums and dads, who maybe got a bit pissed from time to time and smoked Woodbines at work.
But certainly they would not have been tanking miaow miaow. Yet among the names figuring on the m-cat death toll was a 46-year-old from Hove. I can add here that I have two good friends close to my own age who are perhaps a bit too fond of Charlie for people whose tickers have got a good few years on the clock.
Drugs, in short, have moved from the counterculture to the mainstream. There is no longer any correlation with rebellion or even any taste for obscure rock bands. Everyone from ordinary provincial teenagers to some of my contemporaries are ingesting powders about the content of which they have no real clue.
Just in case anybody is wondering, I have not been a regular drug user since the 1980s and it has been a good few years since I have partaken of anything naughty whatsoever. If I did still go to the kind of parties at which spliffs circulated, I would indeed just say no.
On the other hand, my track record leaves me in no position to preach, and my libertarian leftist leanings means I wouldn’t want to.
But on an initial assessment, I am glad I did what I did when I did it, rather than now.
<<Go back
Comments
23 Responses to “Death by miaow miaow: whatever happened to British drug culture?”
Leave a Reply
-
- Yemen: an unfinished revolution
- Comment Is Free: An honours system for those who fight to make Britain a better place
- Democracy crushed; elected President arrested; World wrings its hands
- Fabians change policy on unpaid internships
- Kamal al-Fayoumi arrested as Egyptian regime retaliates to strikes
-
-
Meta
-
That’s not what you were saying a few months ago.“I don’t suppose any of you would happen know where I could score some decent blow, do you?” As Roseanne says in the Pot Episode, “We quit? I thought we were just out.”
I hadn’t heard of it either. At first hearing it sounds like an envoy from Hell.
The lessons seem obvious. Ignorance is not strength, making safer drugs illegal encourages use of more dangerous ones.
Well, I just get hankerings sometime, that’s all. But nobody offered. So I bought me some Glenmorangie instead.
Stamp out this Mau Mau or Mao Mao or whatever it is now!
It may be as dangerous as ‘cake’ from Prague!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbq3kc29Tmg
Do the ‘Brass Eye’ people know about Bow Wow yet?
From my scrutiny of such programmes as ‘Jeremy Kyle’ (it holds a mirro up to the lumpen proletariate), I would say that just about everyone gets off their head on drugs. There is no age, sex, class, colour discrimination. Or, even religion. Devout Muslims will regard crack and cocaine as halal, when alcohol is harem. For the working class, it is cheaper than booze. Let’s not forget that the eighteenth and nineteenth century saw widespread addiction to opium. I have noticed that such addictions are usually the result of allaying hunger pangs; every society (throughout history)had a drug of choice that took the edge off starvation. Although that may not be so obvious in today’s obesgenic society in Britain, there can still be other forms of hunger, emotional and social. It is probably the fact that drugs (hard and otherwise) are much more abundant these days, easier to get hold of, which also makes it easy for people to get involved.
“Fings ain’t wot they used t’be!”
“Aye, lad, I remember when drug dealers, even them lads in Moss Side and Toxteth, had a code of ethics! Not like today, I tell you! The country’s gone to the bloody dogs and that’s a fact!”
Rot!
Dave evidently had a sheltered adolescence; in the late sixties and early seventies in Lancaster [and Liverpool] LSD of widely different strengths was sold to all comers, no questions asked.
One never knew the trip one was likely to get: bugger all / a few patterns on the wallpaper / a trip that lasted for two days … and some people were raced up to the Lancaster Moor Hospital beset by demons and Egyptian animal-headed gods.
On re-reading Sue R’s piece, I suddenly remembered the great temperance campaign in C19th Ireland and the consequent epidemic of ether-sniffing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draperstown
Legalise cannabis and end all this idiocy now!
Chemist shops have been modified to have seperate cubicles so the poor victims of capitalism can have their methadrone in private. First name terms with shop staff. You get ignored at the counter when one of the poor victims come in for his her little drink. Costing the taxpayer tens of millions to feed their habit. It is of course society to blame so we have to foot the bill. They are on higher incapacity benefit to try and discourage them from committing crime. Who are the mugs!
Sue
Yeap, nothing better than feet up, trackie bottoms on and a nice white bread crisp sarnie , watching Jeremy Kyle.
Do you have trouble getting a signal in your attic ?
Its always difficult to compare the present with your young days of a few decades ago but here goes.my recollection of the drug scene of the late 60′s early 70′s was that most dealers supplied a fairly limited clientele on a word of mouth basis.Street dealers were always dodgy but you were more likely to be sold rubbish than something that would hospitalise or kill you.I think the main difference between then and now is that drugs and mainstream crime were poles apart.To sum I think those of us who dabbled years ago were at less risk than nowadays with all the violent crime and general nastiness that goes hand in hand with the drug scene.
Drugs and crime, eh?
This is a decent and fairly-PC blog and using the N-WORD is, to say the least, frowned on as it is in enlightened society in general …
In Boston some years ago my hosts took me to two MASS GRASS social events to meet people and listen to music and smoke dope and, after a while, I asked one of the people present, “You don’t seem to do much public campaigning, so what’s the real purpose of MASS GRASS?” and she artlessly replied, “It’s really a weekend social organisation and it’s real reason for existing is to make it unecessary to buy dope from n—-r criminals in Roxbury.”
Sue mentions Jeremy Kyle. Sue must be a London Eastender with the Isle of Dugs Facelift.
Yes, very outrageous of you Bill. Again. Applause. You don’t like blacks and are “fearless” in saying so in the face of the dictatorial PC establishment. We do get that, really. All done so screamingly wittily. The fact you used to vote Labour or something makes it fine. Fab. Well done.
But Arthur, one of the strongest disincentive to trying recreational drugs was always the utter horror of mixing with REALLY scummy people. Their skin colour was and is quite irrelevant.
A quote is a quote.
Somewhere or other there’s a recorded quote of Harry S. Truman referring to one of his cabinet dressing “like a n—-r preacher” and we ALL remember the ludicrous public brouhaha when someone in American public life carelessly used the archaic word ‘niggardly’ – meaning obsessively frugal.
I misused / misplaced an apostrophe in my post about MASS GRASS [which is, or was, affiliated to NORML] and have accordingly ordered my slaves to flog me.
Remember, children:
“It’s time to give the dog its food.”
Another day…ANOTHER MAIL MORAL panic from the vicious Kyle underclass on the Thatcher estates…have you seen their dogs? Like ‘orses!
COUNCIL KIDS, JUST SAY NO! Don’t float Asprin on your Coca Cola and don’t buy Boots saccharine tabs from the big boys who tell you it’s quality speed…Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters..
Remember what happened to Charlie Parker… (OK, before your time and er, taste). But Steve Purnell (a Glasgow Council Boy) is NOT…he’s just a’ “resting”.
Opps… Steve Purcell. like the Composer (Glasgow’s got modernising Talent, innit)
Why anyone messes with this awful Bow-Wow when perfectly decent marijuana is so cheap and easy to grow is beyond me, boring old fuddy-duddy that I am these days.
Well it’s or one have been consistently disappointed by Skunk.
There they go, not like your usual greyish brick, it’s so dangerous, it’ll take your head off, make you want to do a parcours up the Willis Faber building.
Apart from the smell being striking it’s little more than reasonable.
Bring back Thai sticks and Nepalese Temple Balls say I.
that will make the rise of the French Europe Ecologie go away
(http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/french-regionals-where-the-left-now-stands-and-what-it-means/)
Not that I normally smoke blow that is.
Here’s something clever enough to be worth reading:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7067729.ece
One puff of Skunk is enough. One joint would suffice for the entire Sixth Form.
Bring back Thai sticks and Nepalese Temple Balls say I.
Most importers idea of a Thai stick these days is to put a bit of red string around some Cambodian block weed. Though the Tibetan hash is a little better than the Nepalese, complications with Ma Beijing do make it a little difficult to obtain, and both are still better than some of that North Indian mallarkey.
At least the rise of skunk seems to have decreased the prevalence of cooking hash (soapbar), though the relative robustness of criminal gangs means that more of it ends up on the market still wet than with conscientious individual growers.
All this information was of course derived from one fourteen hour trip to Amsterdam (I did have another trip there, but the afternoon I spent at a secret convetion with the Dutch national baton twirling team isn’t really germane to this discussion).
I have to say, I have enjoyed having a good ol’ media hysteria over drugs. There’s not much better than seeing the Daily Mail and the Sun getting into full swing, really reminiscent of the Brass Eye drugs episode.
Bring back that nutter Nutt, I say. He was like Dawkins on acid (etc etc).
As it turned out they hadn’t taken mephedrone at all:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/10184803.stm