Legalising Drugs

I usually steer clear of the detritus of passing political arguments but the drug advice board thing happened just as I'd finished reading Misha Glenny's McMafia: Serious Organised Crime and my brain was in that mode. This is about legalisation, not about whether the Government were right to sack their advisor.

Any product which costs almost nothing to make, has a high consumer value and requires almost no start-up capital and expertise to make is going to be interesting to organised crime. Especially if there are significant excises, customs and sales taxes – which allow criminals to undercut the legal price and still make super-profits. Criminals don't (at least in Europe) make cigarettes, because although a pack of twenty costs almost nothing to produce, you need a lot of money and expertise to set up the factories to make the things. Plus you have to haul a lot of tobacco leaf around. By contrast, the largest LSD factory in Europe in the 1980's was a small house in a sleepy south-west London suburb (Operation Julie). Nobody saw a thing for years.

Any product where there is a significant difference in the taxation imposed by nearby countries with leaky borders or bribable customs officials will also attract the criminals. Tax arbitrage is an easy source of super-profits for the bad guys as well as Barclays Capital Markets. Cigarette smuggling is still a popular sport along the Italian coastline.

Criminals love drugs because the margins are phenomenal and the production and set-up costs are minimal. They like diamonds, illegal immigrants, small electronics, CD's and DVD's for the same reason. Luxury goods – Louis Voitton and Rolex knock-offs – are not much more difficult once you have found your Chinese manufacturer. The work is all about logistics and security: that's why a gang can switch from drugs to people to counterfeit so quickly. Once you have the logistics in place and the guards bribed, you can move almost anything.

Legalising the substance will not remove the criminals from the trade. In fact, it will start a round of violence the like of which we have only seen at the movies, as gangs fight for control of the sale of something that is just too profitable to ignore. Worse, enforcing any licensing regime (for quality, manufacture or distribution) simply turns the British Government into another drug dealer enforcing its right to be in sole control of the trade and making sure it gets its cut. The accompanying corruption of public servants and the Police would make the 1960's pornography scandals look like your maiden Aunt's tea-party.

The debate is often about the absolute or relative harms caused by the drugs, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is about the damage to society caused by the organised crime that will follow legalisation.

(If there are genuine medical benefits for some people from marijuana, then let's confirm it and prescribe if it makes sense. What on earth the medicinal benefits from speed, crack, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine or skunk could be I have no idea.)

Maybe we de-criminalise use but criminalise manufacture and supply as the Dutch do. I suspect the liberalisers would be happy with this. But wait, drivers of taxis, private cars, buses, trains, lorries and cranes have got to be clean and sober. So have doctors, policemen, nurses, teachers, judges and Court officers, customs and excise staff, air traffic controllers, airline pilots, the guys who run power stations, oil refineries and the various power grids, anyone who works power tools or on a construction site... I'd rather like to believe that the guys who designed the buildings I work in and the lifts I use weren't stoned at the time, and triple that for any crucial software that runs anything... The legislation making drugs illegal would be replaced by legislation making it illegal or sackable for various employees to be caught under the influence.

You see where this is going? Given how long drugs stay in the system, the only people who will be able to take drugs without fear of losing their jobs will be the unskilled, unemployed and low-paid. Which is not what the skilled, employed, high-paid liberalisers want: they want to get high as well. But most of them won't be able to because of the jobs they do and because their employers don't want them coming in wasted. And so we get back more or less to the same frustrations we had at the start, except the entire underclass is now wasted all the time and their children go into school smelling of last night's skunk. Legally.

And no, this is England, land of the binge-drinker and exporter of drunken louts to the world. The English are not going to do drugs like the self-respecting middle-class Dutch do: they are going to do drugs like they do booze. Which is going to be a really pretty sight. 

The first draft of anything is… in dire need of improvement

So said Papa Hemingway. Actually he said: "the first draft of anything is shit". You don’t really know what you need to say until you have tried to say it. You may know what you want to say, but if that's all you say, it's just self-indulgence. You say what you need to say. You check the facts you are stating and the assumptions you are making. You search and delete clichés, urban myths, lazy short-cuts, waffle and boilerplate… and replace them with clear, simple ideas well-expressed. Mutatis mutandis if you are working in the visual arts.

Actors, dancers and musicians rehearse, soldiers, sportsmen and athletes train. Drafting is what writers, programmers, designers and artists do – or should do. Fashion photographers used to take hundreds of shots to get the magic for the cover of Vogue (now they take any old thing and Photoshop it to death). Painters scrape off the oil and start over, musicians stop the tape and record it again, movie directors do take after take of a scene. Because that’s the way you get the little flashes of magic that make it something to be proud of.

I Can't Live Without... Shirts

Every time I want to buy shirts I dutifully walk up and down Jermyn Street looking in all the shops: Turnbull & Asser, T.M. Lewin, New & Lingwood, Harvie & Hudson, Hildtich & Key and Pink.

I always end up back at Tyrwhitt's. I prefer their conservative styling and colours - Hawes and Curtis have gone particularly wild for the A/W 2009/10 season - and they don't use cutaway collars. The fact they almost always have some sort of "sale" going that means you get a shirt for around £25 that is a lot better than anything Marks and Spencer sell at the same price. One the other hand, I always look at Cordings...

... and wish I could wear more of their clothes. I have two pairs of their corduroy trousers (dark blue and dark purple) but their clothes are for the damp English countryside and London has been getting warmer every year recently.

Monday, Monday

Another week's holiday, this one around London because I can't afford to go abroad. This morning was warm and sunny, so I went for a stroll with the camera round Virginia Water.

Autumn colours at their best. In the afternoon, I went to the Ed Ruscha exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and was surprised. I'd always thought of Ruscha as a Pop Artist, but he's developed throughout his career. The best painting there is the Old Trade School Building...

... the windows are boarded up and it's surrounded by chain-link fencing - the painting of the boarding and fencing is extraordinary. It used to teach young men useful trades they could take to the aerospace and defence industries, but it's as dead as those industries are in California. And it's a wonderful composition. I followed that with a burger and ice cream (holiday, remember?) at Giraffe under the Festival Hall - when I think of the awful facilities they had in the 70's - and the Britten Ensemble with Roger Norrington waving his hands at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Purcell, Handel, Hayden, Mendelsohn, Martinu.

Oh, and I had a blinding glimpse of the obvious about the job. Plus that cold has gone. And it's only Monday.

Meditations on a Bar of Chocolate

The other evening I finished a whole 99p bar of Cadbury's Whole Nut. I have a cold, so I'm allowed to eat sugar and carbs. But I only meant to eat a couple of lines or six chunks. As if. I just finished the lot. I didn't want to rush out and buy another, but I did have to finish it.

Alcoholism is: you don't stop once you start. Addiction is: you keep choosing to start. Insisting that starting and then carrying on are choices frees the addict and the alcoholic from dependancy on “cures” or having to believe there's something “wrong” with them that needs endless therapy. It's the start of taking responsibility for yourself.

The real trick is this: even if you do want to start, you don't actually do anything about it. You can think what you like and feel what you like, as long as you don't have that first drink, drug or piece of chocolate. It's a trick because it leaves your head alone and concentrates on your actions. In the early days, it's a lot easier not to buy a drink than it is not to want one, and it's always easier not to buy chocolate than not to want it.

You can do anything alcoholically: drink, drugs, food (over-eating), buying CD's, sex, decorating, working, travelling, running, exercising, name it. Why you do it is between you and the darker reaches of your psyche. That's complicated and messy and even if you did understand it, there's no guarantee you would stop as a result. Stopping is one thing, understanding is another. How you stop is easy – don't start. One day at a time.

The Great London Pretty Girl Puzzle

I've just come back from a brief business trip to a Town Outside the M25 with some of the lads from work. And we were all reminded of the Great London Girl Puzzle. Which is this...

There may be some dazzlers out in the E-something postcodes, but where I and everyone I know lives and works, there are no pretty girls. There are women with trim figures, some Eastern Europeans with that fragile and quick-burning glamour, but no pretty girls. Not like Brighton, Chester, Nottingham, Newcastle or Hull. This is not just my opinion: I've checked it out with any number of the lads at work and we all feel the same way. It's a London thing, not a girl thing.

(Note: in what follows, “girls” means “female between the age of eighteen and when they start looking worn or maternal who are studying, have or trying to get proper paying jobs”. “Lads” means “male who is studying, has or trying to get a proper job and between the age of eighteen and when they start taking themselves seriously or have seriousness forced on them”.)

There are a number of theories about why. Mine is that a working in London is now the second or third job you do – you have to do somewhere in the sticks and suburbs first. So that means the girls are about twenty-four to twenty-six before they make it up to the Smoke. They've been working for five years already and have a nasty feeling they are going to be doing this shit for the rest of their lives. This may make for character, but it does not make for pretty. Now I think about it, women in the Oughties look like men did in the Fifties and Sixties: trapped, strained and forcing the fun.

What about the students? Central London should be full of them. There's the LSE, Imperial, Kings, UCL, Birkbeck, SSOA and on and on. Well, those colleges have been selling themselves to foreign students for the money. They also draw from London's multicultural population. So the pretty English girls come down on the open day, see lots of people not-like-them, and choose Hull or Newcastle instead.

The best, due to a fellow lad at work, is this. In the old days, pretty English girls came from the country to the Big Smoke for the freedom, the fun and the money. The jobs they did are now being done by Aussies, Kiwis, Latvians and Russians. Who are harder, more ambitious and not as pretty. Added to which, they can find the freedom, fun and often a better quality of life outside London. So the pretty girls don't come to London anymore.

The London girls have to look credible at work, because they want careers. So they dress, groom and prepare themselves with the same care and attention as the men. De minimus, in other words. There are a few exceptions: the impact Melissa Deep had on a roomful of male telecoms account managers had to be seen to be believed (honeypot, a, round, bees, like). There was only one of Ms Deep in the whole London scene.

Maybe the London boys aren't that worth the effort. After all, unless they're City Boys, they aren't paid enough to set up a decent life, and if they are City Boys, they have other issues. And maybe the girls come to London to get away from the whole marriage, children and family thing. Resigned to a life of unending salaried work, she could give a damn if she partners up or not.

A Brush With the UCAS Personal Statement

Yet another hour on the phone with my nephew discussing his Personal Statement. For those who
graduated a long time ago, applying to university has got a whole lot more bureaucratic. Also it's online. Part of the application is the aforesaid Personal Statement, which is a 4000-character (!) essay on yourself and why you want to study whatever it is wherever it is. Only you can't tailor it university by university, so it has to be carefully neutral about the institution.

Preparing for an earlier draft, I asked the Young Folk at work what they did for their statements. My manager said he talked a lot about his extra-curricular activities - which made sense since he's that sort of person (an invaluable part of the Sports and Social Club, Fire Warden). An even younger analyst said he talked about why he liked the subject and a little bit about his pastimes, but had also put in paragraphs relating the other subjects he did at A-level to the one he wanted to study.

The Nephew has the same genetic difficulty presenting himself as I do, his mother does and all his grandparents do or did. We just don't do sharing ourselves – our thoughts and ideas, yes, but ourselves, no. (Look carefully at my entries on this blog: are they about me or are they reports of my passing thoughts and opinions?) He wants to study history and if you talk to him for ten minutes you will hear his interest in the subject. For god's sake he's read books about the early Crusades.

My only contribution has been a) editing, and b) asking questions. Plus of course patience and a little knowledge of and sympathy for the awful struggles going on inside the poor lad. I bought him 40 Successful Personal Statements: For UCAS Application, which on first pass scared the living daylights out of me and then, having realised that they teach even less grammar and writing technique than they did when I went to school, The Complete Plain Words. But then I buy everybody that.

Maybe some people can just write about themselves and why they want to study Serbo-Croat and Theoretical Physics. If you asked me what I wanted to study Mathematics and Philosophy I might have said something like “Logic”, but the simple answer was that I'd started out with Electrical Engineering (vocation) and then read some philosophy and knew that was it. It made sense to me in a way that nothing else ever had or ever has. I'm guessing that's the way my nephew feels about history. But how do you say that in boilerplate? And without opening up a question you couldn't answer? Yet it's the best answer there is.