Wow … media prefer man-bites-dog stories to dog-bites-man stories. And also prefer to put stuff we didn’t know before in the news, rather than stuff we knew already.

Who knew?

@1 That’s one way to read it I suppose.

The meow meow reporting has been like this from the get-go. I remember reading one story in Metro (which isn’t even pretending not to be a gutter paper these days) under a headline like MEN KILLED AFTER TAKING MEOW MEOW. If you read the first parapgraph you found they’d also drunk heavily and taken cocaine. It fell into farce by the end: the last paragraph quoted the coroner saying something like “alcohol and cocaine were the causative factors here”.

Headlines like that – which are techinically true but serve no purpose other than to deliberately mislead – should probably be outlawed.

The term ‘legal high’ sounds like a contradiction in terms to me and as a result I’d never tried mephedrone thinking it was probably just a rip-off, and I stuck to more traditional drugs which had the endorsement of illegality. It seems like I’ve been missimg out.

‘That’s why it hits home. Fear is the key for this type of story. Fear it could happen to you, or someone you know.’

Fear and *sin*: this is about ‘unearned’ pleasure. There’s nothing which scares society more than the idea someone might enjoy themselves doing something you don’t enjoy yourself.

Once you know your moods are largely down to chemistry anyway, not a sickness of the soul, you lose your moral inhibition to reuptake inhibition.

We all do it, look in any LC article and you’ll see examples of the same thing. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

Re: 3 Chaise Guevara – so the upshot was that these men died after taking a cocktail of illegal drugs, a legal high and a legal drug. So I suppose you would not have anything to quibble about if the newspaper headline stated the men died after taking illegal drugs and it would be proper for a newspaper to highlight the fact these men died after committing a criminal act.

The article itself appears rushed. What is it trying to say apart from in reality suggesting that illegal drugs should be legalised without any consideration of the pros and cons (‘coz the writer probably believes that his view is the absolute one and anyone else who may be concerned at the use of illegal drugs is not worth listening to).

If the article is supposed to be highlighting fear that can be engendered from reading lots of tabloids when in fact that fear is misplaced, then I can support that.

However, it ill behoves a writer who wishes to be taken seriously to mock ordinary people -viz – “Parents will be worried. Will your teenage children be going out tonight and taking this drug? Will they come home alive? ” – These are not out of the ordinary matters. They are matters about which parents can reasonably be concerned.

Finally, mephadrone is now banned. Do you not think there are rather a lot of more pressing matters about which to be concerned in this society of ours?

‘However, it ill behoves a writer who wishes to be taken seriously to mock ordinary people -viz – “Parents will be worried. Will your teenage children be going out tonight and taking this drug? Will they come home alive? ” – These are not out of the ordinary matters. They are matters about which parents can reasonably be concerned.’

If people are ‘concerned’ they should take the time to be ‘informed’. Ininformed concern makes you a useless parent.

‘Finally, mephadrone is now banned. Do you not think there are rather a lot of more pressing matters about which to be concerned in this society of ours?’

You think of a pressing matter and I’ll name something more pressing than that. Eventually we’ll find the one most pressing matter to be concerned about. Meanwhile a thousand little matters we think ourselves too important to deal with can be left to the State to take care of on our behalf because Nanny Knows Best.

@ 6 Paul D

“Re: 3 Chaise Guevara – so the upshot was that these men died after taking a cocktail of illegal drugs, a legal high and a legal drug. So I suppose you would not have anything to quibble about if the newspaper headline stated the men died after taking illegal drugs and it would be proper for a newspaper to highlight the fact these men died after committing a criminal act.”

Naturally. The title should have been MEN DIE AFTER MIXING BOOZE AND COCAINE.

“The article itself appears rushed. What is it trying to say apart from in reality suggesting that illegal drugs should be legalised without any consideration of the pros and cons (‘coz the writer probably believes that his view is the absolute one and anyone else who may be concerned at the use of illegal drugs is not worth listening to).”

No, that’s the opposite of what the article says. It’s arguing in favour of fact-based policy making. The options aren’t limited to “moronic anti-drug attitudes” and “moronic pro-drug attitudes”, there’s such a thing as a rational middle ground.

And shouldn’t that be ‘Steven’ Baxter, blogger, not ‘Stephen’ Baxter, author of the Xeelee sequence and ‘The Time Ships’?

good spot. Name fixed.

Plus ça change, and all that – some of us remember when the drug Cake* was mentioned in parliament…

*See here for the worrying and dangerous threat that Cake posed to society.

Given what ‘Anton Vowl’ generally blogs about, the point being made is that Tabloids whip up hysteria without much effort made toward accuracy or veracity, and then succeed in shaping government policy from that hysteria, and that that might be worth being concerned about.

I mean half the shit that was printed by the papers about mephedrone was actually being added by piss-takers to its wikipedia page, including the nickname meow meow, which it was never actually called by anyone till the tabloids started printing wiki verbatim. The cheeky wind-up merchants wanted to expose the credulous hacks at the papers, instead they helped get “meow meow” banned – there’s an important lesson in there I’m sure.

I’m trying to understand what ‘Shatterface’ is actually trying to say. He/she says “Ininformed (sic) concern makes you a useless parent.” Is he/she trying to suggest that parents of say teenage children are “useless” if they worry about harm occurring to their children through misuse of illegal drugs and alcohol? If so, then it is hard to imagine “Shatterface” as being a parent. You cannot reasonably label a parent as “useless” if they are concerned at their children becoming adversely affected by illegal drugs.

There is not just one pressing matter that overrides all others. However I would suggest that working towards the amelioration of those in poverty through improving such matters as housing, increasing the minimum wage; tackling the scandal of the very rich getting away with paying the least amount of tax, tackling the problems of the NHS, seeking to improve all schools to avoid the ‘sink estate school no-one wants their children to go to; the scandal of how poorly our elderly are often treated – are matters exceedingly more worthy of our energies and action as a community rather than bleating about the civil or human right to use some pathetic legal high type of drug.

To Chaise Guevara – I would suggest the rational middle ground can be occupied by people who do not believe in the liberalisation of drugs in our culture at the present time.

I’m not really into tabloid journalism but I try to believe things with outlandish titles, as long as they properly give it a go. I found this one the other day and decided to believe every word without reading it it was so good.

@ 13 Paul D

“To Chaise Guevara – I would suggest the rational middle ground can be occupied by people who do not believe in the liberalisation of drugs in our culture at the present time.”

Hmm. Well, I’d genuinely be interested in discussing the subject with them. From my perspective, all rationality points towards liberalisation ATM. However, this is a pragmatic issue for me, not an ideological one (at least, not much), and I’d like to hear the other side.

I’d certainly agree that being against drug liberalisation does not automatically make you an irrational idiot. There are sensible arguments in favour of keeping narcotics illegal. But this article is mainly about nonsensical arguments used by the pro-ban lobby, and I’m still not sure what you think its failings are.

@ 13 Paul D

“I’m trying to understand what ‘Shatterface’ is actually trying to say. He/she says “Ininformed (sic) concern makes you a useless parent.” Is he/she trying to suggest that parents of say teenage children are “useless” if they worry about harm occurring to their children through misuse of illegal drugs and alcohol?”

Let me help: Shatterface is saying (he can correct me if I’m wrong) that being uninformed on any issue makes you useless on that issue. Which is true – if someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about, what use are they? He’s not saying that worrying about drugs makes you a useless parent, but he’s probably saying that getting hysterical about drugs while knowing nothing about them can make you a counterproductive parent.

@3 – With a deacent press complaints body, they’d have to issue a retraction.

And I’d like it to be law that press retractions have to have the same location and, for print press, font size, as the original story. Lead with a story you’re forced to retract? The retraction will be splashed across the front page.

I think it’d work very well.

@12 – I’m fairly certain the “meow meow” name thing was done on a bet, too. I’m still trying to track down the details, but…

All ‘liberalisation’ as prmoted by the nice middle classes means is allowing the nice middle classes to have a bit of fun now and again without getting into trouble for it. Those who have drug issues and drug problems already take plenty of them – liberalisation or legalisation won’t affect them a great deal.

@ 18 Wibble wibble

“All ‘liberalisation’ as prmoted by the nice middle classes means is allowing the nice middle classes to have a bit of fun now and again without getting into trouble for it.”

Source! Actually, don’t bother – it’s obviously a stupid sweeping statement, unless you have some kind of magic access to the thought process of every liberal middle-class person in the world.

“Those who have drug issues and drug problems already take plenty of them – liberalisation or legalisation won’t affect them a great deal.”

Do some research. If drugs are illegal, users have to buy potentially tainted products from potentially dangerous and exploitative people. If caught, they can go to jail, which puts them off seeking help.

If drugs are legal, then you can buy them in shops after they’ve passed product quality regulation, you don’t go to jail for it and you can be confident about seeking help as you would for any other medical problem.