A tale of two news reports

I was watching the BBC South Today local evening news yesterday and during the programme there were two similar news reports that were reported in quite different ways.

Firstly there was the tragic story of a man in his mid-forties from Hove in Sussex who had taken the legal drug mephedrone and had subsequently died of a heart attack. The report started by outlining the circumstances surrounding what had happened. It then moved on to a telephone interview with the brother of the man who had died who insisted that the drug should be made illegal. Next up was a clip from Harriet Harman talking in the Commons about how the government would urgently review the legal status of the drug (no explicit mention of making it illegal but long term observers of this government understand the code only too well). Finally there was a quick interview with a chap from a pressure group. I didn't catch the name of the group but it was clearly a pro-prohibition organisation and the chap forcefully made the point that the drug should be made illegal. There was a brief mention of the case of the two men in Scunthorpe who recently died after taking mephedrone (apparently amongst several other drugs they had taken) and then the report ended.

The second news report was about a lady who has been out horse-riding with a friend of hers on the South Downs when a motorbike had driven a bit close to them, her horse had bolted and thrown her off. Tragically she had landed on her head and has been left paralysed. The focus of the report was on how she is suing the man riding the motorbike for damages. At no point was there any link to any other stories in any other part of the country where people have been injured or killed whilst out horse riding. There was no interview with any relatives of the woman calling for horse riding to be banned. There was no government minister shown urgently promising to review the legal status of horse riding. There was also no person interviewed from a "pro horse riding prohibition" pressure group forcefully making the point that horse riding should be banned.

On the surface, these two stories would seem to involve similar circumstances. Both people involved in them were pursuing a pastime that presumably gave them some pleasure. Both ended in tragic results, one in death, the other in severe and life changing injuries. And yet the way these stories were reported on could not have been more different. One of them was treated like a national emergency with legal sanctions being implicitly seen as the obvious and logical next step to "deal with" the causes of the problem. The other one was seen as a tragic accident with no question that there is anything wrong with the activity itself being pursued.

As Professor David Nutt pointed out last year, horse riding is statistically more dangerous than taking ecstasy and yet the more dangerous activity is perfectly legal and respectable whilst participating in the other can get you put in prison with your life prospects ruined. It feels very much like mephedrone is about to be put into the same category.

As a footnote, I was so annoyed by the coverage of the first story and the blatant bias shown in the reporting (reporting about how some people think a drug should be made illegal is a political position and yet nobody with a non-prohibitionist outlook was interviewed or any sort of opposing view shown) that I put a call into the BBC duty log. I expect the reporter would not have even thought that they were being biased but they were. Lots of people in this country do not think that prohibition has worked or is working and the idea that even more currently legal drugs are likely to be put under control of criminal gangs is a terrible mistake in my view. I am far from alone in thinking this.

In the future, the BBC should balance their reporting on this subject by including the views of for example some of the excellent people at Transform Drugs Policy Foundation or Release. Or how about Professor Nutt himself, the former head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs?

The BBC needs to be much more even handed about reporting politically charged subjects like reform of the drugs laws.

Disappointing discussion about drugs policy on The World Tonight

I have just finished listening to a special edition of Radio 4's "The World Tonight" that was broadcast on Christmas Eve about drugs policy (it's still here on iPlayer although I am not sure for how much longer).

I was disappointed by how little of the 40 minute programme was given to the idea of legalisation and regulation of drugs. It was touched upon tangentially a couple of times and then there was a small amount of time at the end where one of the contributors (former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda) stated that he was in favour of legalisation and regulation of cannabis and also heroin. The other panellists were Professor of Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University Neil McKegany and US government advisor on drugs Keith Humphries.

There were recorded pieces and lots of discussion about the production of drugs, the supply routes and the demand side of things. These were all covered in a lot of detail. I think that the programme suffered from what I hear a lot around this debate: an assumption that the current prohibition situation is broadly correct and that what needs to happen is to modify the approach slightly but still keep everything illegal.

Jorge made the point that all the comments being made by the other two panellists and successive governments about how they were going to refocus their efforts and that there "may have been mistakes in the past but they have learned from those mistakes" have been said time and again over several decades now. There was no real recognition from the other two panellists that the "War on Drugs" has failed. In fact at one point Neil McKegany stated that in his view the fact that "only" 1% of people in the UK use heroin is a testament to how effective the current policy has been. Given that there has been at least a hundred-fold increase in heroin users in this country since the 1971 Misuse of Drugs act came into force I am not sure how that can be considered to have been an effective policy.

There were also some other comments made that I found frustrating. The example of Portugal and the success its 8 years (and counting) of decriminalisation of all drug use was raised near the start and was highlighted as a great success (although no detail was covered). I blogged about this myself here earlier this year and described how Portugal had found that drug use had actually decreased in every category since they had decriminalised. However later on in the discussion when the idea of legalisation was briefly put to Neil McKegany he stated baldly that he would not want to do anything that might encourage drug use. Nobody picked him up on the fact that Portugal's situation flies in the face of the received wisdom that liberalisation of drug laws inevitably lead to increased use and in fact shows that is not necessarily the case at all.

There was also much talk about how good and successful abstinence based programmes are. Keith Humphries claimed to have lots of evidence showing this. However the discussion also just seemed to accept that mandatory abstinence based programmes are the only way forward and the idea that some treatment may also need to encompass managing the addiction in other ways was dismissed as almost unbelievable. The thing is though that in order for an addict to abstain they have to want to. 12 step based programmes such as Narcotics Anonymous were mentioned but one of NA's founding principles is that the person attending the meeting should want to stop taking drugs. This is exactly the same as for other 12 step based programmes such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous. It is actually the only requirement for membership of one of these fellowships. Taken from the UK NA website:

NA is a non-profit Fellowship of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem.

We are recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean.

The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop using.

Legally mandated or enforced attendance at NA meetings risks going against this principle. If someone does not want to stop using (or drinking or gambling), nobody can make them. The difference with illegal drugs of course (as opposed to alcohol or gambling) is precisely that they are illegal and governments consistently try to make users of them stop.

I think this panel discussion would have benefitted from the input of someone from Transform Drugs Policy Foundation or Release to have been able to argue much more strongly for legalisation and regulation. Many of the other problems they were discussing on the programme would be greatly eased and perhaps even in some cases eliminated if a regime such as this were embraced.

Kudos to the BBC for dedicating an entire programme to this subject but perhaps next time they could strive to ensure that the discussion is widened.