DRUGS

This sort of moment comes along very rarely, but today my views on a subject happened to be aligned with those of the current UK government. That subject was 'legal highs'. In the Queen's Speech (somehow even less interesting than The King's Speech) it was announced that there would be a blanket ban on all 'legal highs'. Let's get one thing perfectly clear: I support the banning of 'legal highs'. I support the shift in legislation regarding 'legal highs' away from attempting to ban individual products towards a blanket ban on any and all of them. Allow me to explain why...

'Legal highs' are extremely fucking dangerous. Not like you might have a bad trip dangerous, but like might kill you or leave you with permanent organ damage dangerous. Properly fucking dangerous. They are dangerous because they are untested and unregulated. They are unregulated because they are sold as not fit for human consumption. It is in the best interests of the public at large that such substances are banned from sale.

But it won't work. And even if it did work to some extent, it will not address the problem. And addressing the problem wouldn't work if politicians tried to do that (which they won't) because it's actually not a problem at all. Thinking of it as a problem is the real problem. But we're not even looking at the first one yet, so...we're screwed basically. Allow me to elaborate. Human beings have been taking drugs for tens of thousands of years. We've been taking drugs since before religion. We've been taking drugs since before commerce. Way before agriculture. Yep, all the way back there in the darkest recesses of human history...can you see it? Yep, it's a guy gettin' high.

FACT #1: We take drugs because drugs work! 

The human brain is an incredibly complex network and the communication within that network is done by neurotransmitters. They are chemicals that fit into neuroreceptors and make brain do thing. It's complicated and this is not the time for a biology lesson (and I'm not a biology teacher) but what you need to know is that drugs work by mimicking neurotransmitters and fitting themselves into the receptors thereby giving us the effect of the neurotransmitter without having to go through the normal procedure to get it. For example, heroin works because we already make a painkiller in our brain (some gland or something) that is way more powerful than any plant-based opiate. Opiates work because they have the same bits as our own stuff. It's just that to get our own stuff we have to be in a huge amount of pain. You can take heroin when you're not in pain, and it is, by all accounts, great. Same goes for cocaine, same goes for weed...

FACT #2: We will always take drugs! 

You cannot stop people from doing something that they want to do. You make murder illegal, that's fine, most people don't want to murder anyway. And you know what? The people who really do want to murder, they do it anyway. Most of them seem to get caught, but they've already done their murder. Whether you lock them up or kill them, they've still done their murder. Aside from retroactive punishment, the criminal law is totally useless. People commit crimes all the fucking time. Some are more serious than others. The overwhelming majority go unnoticed, let alone unpunished. I'm talking about the everyday 'crimes' that we all commit. You want to see everyday criminals, drive at 70mph on a British motorway. Fuck it, just drive around. You'll see plenty of shit that's both dangerous and illegal, and you'll see people getting away with it in their fucking millions. Cocaine is illegal, but does that stop people from taking it? No. If you popped out a gram of coke at a party and started chopping out a few lines, unless it was a particularly straight party (but those sort of people don't throw parties...), you will have people gladly relieving you of the drugs that you have generously supplied. Spark a joint, offer to pass it, someone else will almost always take it off you. I could go on, but I won't. The point I'm making is this: you murder someone and you're a murderer, you steal shit for a living and you're a thief; in theory, and by the letter of the law, if you pass a joint you're a drug dealer.

FACT #3: Drugs should be legal! 

If the powers that be had even a gram of pure common sense, then we wouldn't be in this mess. The law only functions as long as the majority of people don't want to break it. If too many people want to break it, then it ceases to be viable to punish them all. Somewhere, there is probably a formula for that... This is where unwritten laws, rules of thumb, if you like, come into it. The speed limit is 70, but you are unlikely to be done for speeding unless you're going above 80. Unless it's near the end of a quota period and the police are down on their fines targets in which case you'll get the book thrown at you (at an extra book-throwing cost) for doing 71... So, if the law doesn't make any difference to behaviour, then why should it matter that drugs are illegal? People are going to take them anyway and they're almost guaranteed to get by unnoticed by the law. Well, that's where the 'legal high' rears its ugly head once again. And it brings us nicely round to that real problem that we were talking about earlier. People take 'legal highs' because they want to get high. They want to get high, but are afraid that if they buy an eighth of weed then they'll get kicked out of uni, sent to prison and their life will be ruined forever. So they go onto some dodgy as fuck website and order some synthetic cannabis substitute that, while officially not fit for human consumption, will get them high without the inherent and implied risks of illegal cannabis.

The fact that otherwise intelligent people will ingest a substance that is not fit for human consumption in order to get high should be a massive fucking hint that people are going to get high regardless of the risk factors attached to the process. Drugs should be legal because making them illegal does not work on any level in terms of reducing the number of people who take them. It just makes them more dangerous. It makes the whole process more dangerous. But here's the other thing, as dangerous as those 'legal highs' were that those students at Lancaster Uni took, they all survived. And for every one of the drug-related admissions to English A&E departments that day, how many alcohol-related admissions were there? My guess would be into the hundreds. I'm not going to get into the hypocrisy of having legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco and at the same time making weed illegal when it's less harmful to society than the former and to the individual than the latter... Because we all know that story backwards and forwards. We need to ban 'legal highs' because they are staggeringly dangerous, but we also need to de-criminalise recreational use of the real thing. If we did that, then our society would be safer and happier. Our police force would be unburdened of the responsibility of having to in some way wage an unwinnable war.

But what am I saying? That's never going to happen. It won't happen because none of our elected officials want it to happen. It won't happen because no one will ever run for parliament on a message of drug legalisation. That won't happen because they wouldn't get in if they did. So we're stuck with a government whose policies in no way reflect our wishes. That's democracy.

Formula 1 Rethink

Apparently, according to Seb Vettel, Formula 1 needs to 'bring back the fear factor'...

Ok, Seb, might I venture a few suggestions on that front? The last time someone died in Formula 1 was 1994. Ayrton Senna at the San Marion Grands Prix. Tragedy. Everyone (well, more or less everyone) in the world remembers, or at least knows, the name Ayrton Senna. They know that he was a racing driver and they know that he died. Roland Ratzenburger was also a racing driver and he also died at the 1994 San Marino Grands Prix. No one really outside of Formula 1 remembers his name. No documentary entitled Ratzenburger ever won the award for best documentary at Sundance. Roland Ratzenburger had, by all accounts, a bright future ahead of him. I'm not sure what point I'm making here, it's late and I'm tired, but I think there is a hypocrisy here. In fact I'm sure there is.

It's been 21 years since the last time a Formula 1 racing driver died during a Grands Prix. Apparently, that is how long it takes for people in the sport to start wanting the death back. There is a fantastic documentary about the dark days of F1 featuring lots of interviews with drivers and crew who had worked in the sport during the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s and they all had vivid and upsetting accounts of watching friends and loved ones die - sometimes in truly horrific ways - more or less every week. Between 1953 and 1994, fifty drivers died in Formula 1.Ok, so I'll grant you, I don't think Vettel was talking directly about death. He was talking about the fear of death. But you can't have smoke without fire.

There is no denying that F1 is in a bad way at the moment. It is less exciting now than it's ever been, so dull in fact that even the drivers are finding it tedious. And as someone else pointed out, if you're driving a 900hp racing car at 190mph and you're bored: something is badly wrong. Recently, and for the first time in my living memory, Formula 1 asked fans for their thoughts on how to improve the sport. This was patently ridiculous. A Bad Idea in the grand tradition of Bad Ideas but at least we can be assured that nothing will come of it. I think what we have to accept, and this is something that the presenters of Formula 1 on the BBC consistently refute at every available juncture, is that Formula 1 is dying and that we should pull the plug.

Formula 1 is a relic of the time before oil shortages and climate change. As a spectacle it is hideously vulgar. This weekend is the most vulgar spectacle of them all: the Monaco Grands Prix. It's not even a race. No one can overtake on the track because it's too narrow and twisty. It's boredom incarnate to watch and it's ultimately just a thinly veiled advertisement for tax evasion. Formula 1 insists (and it can insist because it's a company run by a single octogenarian) that it moves with the times, and yet Monaco will always have a Grands Prix. It follows fashion in one breath while ignoring it with the next. And, like any attempt by an 80 year old man to be fashionable, its flirtations with it are usually misguided and always unpleasant to watch. Take the hybrid engines that we now have (and are apparently stuck with). That was an attempt to more the sport forward, yet it has backfired. The sport is now vastly more expensive to participate in and, unless you can afford one of the good engines made my Mercedes, you don't have a hope in hell of getting near the front of a race. And even if you did, you'd still lose to the Mercedes team because they don't just have the best engine, but they have a better version of that engine and a better car around it. This, we are told, is the price of progress.

Formula 1, we are told, is the pinnacle of motorsport. It is the testing ground for technology that will improve road cars of the future. It is the point, way high up in the clouds, from which progress in all areas automotive trickles down. And, you know what? I'd be fine with that. An anything-goes technological battle royale. With mad experimentation happening all the time, it would be crazy, but vividly entertaining, I have no doubt. But that's not what F1 is. It is the pinnacle of motorsport as decided upon by an 80 year old man. There are rules (thousands upon thousands of rules) and they're all in place to try and make sure this artificial playground in the sky is as level as possible, while also making sure that Mercedes still win almost every race. There has to be a clear hierarchy to the level playingfield. Maybe something Orwellian would do here. All playingfields are equal, just some are more equal than others? But let's face facts here. The most inconsistent component to an F1 car isn't the silly tyres that are designed to be awesome, then ok and then terrible at precise intervals... no, it's the driver. Why not take the drivers out of the equation all together? Make it a battle between algorithms! Whoever has the best algorithm wins! You wouldn't even have to stage a race. You could just decide each on on a computer and announce the victor there and then.

The thing is, Formula 1 must decide what it wants to be. And it must not be allowed to decide on something that is inherently self-contradictory. It can either be the pinnacle of automotive technology, or a level playingfield for the world's best drivers. The hybrid tech makes no sense to me. It's so complex that a lot of the control has been taken away from the driver and handled by a computer that in 1980 would have filled a whole row of terraced houses but today would fit into a fag packet. This means the drivers are not as involved and it's less a test of their driving skill as it is their ability to communicate with a computer. I'm surprised it still has a steering wheel. It doesn't need one. It's not attached to anything. Some of them even look like iPads. This does not inspire the viewing public. But here's the thing: you can't go backwards. You can't get rid of the hybrid engine and replace it with a vastly less fuel efficient screaming V8. You can't replace the iPad with a steering wheel. Nor can you replace run-off areas with concrete walls, tyre-walls with metal... you just can't.

It is widely understood that the 1970s was the most dangerous decade in F1, in rallying it was the 1980s with the Group B death machine; in touring cars it was the 1990s. Now, all of those sports have been sanitised to varying degrees. Now, almost no one ever dies. Rallying still exists, and people even go to watch it. It's not on TV in any way that you can really watch it but in the 80s more people watched rallying than F1. Rally driving looks like a huge amount of fun and I would love to try it. Formula 1 doesn't. And I don't. Formula 1 could ditch the razzle dazzle of multi-million pound sponsorships and VIP motorhomes and £20m-odd a year for Lewis Hamilton and go back to its roots. People would still watch it. I personally preferred it when it was tobacco dollars that had their names on the back of F1 cars, but that's just how I was raised. Better Marlboro than Bank of Santander any day.

Last year, an all electric formula was introduced. There was a brief flurry of interest when it was announced, a bit more when it got going and then nothing. I assume it's still going on, but I don't know. I don't know, because no one cares. If it was up to me, I'd let F1 as we know it die. It surely will when Bernie Ecclestone shuffles off this mortal coil. But knowing our luck, the twat will live to be a hundred and fifty. Maybe he's immortal. Maybe someone should check.

Thoughts on the Future and Other Issues

I'm writing this today without access to the internet. I mean, my phone can access the internet, but only to tell me why my home broadband is down. Ok, so it's something of a first-world problem I'll grant you, but bear with me because I have somewhere to go with this. Also, I should note, I am not particularly angry but I don't have a blog called, “I'm in a thoughtful mood right now,” so this'll have to do.

Also, my internet is back. Hmm...to continue or to give up? Shakespeare would have known what to do, but then again he didn't have the distractions of the internet to contend with so it's really no surprise that he got so much stuff done.

My girlfriend recently introduced me to Netflix. I had long avoided this service for a reason that could best be characterised by an instinctive mistrust of it. A gut feeling if you will. And it's not a fear of the New. I have a smartphone now, and while I loath its presence it has come in handy more than a handful of times. No, it's not that. Now I would never personally admit to having illegally downloaded episodes of TV shows from file-sharing sites, but from what I understand it's more or less possible to watch any episode of any TV show from pretty much any era within a day of its release. It's possible to watch American shows that aren't on over here. It's possible to watch whole series that are no longer on the air. From what I understand, its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. Netflix, on some level, promises to be something in between 'real TV' and illegal file-sharing. You can watch what they have on their service, and you can watch it immediately and without commercials. This last part is absolutely key to why I don't own a television. I hate commercials. Or adverts, as they ought to be known. For some reason I've lapsed into speaking, or at least writing, in American. I'm also splitting my infinitives, but that's a game of 'spot the poor grammar' that we can save for later.

So what's my problem? Why can't I get on board with Netflix? Well problem the first is that I do not like the user interface, or UI as I believe it is known. I don't like how items are bunched together in groups that I have to navigate through. I don't like scrolling through endless lists of things when I have no idea what is even on the list. If I don't know what I'm looking for, I'm almost certainly not going to find it like that. If you search for something that you know you want, then there arises the problem that I have with looking through someone's iPod at a party. They've plugged it into the speakers because they think their taste in music is superior, but they don't have anything I like and when I do find an artist that I like they only have one track because it's from some bullshit compilation, or worse, a mix album. Netflix is like that guy (almost always a guy). Also, I haven't been to a party in a long time.

Now, I believe that something like Netflix is almost certainly the Future of Television. People are already used to on-demand services and fewer and fewer of us are watching TV as it is aired. We like to save up a whole season and 'binge-watch' it. We've even been warned about how, much as with the other types of binge (drink, drugs, etc), this could be bad for us. But the trend shows no sign of abating. But the problem is that Netflix does not have most of my shows. And nor will it any time soon. And there arises a further problem once we unpack why this might be. We come back to commercials. Ad money pays for TV shows. Apart from the BBC which is publicly funded, at least for the time being, and networks in America such as HBO and Showtime which are funded by subscription. HBO won't let Netflix have their shows because they already have an on-demand service (that we can't watch in the UK) that is part of their subscription package. Lose that, lose their subscribers; lose them, no more HBO. And no more HBO would mean no more GoT. So no, let's not go there.

And what of commercials? Netflix does not interrupt its shows with five minutes of mind-numbing ads every ten minutes (have you seen TV in America? It's fucking insane!) so there is no ad revenue to be gained from it. Netflix makes its own shows now, too, but not enough for it to really qualify as a network and since people binge-watch its shows, any exposure of advertised product would be utterly impossible to quantify. You have a 24-episode season of a popular show on a mainstream network and you get, in an hour of TV, fifteen minutes of ad time. That's the same hour, every week. You can target your ads to key demographics because people know who watches what. Ad agencies have that information so they can buy the right slots for the right advertisers and everyone is happy. People who watch daytime TV get to find out about new brands of adult nappies or how to turn their gold into cash; children get to find out about new accessories for their toys, and everyone (by which I mean no-one) is happy.

So, how does this fit into Netflix and the Future of Television? I don't know. It's a fucking doozie. TV networks are beholden to their advertisers, so they need to keep people watching at the correct times on the correct days of the week. As it stands, this is the only way for advertisers to flog their wares to the target demographics. It wouldn't work on Netflix because there are no ads on Netflix. As soon as they start putting ads in Netflix, people will stop watching or subscribe to ever increasing levels of 'Premium' in order to avoid them. So Netflix is not the answer, because it's ultimately more like a subscription service, a la HBO, than it is anything else. And what of illegal downloading? Will Netflix make this a thing of the past? Unlikely. I'm sure it's swayed a few people away, lured them with House of Cards and other such fancies, but it lacks the extensive back-catalogue and the go-anywhere reach of the file-sharing sites. And file-sharing doesn't impact on advertisers because their shows go out, laden with ads, every week as normal. Consequently, file-sharing doesn't really impact on TV networks either. They can still churn out their derivative crap week after week, year after year because people who wear adult nappies don't know what a Pirate Bay is and wouldn't know what to do with it if they did. They're too worried about whether they just shat themselves or not. HBO's not worried, because they can probably see the big picture. If you follow illegal downloading to its natural conclusion, then everybody downloads illegally which means no one watches HBO. No one subscribes, they have no money; they have no money, there's not GoT. So illegal downloading isn't the answer either because it results in a paradox that will destroy us all and everything we love.

So what is the future of television? Notice how I removed the caps? I don't know. So the best advice I can give is from a piece of grafiti that I saw once:

Stop watching, start living.