If you’ve been following things lately here you’ll know I’ve been linking to a lot of the stuff coming out of the Vice UK/VBS.tv corner of the internet, for good reason.  It’s usually all good, thought provoking, eye-opening stuff that I think you’ll find interesting.  I say that because I figure if you come here to read my witterings you must be drawn to similar stuff as me but of course I could be wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time.

So, while I type this in bed, recovering from some sort of mutant cold/flu bug (not man-flu) I thought I’d tell you about The Vice Guide to Film.  As you’d expect, this is no regular film guide.  Shane Smith, the co-founder of Vice Magazine, explores some of the less-known film movements and national cinemas of the world.   Shane gives you, the audience, a chance to peek behind the closed doors of the film industries in countries such as Iran and North Korea where he hangs out with maverick film makers like Gaspar Noé and throws himself in at the deep end by acting in a Mexican film.

If you live in the UK you will be well aware of the recent controversy a legal high known as Mephedrone which has a rather bizarre street name of meow meow or M-Cat.  The reason it’s such a topical discussion is due to the untimely demise of 2 teenagers from Scunthorpe who had taken it.

The first I heard of the deaths was via a news broadcast on the radio on Tuesday evening but by Wednesday morning the media was in a frenzy on how this legal high was killing people, very much like they whipped up a storm when ecstasy first started doing the rounds.  One thing puzzled me and now slightly annoys me.  On Tuesday night the news reports I listened to all stated that the boys had taken mephedrone, gone out to a club and consumed copious quantities of alcohol and also take Methadone.

Now, you don’t need to be a genius to know that mixing any drug is never a good idea but those three? For crying out loud, methadone is a heroin substitute, hardly the sort of thing you would expect a couple of teenagers to want to take to finish off, quite literally, their Monday night rave?  However by Wednesday morning I found very little mention of the methadone use, just that the mephedrone was considered a contributing factor in their deaths and their parents are widely quoted as saying they only took the mephedrone because it was sold as a legal high… So why did these good boys take methadone, a controlled prescription drug?

Following the subject on the news I listened carefully to the words used by police relating to arrests made in connection with the deaths.  The suspects who had been arrested were arrested for supplying a controlled drug.  That’s not mephedrone which is widely available online (tho it is illegal to sell it for human consumption), methadone however IS a controlled drug.  Could it be that the methadone had more of an impact on the death of the boys?  If I were a betting man, which I am, I’d say it was more a contributing factor than the mephedrone.