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.

As someone who has taken a variety of drugs, legal and otherwise I am still astounded by the great number of people, you and old, who happily take pills, powders and potions with no idea what they are actually taking.  Rule No. 1 in my book is Know what you are putting into your body.  With the advent of the internet this is not difficult. Rule No.2 is Be very, very wary of mixing drugs.  I can’t say don’t mix drugs because I have done so myself but I only did so after I had taken things often enough to now what they did to my body and had a good idea what the effect would be.

Of course with all the scare stories in the press right now you can bet your bottom dollar that sales of mephedrone are rocketing as people clamour to buy it before it is banned, which it will if the British Press has it’s way.  The ignorance of the facts and scaremongering by those who seek to blame anything rather than the cause will only widen the appeal, having the exact opposite effect than originally planned.

Remember ecstasy?  It’s all just a case of history repeating.

VBS.TV have a new feature coming out on 12 February which is a love story of an altogether different kind.  Swansea Love Story is about the largely unreported heroin epidemic in South Wales. The film takes an intimate look at the lives of a gang of young addicts, their families and their surroundings. It also examines how unemployment, the breakdown of the family and the nature of love contribute to the dilemmas faced by a group of young people.

The film is co-directed and produced by Vice UK’s editor Andy Capper and Mike Leigh’s son, Leo and was filmed between Spring to Winter 2009 after Andy and Leo made contact with a gang of young addicts through the SANDS drugs agency.

Focussing on Amy & Cornelius, Lee & Leanne, Clint, Kristian and Wills; Andy and Leo following them around their daily lives as they struggle to get money to buy drugs, alcohol and for places to live. During the course of the film, characters get clean and relapse, they fall in and out of love and you get to meet their families and drugs workers.   You also get to meet their drug dealers as well as members of Swansea’s mining and docker community who talk about how the city has changed.  In place of industry there are bars, strip joints and cheap booze outlets and racial tension often spills over into public protest and violence.

Here’s a short trailer for the film which will be released over 6 days from 12 February 2010 only on VBS.TV

Like a lot of people here in the UK, I was in last minute panic mode because I had decided to leave doing my tax return until the last 10 days before the deadline for submission.  My brain knows that it would be so simple to just do all the paperwork at the end of each month so that submitting my return will be a breeze but does it listen to itself? Of course not!  So I had a marathon session with a years worth of receipts and bank statements and finally crunched the numbers, filed it on-line and bit the bullet and paid the tax man what I owed…ouch!  Anyway, I’ve decided I’m not going through all that again so it’s definitely going to be month by month from now on, I only have a few months left before it’s technically time to do it all again!

One of the things I’ve been really keen to blog about is the documentary that’s been running over on VBS.TV, The Vice Guide to Liberia.  Now, you may or may not know much about Liberia, I certainly didn’t know much.  I roughly knew that there was talk of child soldiers who took drugs and what I assumed was media hyped tales of human sacrifices.  One of the reasons Liberia is back in the news, in some places, is due to the ongoing trial of former Liberian President and accused war criminal Charles Taylor at The Hague.  So it seemed appropriate for VBS.TV to release their documentary on what life is really like out there and boy is it scary!

The documentary has been released in 8 episodes and is probably not for the squeamish.  To give you an example of what I mean there’s one scene where a kid of around 13 holds up the heart, freshly removed, from a Liberian General and proudly proclaims that he’s going to eat it.  Yes, this is real life!  They sacrifice innocents (young children) and drink their blood before going into battle, fired up after smoking heroin and cocaine.  Brixton and Croydon seem like nursery school in comparison!  Here’s a little taster of what you can expect.  It’s compelling viewing.

Now, I know that’s quite depressing but fear not, let me end on a slightly more upbeat note. I went along to Gloom Aid which was a charity night in aid of the Depression Alliance.  I swear I’ve never laughed as much as I did that night, after 5hrs of comedy and music my jaws were aching from laughing.  People who know Mr Omneo know he doesn’t laugh a lot so you can be sure it was funny!  I particularly loved Angelos Epithemiou who I had never heard of before, likewise Frisky and Mannish had be howling with laughter so get along and see both of them if you can!

I blame Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, they started it all with Sach-gate.  Ever since they were forced into publicly stating they were sorry, when they probably were not, the entire population, when it’s not consumed with following Jade Goody’s demise, is seeking out people who either are or are not apologising.  Carol Thatcher, the BBC demanded she apologise for using the term Golliwog.  After all the newspaper articles and on-line articles I read I still never found out who she was supposed to apologise to.  It seems she was just supposed to apologise to everyone, if it had been the person she actually referred to as a golliwog I would have understood, after all that is the person who was supposed to have slighted was it not?  Hmmm then again, she seemingly said, “He reminds me of …” so it’s not, technically the same as saying to his face, “YOU remind me of…” in which case an apology would make more sense.  A friend told me once that her friend said I reminded her of Fergal Sharkey, should I have insisted on a full and unreserved public apology for the offence I took at that comparison?? OK, so maybe it was meant as a compliment even so…

Then take Gordon Brown, no please, someone take him (boom-boom!)  He’s being lambasted for not apologising for the economic fuck up we are coasting through.  He doesn’t think he’s personally fucked up the world’s economic situation and therefore won’t apologise and so everyone keeps going on about this fucking apology or lack of, as if it would make any difference!  I can see it now, Gordo gets up and apologises and what would the press and the public say?  Why of course he doesn’t mean it!! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…

Then there is David Cameron… he makes me laugh!  He’s busy apologising for his failure to do something to stop the economic fuck up… quite what he thought he could have done is beyond me, the guy isn’t even in power so can’t do anything even if he wanted to but hey, he’s apologised so he’s a good guy, not like that nasty Gordo Brown who won’t apologise…  Interestingly tho, if you read any of the transcripts of the speech David gave in which he apologised you’ll find out he didn’t actually use the S word.  What he actually did was say sorry in a private briefing with a few favoured journalists who then reported back that Dave was sorry…

So anyway, sorry for this, sorry for that and damn you all to hell because I’m not sorry at all, will everyone stop expecting and issuing apologies.  No one believes you mean it when you do say it so why should they care when you don’t.  As I wrote this entry there was only one song on my mind to include and here it is, ladies and gentlemen I give you REM and The Apologist

During our time out we ‘befriended’ an American girl who went by the name of Melissa. Melissa was cute, very cute…very cute and very drunk! So drunk she thought I was 26, yes…that drunk! We had a short but frequent conversation which consisted of her asking me my name, asking me why everyone hated Americans, asking me what I thought of Obama and how she wanted to vote for him but is afraid that he won’t be able to deliver and therefore the trusty McCain might be a safer pair of hands. Then she would go back inside to chat to her friends and then upon returning, we’d have the exact same conversation. Her reaction was amusing when she asked me if I thought she was pretty and I replied, “Yeah, you’re okay” if she wasn’t so close to falling over I swear she would have stamped her foot. Then she almost fell over laughing when she twigged I was joking.

Anyway, the trigger point for this blog was mainly about our conversation about Obama. I was trying to encourage her to vote Obama, reasoning that it is better to try something new and radical and so what if it fails, at least it was tried and we might find it is an easy tweak to fix and return new and improved, like shampoo… And of course if it doesn’t fail, we bask in the glow of satisfaction because we had belief in our ability to pick the good guy, when everyone else was worried it might go wrong.

It’s that fear that replicates the same emotions whether its politics, a work promotion, flying, our approach to a relationship even singing karaoke! We worry and fret about all that can go wrong and talk ourselves out of doing what our instincts are telling us is the right thing to do. How many times you experienced yourself saying, “I should have listened to myself before!” I’ve done it loads of times, placing a bet on a horse for example and having a feeling for a rank outsider and then at the time of writing the betting slip I change to a safer bet only to watch my outsider romp home…If only!

But experience has taught me that by facing our fears we ultimately discover that what we feared most was statistically less likely to happen. After a couple of times you realise, “Shit! This wasn’t so bad after all” and suddenly that fear has been swept out into the street and lost in the wind. I hope Melissa votes Obama and I hope America votes for Obama and gives Change a Chance! To paraphrase, It’s better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all!

By the way, The Mentalists! were as good as ever even tho I think I offended Kim when she apologised for a songs alleged ‘rubbishness’ because it was new and as they played it more it would get better. I remarked, “Could it get any better?” which had a silent How? at the start of the sentence, this however was lost in the noise of the pub and she thought I was being critical.