Drugs

Since 2011, the Silk Road has infuriated governments the world over by allowing digital pirates to operate above the law. It has been – in effect – an eBay for Afghani heroin, cocaine and all manner of illegal goods. Hosted in the virtual tunnels of the ‘Deep Web’, transactions are made in BitCoin and up until yesterday, it was doing roughly 60,000 a day. But now, it seems, the cops have swooped. Yesterday afternoon Ross William Ulbricht, known by the pseudonym ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ was arrested – on charge of being the owner. Drugs were the site’s bread and butter, making up 70 percent of sales. But you could buy

Another summer, another reminder of the consequences of our drug laws: A man has been arrested in connection with the death of an 18-year-old who had taken fake ecstasy tablets. The woman died in Alexandria, West Dunbartonshire, on Tuesday. She and three friends had taken green tablets with a Rolex Crown logo on them. Similar tablets have been linked to the deaths of six other people in the west of Scotland in the past two months. Of course, no-one needs to purchase ecstasy and primary responsibility for these horrid deaths lies with the people who manufactured these pills. Nevertheless, unscrupulous (and stupid) suppliers are not the only culpable actors in this sorry

The ‘fake-sheik’ has pulled off another classic sting operation, worthy of his time at the News of the World. Mazher Mahmood can add Tulisa Contostavlos, the ‘musician’ turned X-Factor judge, to his hit list today after she was arrested ‘by appointment’ earlier this afternoon following allegations of drug dealing made in The Sun on Sunday. Tulisa and a 35-year-old man are being held in custody in central London. As the summer breeze blows begins to away the chill caused by Sir Brian Leveson, it seems that newspapers are increasingly willing to take risks. This will come as blow for our grubbier celebrities and politicians, who have had an easy ride for the last

In this week’s issue of the Spectator, Leo McKinstry argues that Britain is dropping all its most harmful habits. Here is an excerpt: ‘According to the pessimistic narrative of national decline, Britain is now drowning in the effluence of moral collapse. We inhabit a country supposedly awash with vice and decadence. If we aren’t playing poker or bingo on our computer screens, then we are watching pornography. Our streets are said to be dominated by betting shops and lap-dancing clubs, by drug addicts and binge-drinkers. Yet for all its hold on the popular imagination, the idea of worsening degeneracy in modern Britain is not backed up by the evidence. Our society is

Gripped by his habitual despair, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend in 1872, ‘I am appalled at the state of society. I’m filled with the sadness that must have affected the Romans of the 4th century. I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth.’ Warming to his bleak scatological theme, he continued, ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’ Many commentators would feel that exactly the same words could be applied to modern Britain. According to the pessimistic narrative of national decline, Britain is now drowning in

Does this advert ring a bell? It showed a handsome young man hitting a cricket ball far into the distance. It appeared on the Tube last spring. The tagline read: ‘How far can you hit it, Rory?’ The advert said that the young man was Rory Hamilton-Brown, captain of Surrey County Cricket Club. It urged commuters to watch his team play. It suggested glamour and clamour; neither of which is associated with stolid county cricket. Something was afoot. Hamilton-Brown had been appointed three years earlier, aged 22, to rejuvenate Surrey, a once great club wandering in the wilderness. He was the youngest captain in the country, and one of the

Should we be doing more or less to help to tackle drug addiction? And does addiction even exist? Are addicts just selfish people? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens and the Daily Telegraph’s Damian Thompson enter into a riveting and lively debate on this very matter (1:06). Prompted by Russell Brand’s article in this week’s Spectator magazine, the pair find some common ground but disagree wholly on the very nature of addiction. It gets heated, with Thompson calling Hitchens’ ‘sanctimony’ ‘suffocating’. Here’s a snippet: listen to ‘Hitchens vs. Thompson on addiction, 6 Mar 13’ on Audioboo http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07032013.m4a Download | iTunes | RSS UPDATE: Peter Hitchens has blogged about his

In this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens takes on the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson about Russell Brand, drugs, and whether addiction even exists. Click here to listen.  The last time I thought about taking heroin was yesterday. I had received ‘an inconvenient truth’ from a beautiful woman. It wasn’t about climate change (I’m not that ecologically switched on). She told me she was pregnant and it wasn’t mine. I had to take immediate action. I put Morrissey on in my car and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills my misery burgeoned. Soon I could no longer see where I ended and the pain

Shadow Defra minister Mary Creagh told MPs today about her fears that a carcinogenic drug commonly used as an anti-inflammatory in horses could have entered the human food chain. Speaking in the Commons, she said: ‘I am in receipt of evidence showing that several horses slaughtered in UK abattoirs last year tested positive for phenylbutazone, or bute, a drug which causes cancer in humans and is banned from the human food chain. It is possible that those animals entered the human food chain.’ As I wrote on Coffee House on Tuesday, it was Defra’s decision last autumn to abolish the National Equine Database which has got us into this mess. Previously, the

The news, reported by the New York Times, that Lance Armstrong is preparing to confess his sins reminds me of this passage from the Book of Daniel: Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Remember, however, that golden-sunned afternoon in Paris in the summer of 2005. On the Champs-Elysees Lance Armstrong, the undisputed titan of his era, stands

In one sense, I have some sympathy for Lance Armstrong. He has been hounded by the American anti-doping agency USADA who, like other federal agencies, are remorseless foes. Once they have their hooks in you they never let go. The usefulness of their investigations is another matter. Even so, Armstrong’s declaration that enough is enough and that he will no longer bother to defend himself against doping charges will doubtless be seen as a capitulation. Most people, I suspect, will take his silence as an admission of guilt. So it really wasn’t just about the bike, was it? Apparently not. The evidence against Armstrong may still – as far as