Drugs

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Henry Jeffreys and Sarah Coghlan join Mary Wakefield to discuss Movember and other wackiness.” startat=1456.1] Listen [/audioplayer]Some men are growing facial hair for Movember but lots of people are just trying not to go bald. Male pattern baldness affects half of men over the age of 50, according to the British Association of Dermatologists. But that’s not all – half of women over the age of 65 are also grappling with hair loss. Usually, though, their hair thins, rather than disappearing quite so radically as it does in men. So what can both sexes do to preserve their crowning glory, or mitigate what they’ve lost? 1. See your

Lacking in pep? Looking for some extra zing as winter sets in? The Spectator recommends our energy conference on 1 December. Tickets are still available, sign up here. I don’t want this to become the ‘Tom Tells You To Get High’ blog, so this will be the last time I write about cannabis for awhile, I promise. Unless there’s something interesting in the news about it again. Anyway, pass the dutchie on the left-hand side and all that. The Daily Mail, the BBC and the Telegraph report that teenagers who smoke cannabis regularly do worse in their exams. Per the Mail: ‘The findings. . . add to a growing weight of evidence

Sometimes I read things that really get on my wick, and last week was one of those times. A new, ‘definitive’ 20-year study has ‘demolished the argument that the drug [cannabis] is safe’, according to the Daily Mail. Has it, though? There are various things wrong with that claim. One, no study is ‘definitive’; two, the research was not a ’20-year study’, but a review of other studies carried out over the last 20 years. There are lots other things wrong with the coverage, too, including the startlingly ridiculous claim that cannabis is ‘as addictive as heroin’. Even according to the research itself, less than one-tenth of people who try

‘Stand outside the fishmongers in 20 minutes and call this number,’ she said, ‘and I can arrange it.’ On Saturday evening I was scrubbed up for a big night out. I was wearing a black jacket and black jeans, which is overdressed for a night out in this seaside town. But Jupiter, said Shelley von Strunckel, was making a spectacular conjunction with Uranus, my ruler, lending me enormous powers of attraction. So I thought I might as well dress up for the occasion. After 20 minutes, I stood outside the fishmongers and called the number. Half a minute later an anonymous-looking door next to the shop opened inwards, and she

New powers to tackle the huge growth in ‘legal’ highs are set to be introduced. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, is said to be pushing for the most radical move, a blanket ban on all psychoactive substances. My heart sinks. Do those at the top of government really think that a blanket ban will solve the problem? The evidence doesn’t suggest so: prohibition very rarely reduces drug use. So why do they think that an even more extreme level of prohibition will help? New varieties of ‘legal’ high will be invented and put on sale on the internet. Many of these drugs are already imported from foreign websites,

Upon seeing the headline ‘Paracetamol does not help lower back pain’, I found myself emitting a small (well – actually quite a large) sigh. The image of queues of angry patients brandishing pitchforks and newspapers, demanding to know why I’ve been withholding ‘the good stuff’ and tricking them into taking pointless pills, came to my mind. I worry about health articles in the general press, particularly the transformation of clinical trials and evidence into headlines and soundbites; that the reader won’t necessarily read the whole article, or account for the limitations of the evidence, just taking home a simple one-liner: in this case, that paracetamol – arguably the most widely

Great God, Vegas is an awful place. I realised this the moment I arrived. My cab driver — who’d been perfectly agreeable en route from the airport — mistook my post-flight sluggishness for reluctance to give him a tip, and drove off angrily cursing me as I fumbled in my pockets. The line just for the check-in desk was about a mile long. Everyone was fat and drunk and dressed for the beach. Outside it was too hot: 105°F at 5 p.m. Inside, it was too cold from the relentless air-conditioning. Everywhere had the style and charm and tastefulness of Redditch. By day three I’d had enough. ‘Don’t stay in Vegas

Glastonbury weekend is upon us, and the bores are out in force. West London buzzes to the sound of hoorays buying drugs, and the army surplus stalls of Portobello Market are making a killing. Conversation in these parts has been reduced to a long in-joke. Ask what’s so funny and you’ll get the same response: ‘Yah, sorry darl – it’s a Glasto thing.’ The same is probably true in every posh postcode in Britain. I’ve never been to Glastonbury and probably never will – but God have I heard enough about it. ‘Veteran’ friends look at me as one would an idiot child, explaining the life-changing wonder that I’m missing.

It’s fashionable nowadays to claim that young people in Britain don’t know how to have a good time. There’s certainly plenty of evidence to suggest we’re avoiding the drugs our parents’ generation got their kicks from. Fraser Nelson discussed this in The Spectator last November, arguing that Britain’s youth were becoming more abstemious: ‘Marijuana, LSD, speed, cocaine — surveys show that every drug you can think of is plunging in popularity amongst the young. The proportion of under-20s who say they have taken drugs in the past month has halved over the last decade. Only two drugs are on the up and both are legal: Ritalin and Modafinil, stimulants that can power students through

In the first issue of Spectator Health, our cover piece is on the controversial issue of statins, arguably the most important ‘consumer’ medical issue facing people today. As Dr James LeFanu, our cover author, notes, GPs are eager to prescribe statins to anyone over 40 with even a slightly elevated cholesterol level. This is how Le Fanu first discovered  the problems with statins: ‘I first became aware of the scale of this hidden epidemic of apparent statin-induced symptoms after describing in my Telegraph column the experience of a man in his seventies whose general health following the successful repair of an aortic aneurysm had gradually deteriorated to a state (as he

 Gstaad ‘On ne touche pas une femme, même avec une fleur,’ says an old French dictum, one not always adhered to in the land of cheese, or anywhere else, for that matter. However hackneyed it may sound — don’t you hate it when a hack declares an interest in order to gain brownie points for honesty? — I nevertheless will declare one. I’ve been a friend of the Somerset family for about 50 years, starting with the father, David Beaufort, whom I met sailing around the Med back in 1963. He was then David Somerset and is now the Duke of Beaufort, and his four children are all close friends