Don't ignore the real evil. (Popstars and Drugs - What's your opinion?)

Member Name: Daisybelle

Product:	Popstars and Drugs - What's your opinion?
Date:	23/03/01 (207 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: There just enjoying themselves

Disadvantages: You don't want your kids copying them

C’mon, this category has got to be a joke, right? I mean to say, The Stones, Beatles, Hendrix, Joplin et al were all notoriously doing drugs before I was born. The seventies were full of hippies and progressive rockers strung out on acid, and punks’ pogoing to the tune of amphetamine. Liam confirmed what the nation thought it knew when he got caught with the wrong sort of Coke. Robbie Williams showed there’s life after Take That by being open about his roguish dabbling.

Maybe these kids have been put up to it by their managers to enhance their street cred. Sheesh, even Charlie Parker liked to whack up on his namesake, so what’s the big deal about a few lads skinning up and Eminem dropping E’s live on stage? The fact is, that drugs and music go back forever, early Shamans used whatever they could get their hands on to bob about to the beat of a bongo, so why does anyone bother getting excited nowadays?

Well there’s a difficult question. Could it possibly be, that sensationalist, lazy-arsed journalists swoop on things like this in delight, because they can be virtuous, holier than thou and more importantly, in the limelight for a day without having to write any new copy. After all, as I mentioned previously they’ve written the story to death already, so it’s an easy score (Pun intended).

It’s nice for the politicians too, to be able to shake their heads sadly about decency and the state of the nation. So what is the problem here - Bored young people moving in glitzy circles with more money than they know what to do with – It’s pretty odd that more of them aren’t getting caught. I mean, I’d be surprised if less than a third of the people that read this haven’t at least smoked a joint at some point, so why should we worry about whether music makers are doing the same?

It’s the influence on young kids that worries people really, isn’t
it. The thing is, they’re probably quite correct to be concerned. I’m a prime example. As a teenager, I’d no sooner got into music (Punk n, Ska) than I was trying drugs and alcohol. I’ve been lucky that I’ve never gone over the edge, but when I was 14 I started progressively dabbling with hash, grass, glue, petrol, tippex thinners, butane, magic mushrooms, acid, speed, ecstasy and cocaine. All washed down with plenty of booze and that’s a genuine recipe for disaster.

I hope that my little confession isn’t going to make people think – Loser, give me an NU, then never read my ops again. I’m really quite sensible and boring now. A lot of it was fun at the time, but a lot of it wasn’t. Coming down off bad acid is indescribably frightening when you’re 16 years old, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it. I don’t want to wallow in this, but would try to excuse myself by saying most of the time I did drugs because I was miserable. Of course, a lot of the time I was miserable because I did drugs, but hey, that’s hindsight for you.

Having said all that, I’d be a bit of a hypocrite to throw stones, wouldn’t I? But I will anyway. The stones shouldn’t be thrown at the musicians though, because they’re just doing what musicians and young people do. The media, corporations and multinationals are in many ways responsible, so don’t be fooled.

It’s very much in their interests to ensure that the younger, more susceptible members of society are fully plugged into consumerism, and over the last forty years they’ve done a fantastic job of convincing progressively younger people that they are, in fact, mini adults. They quite obviously aren’t though, or they wouldn’t be suckered into the cycle of adoring these talentless planks and buying their manufactured music to impress each other, but that’s what these calculati
ngly manipulative leeches feed off.

Successive governments have failed abysmally to attempt to curb this as well. Listening to them blaming the parents and suggesting curfews, punishment for parents’ etc. just makes me sick - I have wonderful parents but still had to find out for myself. They (HMG) need to put a spanner in the spokes of the consumerist wheel to provoke real change, but that would cost real money, and what’s more important, a few f**ked up young lives or bending to the demands of corporate finance? Oh go on Tony, I’m sure you’d like to glossily restate that it’s the parents fault instead of answering, wouldn’t you, you silver-tongued squirrel.

The government deserves a beating on several fronts. Their inability to discuss the drug issue sensibly, coupled with the pitiful resources they put into removing hard drugs from the country is difficult to understand. If drugs are readily available I think it’s unlikely their use is going to decrease, and young people with too much money are not going to lead the way on the governments behalf – rock n’ roll is based on rebellion, remember.

Legalising cannabis would take it out of the loop and allow resources to be concentrated on hard drugs. A lot of people counter-claim that cannabis leads to harder drugs anyway. They’re correct in my experience, but that’s because the same people you buy a quarter of hash from can sell you a gram of speed or a couple of E’s. If cannabis were purchased in shops the exposure to harder drugs would be removed. I never got into cannabis in a big way because it made me vomit more than occasionally, so I gave it up early on in my narcotic meanderings – just to make clear that I’m not in favour of legalising it as an interested party.

While I'm on the subject, most of the other drugs went the same way over time. I quickly discovered that solvents give y
ou cancer and brain damage, which put me off. Speed makes you horribly paranoid, acid can be terrifying, Cocaine has too much potential for addiction to be fun - but it takes a degree of sense to acknowledge this. Ecstasy was last to go, because the effects can be so good. The risk of severe reaction or death is quite small, but in the end I opted out for that reason, along with the fact that there's no way of knowing what you're buying - I was also starting to become a reasonably functional person by then. On balance I'm pretty lucky that I was able to renounce the undeniable pleasures of drugs (That, after all, is why people use them - It's the side effects that are bad), because now several of my peers are either dead or HIV+. Scary, eh.

Well that’s that. Sorry if it's been a bit of a self-indulgent rant, but I really wanted to get the fact that I used to be a dustbin for illicit pharmaceuticals off my chest, so I don’t need to tread delicately around those of you who’re fortunate enough to have had more sense. My extremely fuddy-duddy answer to the problem of starlets being a bad influence is that we need a national effort to see that children are treated more like children and drugs are dealt with in a comprehensive, rhetoric free fashion. But that isn’t going happen, is it?

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