Amateur Brain Surgery

The Nurse doesn’t get out much. But she devours the TV news avidly from her cell. So it grabbed her attention when a senior UK police officer recently recommended we make all drugs legal and face the consequences, rather than spending obscene amounts criminalising drug users as well as the abusers.

Millions of ordinary law-abiding folk hold down jobs, pay massive mortgages and rear nice, polite children. But at weekends they indulge in a marvellous array of class A and B drugs to no ill effect. It’s only the addicts - the abusers - that cause problems. Nor are these happy Weekend Warriors throwing up Phal on the street, showing their tits to passers by, falling down, stealing or fighting. That’s the binge drinkers. So The Nurse felt his recommendation made sense.

Old habits die hard. Retrieving her laboratory test log book and special pen from their hiding place under her toilet bucket, The Nurse decided to test the theory. Her plan: to offer unlimited prison moonshine to half her fellow inmates (thus simulating an all night Stella-scarfing session) while giving the other half free access to a generous pile of ecstasy pills.

Both segments were given basic instruction about how to consume the stimulants with maximum safety:

• drinkers - don’t drink too much. Stop before you get drunk. Alternate with water if it’s a long night

• drug users - don’t drink water unless you’re dancing. If you’re dancing, drink water

The results:
DRINKERS - eight hours after the experiment began The Nurse observed the drinkers, all too drunk to remember the ’stop before you get drunk’ safety guideline. This segment was variously breaking knives out of the prison kitchen, hanging the guards, vomiting in each others’ beds and engaging in unfortunate ‘beer goggle’ fuelled incidents (too raw to detail). Arguing irrationally with their best friends. Texting out for extra large kebabs. Smashing up the television room, bleeding, roaring karaoke and calling each other cunts. In all, the drink made inmates boring, ugly and stupid. Or more boring, ugly and stupid.

DRUGGIES - eight hours in The Nurse observed the pilled-up segment sensibly abiding by the safety guidelines despite having decimated the huge pile of doo-dahs. They appeared busy and productive: holding impromptu therapy sessions, talking about their childhoods, making new friends, sitting in the exercise yard marvelling at the night sky, holding hands with the screws and cleaning their cells. A group had pushed back the tables and set up a mini-rave in the dining hall. The most serious effects appeared to be excessive gurning and the loss of an occasional conversational thread.

The Nurse acknowledges that addicts have a terrible time of it. They deserve to have lots of money spent on them to help them get better. But happy, harmless drug users should be left to get on with it. They cause no harm to society and very little to themselves. Alcohol seems to be the only fart at the Bar Mitzvah and it’s a particularly stinky one.

To complete her research, The Nurse went in search of statistics. In London alone, during 2000, alcohol-related property and social damage cost the taxpayer an horrific £4.6 billion (www.number10.gov.uk). No doubt it will be a lot more in 2007, with binge drinking still on the up. But she couldn’t find any stats for ecstasy-related damage. Nada.

Alcoholol related deaths in the UK during 2005 numbered 8,386 (www.statistics.gov.uk). Again, this has probably increased significantly since then. Whereas on average there are 40 UK ecstasy-related deaths per year and just 26 reported across the whole of Europe during ‘04 (www.guardian.co.uk).

The Nurse’s conclusions are based on the premise that there’s no valid moral argument against taking drugs, per se. After all, what’s morally wrong with feeling good? Common sense shows that while deaths by drug abuse are tragic, humans have always liked to take stimulants and they always will. The Nurse’s point relates to the relative dangers and social costs of Es - and similar - versus booze.

As such, the statistics speak for themselves. The Nurse rests her case.