We Hate The Kids part 2: you’re spoiling the game.

On the cover of every magazine, young women are reminded of what will happen if we lose control. We will become fat and powerless and unloved, grotesque, overconsuming, binging on all the drink and drugs and digestives we can get our sweaty, unladylike paws on. We’ll stumble out of taxis way past our bedtimes, flashing our knickerless crotches at unsuspecting paparazzi and returning home to grind what’s left of modern morals into a fine powder and stuff it up our disintegrating post-feminist nostrils.

If your media world consists of The Hate, News of the World, Grazia and Closer magazine, you could be forgiven for thinking the country was being overrun by baying packs of young women ‘gone wild,’ ‘rebel mums,’ on the lash and the combined pill, vomiting helplessly into the gutters of taste and decency.

And leading the pack, grown monstrous on fame and fags and pap-dashes, Amy Jade Winehouse, the nightmare reanimated corpse of a fifties housewife, all beehive and bad behavior, cackling drug-smoke and beat poetry, brandishing a bottle of vodka and several confused baby mice in her terrible crack-stained fingers.

The spectre of young women’s imagined loss of control as cipher for social degeneration is a long established and tediously familiar one. As early as 1712, the Spectator of April 29 made explicit links between a number of ‘addictive’ substances and their dangerous effects on the adolescent female mind, warning its ‘fair Readers to be in a particular manner careful how they meddle with Romances, Chocolate, Novels and the like Inflamers; which I look upon as very dangerous to be made use of during this Carnival of Nature’.* TheFWord has run a great series of posts this week about the Hate and others’ effusely graphic concern for the mental, physical and moral health of young women stumbling through the streets of London, Glasgow and Birmingham at 4am with the lads. From a recent article:

‘The shocking increase in drunken loutishness by 'ladettes' - up more than 50 per cent across the country overall - is being blamed by police leaders on the Government's controversial 24-hour licensing reforms.

They said the figures were no surprise given the increasingly commonplace scenes of young women staggering helplessly around town centres, or collapsed amid pools of vomit.’

And this is posited as a ball-quivering social ill despite the fact that, as stated in the very same report, drink-related violence has fallen by a third in the UK since 1995. ‘Ladettes’ cause panic with their thoughtless appropriation of the cultural norms of the patriarchy, so all the more reason to frame girlish bad behaviour as a terrifying and preventable ‘loss of control’, drunken or otherwise.

And that loss of control comes back to the body, time and time again. Where the archetypal representation of male juvenile delinquency is the stalking hoodie, the active and malignant bourgeois nightmare, the image of female degeneracy is just that – an image. It’s not how we behave, it’s how we present – the ‘scenes’ we present, the flesh on show, the ‘helpless staggering’.

'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves…' John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Self-control is presented as a physical property in just the same manner. The woman with perfect hair and make-up is in control. The dieting woman is in control. The woman with the gruelling exercise regime is in control, and maintaining that control is a constant struggle, since one violent, consuming fear in 21st century western culture seems to be the notion of western women really kicking loose, dumping that economy-serving physical self-martyrdom which represents successful womanhood for so many young women today. Not buying in. Spoiling the game.

Suddenly we’re not playing nicely anymore. The girls are staggering out of control, the boys seething with murderous intent. This is not, believe it or not, a permissive society, and to think otherwise is to entertain the notion that our parents' generation remained true to its ideals of tolerance and freedom. Britain and America are consumed by notions of shame, decorousness and a warped sexual economy desperate to bring young women, its key future consumer-base, to heel.

But we're spoiling the game. Spewing our non-conformity into the gutters of modern standards, the young women of this country, rich and poor but particularly poor, are rebelling in the traditional manner of any British underclass: we get ratarsed and we get rowdy. And what does that acheive, I hear you ask?

Well, it certainly scares the hell out of you. It's not much, but it's a start. In fact, tonight I might get the girls round for a night of loitering: we'll dye our hair pink like Lily and Amy, drink and get twisted and plan to end up with our skirts hitched under our armpits on a pavement in Shoreditch by midnight. If it frightens you, if it makes you sit up and think about what the hell happened to your dreams of a better world, then make mine a triple and down with standards.





*cited in Ballaster, Ros, ‘Addicted to Love? Women and/as Mass Culture,’ in Beyond the Pleasure Dome, Armstrong, Campbell & Armstrong (Sheffield, 1994).

Reefer madness: an interlude.

Shock, horror, disaster! Call the riot boys, summon the G8! Get your placards out! Cannabis causes brain damage!

Well, sort of. Ish. We think. But it's been days since the last teen stabbing and it's a slow news morning, so let's have a moral panic anyway. Cue headlines splashed with the latest drug trials that prove next to nothing about the effects of marijuana on the human brain, as if that were the point.

Let's take an example: alcohol is our nation's biggest drug problem. Now, in tests that have been carried out so far, medium-to-low-level use of cannabis - a few joints a week for a few years, say - has been shown to display no correlation with changes in brain composition and chemistry. Likewise, there has been little evidence to show that a few units of alcohol a week does any permanent damage to one's system.

But the most recent studies on THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, examine people who've been smoking five or more joints per day for upwards of ten years. That, my dears, is one significant fucking habit. It's the equivalent of major, long-term alcoholism. And both addictions, taken to extreme, cause brain damage along with a host of other symptoms. If you're at an equivalent stage of advanced alcoholism, your memory will be dodgy, your sleep patterns shot to hell and your stress levels all over the place, not to mention the fact that you've probably fried your liver and kidneys. Likewise, if you've been smoking five joints a day for ten years all by yourself, you may well have a slightly shrunken amygdala, but your biggest and most immediate problem is probably going to be lung damage.

So let's compare this to another damaging behavior: self-harm. If you carried out equivalent studies on groups of self harmers with a control group, one would probably find that the self-harmers as a whole displayed significantly higher levels of depression and medium- to high-level manic and schizophrenic symptoms than the non-self-harming teenagers. Does this mean that self-harm causes brain damage? Of course not.

Alcohol, self-harm, hard drug use, smoking, unsafe sex, smoking cannabis. All of these activities have been shown to be more prevalent amongst the depressed and emotionally disordered, and particularly amongst the depressed and emotionally disordered young. But they are aggravating symptoms, not the cause of the problem. It's only logical that chemical escapism, offered by these drugs and addictions in their extremes, is a resort likely to be most tempting to those who have most to escape from.

Which is not to say that it's a good idea to spend all of your time stoned. It's a very BAD idea to spend all of your time stoned, especially if you care at all about your lung capacity. But it's no worse for you than, say, mild alcoholism, and there's no reason for it to be criminalised when alcohol isn't. The effect of the continued criminalisation - and, now, of reclassification despite leading doctors' advice - of cannabis is simply to make users more financially and emotionally dependent on illegal drug-dealers, and less likely to seek help when , like young alcoholics, they recognise that their problems have superseded their control.

The trouble with the THC debate is that it tends to be polarised between subjective extremes. On the one hand, there are the hard-liners like Gordon Brown who just hate hippies, stoners and all their ilk; then there are parents understandably blinkered by fear for their children, and conservatives eager to jump on the latest bandwagon condemning the coping mechanisms of any social underclass. (Janine has a brilliant piece today commenting on the continued legality of alcohol at the Henley Regatta).

On the other hand, there are the producers of High Times and their mates, the great semi-washed, stoning masses who may or may not be otherwise useful members of society. Addicts frantic to defend their habit. Endless arguments over late-night spliffs that usually begin with a lazy generalised attack on NewLabour and end when someone starts quoting Bill Hicks. This isn't the whole story either.

The simple fact is that this country has a problem with drugs and drink: period. For Joe average dope fiend and Jill average booze hound, low-level use doesn't often present that much of a problem, particularly if you don't have a Facebook account. But there are heavy users, serious addicts, people who peddle away their lives to the drug, and they do have problems - problems that don't need in-depth psychiatric studies to demonstrate their urgency.

As a nation, we've fostered for several generations a serious weed habit that's growing to form a plausible second option to the nation's favourite hobby: boozing. We're a nation of alcoholics; we've been a nation of alcoholics for centuries. Alcohol is the drug of imperialism. It makes you rowdy, aggressive, navel-gazing, horny and insidious, strips you of humility and moderation, gives you a self-inflated sense of your own importance, psyches you up for a fuck and a fight. Alcohol is something the British have long internalised as a part of their cultural identity. Weed isn't. No stoner that we know of ever colonised Africa; violent stoners laying out gender hierarchies by beating their wives and children is another cultural norm that's yet to be identified. Weed saps away every hypercapitalist drive to improve oneself, to fight and conquer, to produce and to consume on ever more dizzying scales. Joint-in-hand, one is quite happy to spend another evening on the sofa chatting to your mates about the semiotics of 1980s cartoons. Not so the bottle. A drunken British public is something the system has come to accept, despite periodic media panics over the moral health of the nation, usually timed to coincede with periods of relative conservatism and economic slowdown.

We need to have an open and objective national conversation about weed. Marjunana is neither a panacaea nor about to tip us into an immediate cross-generational psychotic break, but it is a national health problem, a problem that needs to be understood and addressed. Increasing criminalisation, victimising the young and the mentally distressed and frantic media scaremongering add nothing useful to the TCH debate. Honest and balanced reportage in non-judgemental conversation with users, healthcare professionals and families alike might just take us one step closer to understanding the real scale of harm that this drug causes. So let's begin it.