Apologies for the silence, which was in part due to a glorious whirlwind of a visit to Dublin, where I spent a while with Ireland’s answer to Oprah, Gerry Ryan. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Gerry’s morning show on RTE2 so I know that pretty much anything goes. And I was […]
UK taxpayers fund effective HIV prevention programmes for drug users in other countries, but not at home. Perhaps that’s because UK jails are better organised than those in, say Kyrgyzstan, so there’s not that many drugs inside? Uh, no. UK prisoners fork out around 100 million quid a year for drugs, according to the former […]
There’s more smack than dope in British jails, according to newly-published data (pdf) from the Ministry of Justice. In random testing, 4.2% of prisoners tested positive for opiates, 4% for cannabis. In a couple of jails, heroin use was up at 16%. Some people say that prisoners are switching to heroin because it doesn’t hang […]
Britain today published it’s new drug strategy (pdf here or here). It’s actually pretty sensible, but it will probably be howled at by footsoldiers on both sides of the War On Drugs. On the one hand, the government plans to cut benefits (welfare payments) for addicts who refuse to turn up to treatment programmes. That […]
Wandering around the villages of East Java on the last day of 2007, I came across a bunch of kids preparing for their New Year’s Eve festivities. No champagne for me, then…