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The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol ...

Newspapers are the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeing
I'm a lightweight; always have been. I didn't get properly drunk until I was 25, on a night out which culminated in a spectacular public vomiting in a Chinese restaurant. Ever wondered what the clatter of 60 pairs of chopsticks being simultaneously dropped in disgust might sound like? Don't ask me. I can't remember. I was too busy bitterly coughing what remained of my guts all over the carpet.
Not a big drinker, then. Like virtually every other member of my generation, I smoked dope throughout my early 20s. It prevented me from getting bored, but also prevented me from achieving much. When you're content to blow an entire fortnight basking on your sofa like a woozy sea lion, playing Super Bomberman, eating Minstrels and sniggering at Alastair Stewart's bombastic voiceover on Police Camera Action! there's not much impetus to push yourself. Marijuana detaches you from the world, like a big pause button. That was the worst thing about being stoned: there came an inevitable point every evening where you'd find yourself shuffling around a massively overlit local convenience store feeling alien and jittery or watching episodes of friends that seem to last nine hours rather than the bearable twenty minutes . No thanks.
These days I'm sickeningly lily-livered, by choice rather than necessity. I don't smoke, I drink only occasionally, and I'd sooner saw my own feet off than touch anything harder than a double espresso. I don't want to get out of my head: that's where I live.
In summary: if I've learned anything, it's that I don't much care for mood-altering substances. But I'm not afraid of them either. With one exception.
It's perhaps the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeing, yet it's freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this "awareness" is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they've even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it's called "a newspaper", although it's better known by one of its many "street names", such as "The Currant Bun" or "The Mail" or "The Guardian".
In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.
Tragically, widespread newspaper abuse has become so endemic, it has crippled the country's ability to conduct a sensible debate about the "war on drugs". The current screaming festival over "meow meow" or "M-Cat" or whatever else the actual users aren't calling it, is a textbook example. I have no idea how dangerous it is, but there seems to be a glaring lack of correlation between the threat it reportedly poses and the huge number of schoolkids reportedly taking it. Something doesn't add up. But we're treated to an hysterical campaign for a substance that will presumably – thanks to this – soon only be available via illegal, unregulated, more dangerous, means. If I was 15 years old, I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd be trying to buy "plant food" on the internet. And this time next year I'd be buying it in a pub toilet, cut with worming pills and costing four times as much.
Personally speaking, the worst substances I've ever encountered are nicotine and alcohol. Apart from the odd fond memory, the only good thing either really have going for them is their legality. If either had been outlawed I'd probably have drunk myself blind on cheap illegal moonshine or knifed you and your family in the eye to fund my cigarette habit.
But then I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to narcotics. Like I said, I'm a lightweight. I can absolutely guarantee my experience of drugs is far more limited than that of the average journalist: immeasurably so once you factor in alcohol. So presumably they know what they're talking about. It's hard to shake the notion half the users aren't trying to "escape the boredom of their lives": just praying for a brief holiday from society's unrelenting rubbish.

What are Charlie Brooker’s views on media hysteria and how does he persuade his audience to share them?

Woeful Wonder of Woolies - Article

That's the woeful wonder of Woolies

Only one high street store could have provided a cheap counterblast to the excesses of the boom
Giles Coren
The death of Woolworths has dealt a serious blow to those of us who had been quietly celebrating the onset of recession as a counterbalance to the recent years of greed and slickness, and had hoped that it would herald the arrival of a new austerity.
Secretly, I had been longing for a return to the stiff, cold, clip-voiced, monochromatic world of the early 1950s, or the Blitz, or the Great Depression or the three-day week section of the 1970s, or, indeed, any of the impoverished and perilous periods of our recent past, which by rights ought to have been depressing, relentless and smelly, but about which old people bang on endlessly with a tear in the eye, remembering mostly the songs and the shagging.
I was all set to crack out a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and a flat cap, grow a pencil moustache and belt my trousers around my armpits. I was looking forward to rubbish piled high in the streets, shoeless children in grey shorts playing cricket with shards of Spitfire in bombed-out cathedrals, family gatherings round the radio to hear optimistic prognostications from Gordon Brown (delivered from his nuclear bunker 10,000ft beneath the Peak District), three-mile walks to get the milk, scratchy woollen Home Guard fatigues, boiled horsemeat and other things that could, in later years, be funnelled willy-nilly into sentences beginning: “When I were a lad...”
Because to have filled my house with stuff from Woolworths would have been to embrace properly the deflated spirit of the age. It is the place where you can get absolutely everything, but in its crappest form. The same stuff as everywhere else, only worse.
If you didn't want to spend 40 quid on fairy lights for the Christmas tree, you could spend £4 on fairy lights from Woolies. They wouldn't actually light up, of course, and when you gave one of the bulbs a tweak to check it was screwed in properly you'd get all your teeth blown out of your head and your hair set on fire. You might spend the rest of Christmas in A&E, but the main thing was you were only down £4.
And if £9 seemed too much for a glass pie dish from John Lewis then you could get one from Woolies for £2.50 that would be smashed into a thousand pieces by the time you got it home on the bus (Woolworths customers always go home on the bus). And if it wasn't, then it would shatter as soon as you turned on the oven.
Woolworths was for people who had no money but still wanted to buy things: “Only £3 for this lidless thermos flask?” “A mere fiver for this AM-only radio with a battery flap that doesn't quite close?” Best of all, it was sold to you by a surly woman wearing a badly pilled, red polyester fleece who suspected you of shoplifting. Oh, the wonder of it.
I love the crapola Britain signified by Woolies, and was so hoping that we would be driven back to it. I thought in these hard times it would be all the new shops and services that would go - all the fancy foreign imports, the good coffee, the colourful food, the sexy clothes, the slick technology - and that Britain would return to those days of long and seemingly endless yore when all things British were rubbish, and we just didn't care.
But the closure of Woolies suggests that the traditional core values of what I fondly call “Crap Britain” are going to be lost, after all. Look at Little Chef. Only yesterday the relaunch by Heston Fancy-Pants Blumenthal was unveiled at Popham in Hampshire. It's all free-range eggs, green tea trifle and 72-hour braised ox-cheeks. And there was I, looking forward to embracing the grimness of the current climate by pulling off a wet dual carriageway to sit at a greasy table, swallowing slices of clumsily slaughtered factory pig washed down with bog-water coffee, then getting knifed by a trucker in the outside loo.
Woolies, Little Chef, what next? Ginsters? Panda Pops? Mr Whippy? It's all going. Almost all gone. The grey, damp, crappy underbelly of the ancient British consumer culture is being stripped away, and when this crash reaches its lowest point, who knows now what we will find there?
Gordon Brown tried this week to keep Woolworths afloat till Christmas. At first glance it might look very strange for a government to want to sustain a chain of shops that is worthy but broken, anachronistic, shabby, grim, depressing and with no viable future. But then he's only human. And I guess he knows just how it feels.


2) What techniques does Giles Coren use to interest his readers in the recent Woolworths story?

(Adjusted from Giles Coren's Article from the Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/giles_coren/article5254250.ece)