Blog off

Update: you need to look at Big Smoke and my personal site for my latest work. Thanks.

A few eagle-eyed regular readers have pointed out to me that I haven't blogged in a while. I know. In fact there has been a three-week gap. That's the longest gap there has ever been in this blog's entire history - including the time I had pneumonia - and every high and low of my life over the last four and a bit years.

Well, there's a reason for the break. I'm switching the blog off, but wanted to give myself a little thinking time before telling everyone in case I was going to change my mind a couple of days later.

To be precise I'm archiving the old girl. This is the very last post and in a couple of weeks I'll turn off the comments - and that will be that.


It's been fun but I'm moving on. I've set up a Jim Jepps website where you can keep up with any interesting bits of news, articles I've written and projects I'm supporting. I've got a few things in the pipeline so watch that space!

If there are two thoughts I'd like to leave with I suppose it's these. First, that the internet can be a civilised place if people treat it in the same way that they treat their own day to day 'meatspace' lives. That means the same self-regulation and the same willingness to not put up with the kind of behaviour that at work or among friends would be unthinkable but appears to be commonplace in some places on the net.

I think writing this blog has proved to me at least that it is possible to disagree with someone on the net without demonising them and to be critical of your friends without falling out.

The second is that the best of the web is where people think, not where people are fastest with the news. The blogosphere is full of people blogwarring with each other, jumping up to comment on the news the moment it comes out and knee jerking their politics just so they get in first. That's pretty unhealthy and it's led to parts of the blogosphere mirroring the worst parts of the 24-hour media rather than enhancing it or, even better, holding it to account.

I think we need to be more conscious of the risks of becoming an echo-chamber caught in a self-referential circle.

Twitter allows us to, for example, name a Tory MP arrested for sexual assault within an hour of it happening. What it does not seem to allow for is to not out that person until we know whether any charges will actually be brought. In our daily lives gossip is seen as a bad thing, and gossips are people we are generally wary of - much of social media encourages us to unthinkingly exhibit behaviour that most of us would regard as reprehensible in other circumstances.

Why else would a perfectly decent person serving jury duty think it's perfectly acceptable to contact someone whose case they've heard about a co-defendant? That's something I'm sure she would never have dreamed of doing before the ubiquity of social media but, in reality, is just as wrong as walking up to them face to face and discussing the, as yet unfinished, case.

I'm just thinking aloud really; it's hardly as if I've personally come a cropper of any of these tendencies nor have they been a theme of this blog particularly, but I am concerned at how the medium is distorting how we do politics and what we think is decent behaviour. The fact that these new technologies seem to by-pass that area of the brain where our integrity lies is a tendency I firmly believe we can counter if we work together to do so.

At least that's the way it seems to me.

Returning to the subject of signing off though, it's been an educative experience. I first set the blog up as a purely temporary measure as I wanted to test whether I could write a post a day for a month, but at the end of the month it was oh so easy to carry on. And here we are. It turns out that once you have momentum it's easier than you'd think.

Thanks to all the lefty, greeny, decent people who've been following The Daily (Maybe) for the last few years. Do stay in touch and good luck with the future - we're all going to need it.

Time to end the war on drugs

This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act which heralded the beginning of the war on drugs (a term first used by Nixon in June 1971). This war has done irreparable harm to millions and yet still, it appears, drugs won. It's time to negotiate an honourable surrender and accept we are well and truly occupied.

The ongoing policy treats a public health issue as primarily a law and order issue has not just failed, in many cases we can see that it has made the problems associated with drug use worse.

In the US the continuing anti-drug user escalation means that states are introducing mandatory drug testing for welfare claimants. Don't worry though all you deficit watchers, the claimant has to pay for the test themselves in order to apply for benefits, and if they fail they are simply cut off.

Drug addicts without any means of support - what could go wrong?

Part of the oddness of the whole debate though is that public opinion seems remarkably resilient. Despite the fact that you're unlikely to see an article in the press or a BBC broadcast advocating the repeal of the drugs laws - and God help any politician that suggests such a thing - there is still a large body of opinion that our current approach simply is not working despite the fact this argument is never articulated in the media or by our leading political figures.

A campaign to get the government to rethink was launched today but it was met with a swift rebuff. A government spokesman said:

"We have no intention of liberalising our drugs laws. Drugs are illegal because they are harmful – they destroy lives and cause untold misery to families and communities. Those caught in the cycle of dependency must be supported to live drug-free lives, but giving people a green light to possess drugs through decriminalisation is clearly not the answer".

But where is the evidence that drug laws protect people from harm rather than simply criminalise a wide spread activity? The campaign's launch letter states that;

"In 2001 Portugal decriminalised the possession of all drugs and, despite sensationalist predictions to the contrary, this has led to a decrease in the number of young people using illicit drugs, an overall reduction in the number of people using drugs problematically, fewer drug related deaths, and an increase in people accessing treatment voluntarily, things we would all like to see happen in the UK. Whilst there are other factors to take into account, it is clear from the Portuguese experience, and from other jurisdictions, that the decriminalisation of drug possession and use does not lead to an increase in drug use or related harms."

The complete decriminalisation of drugs would bring drug use into the open, allowing users to seek help when they need it, allowing public information to be actually useful rather than censorious crap, ensuring that those drugs in circulation are safe and well regulated and cutting out organised crime from this lucrative industry.

It may even begin to allow the "did not inhalers" in our political establishment to be a little more honest about their own drug histories and make stunning admissions like "I used to smoke weed because I enjoyed it." Wouldn't that be a thing?

Wednesday's Selection

I dearly wish computers were less helpful. Right now my spellcheck is in French and I have absolutely no idea how to change it. How does it know I'm in France and why does it think I've suddenly become a native speaker. Anyway, it's useless to me now as very little of what I type is in the proper French, so my computer thinks it's all wrong.

• When the Westborough Baptist church are being picketted by the KKK the mind starts to boggle.
• Georgian London has an interesting post on riots past.
• A little while ago Earwicga wrote an interesting post on how gender specific work in international development can sometimes be less than worthless.
• The London Assembly has warned that the focus on frontline policing may actually reduce their capacity. I think this goes for all public services frankly.
• Damascus gay girl writes on the Syrian government's offer of amnesty for her and other dissidents, as long as they behave from now on.
• Reuters reports that the US congress may vote on withdrawing US troops from Libya. A scheduled vote has been delayed. "Democrat Dennis Kucinich, the resolution's disappointed sponsor, suggested the vote was dropped because it might have passed". The Republicans say they may yet bring it back to the table though.