Pubdate: Sun, 28 Aug 2016
Source: Mail on Sunday, The (UK)
Copyright: 2016 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/255
Author: Peter Hitchens

LOOK OUT! THEY'RE SNEAKING UP ON YOU WITH A CHEMICAL COSH

THE most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week's 
revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug 
troublesome teenagers in the 1960s  and we have only just found out. 
One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side 
effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles.

This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was 
given to boys at a Yorkshire 'Approved School' (a state-inspected 
home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were 
told of this experiment.

To qualify for the secret chemical cosh, you had to be 'impulsive, 
explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive', which for teenage 
boys is more or less a description of being alive and awake. Both 
schemes were endorsed by the Home Office's own in-house psychiatrist, 
Pamela Mason. How many other such horrors happened  are perhaps still 
happening  without us knowing?

I have long suspected that the Home Office  and much of our 
elite  are quite keen on doping the population. Despite making 
various militant noises over the years, this secretive department has 
quietly filleted the drug laws so that they are now the boneless 
wonder of the western world.

And for many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the 
epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars. I suspect the 
authorities hoped prisoners would be so stupefied that they would not 
riot, or escape in large numbers  things the Government greatly 
fears, and which have destroyed many Cabinet Ministers.

This policy is now going badly wrong, as cannabis is not in fact the 
peaceful drug some claim. Many of the drugs readily available in 
jail, such as the synthetic 'Spice', make their users more violent, not less.

The Government has also been quite happy to allow pharmaceutical 
companies to run huge experiments on adults and children with 
sketchily tested and unproven tablets that I would not give to a dog, 
even if I disliked it.

ASTONISHING numbers of people are now regularly taking mind-altering 
drugs  Ritalin for children who get bored in school, 
'antidepressants' for unhappy adults (and sometimes both together, as 
adults now have 'ADHD' and children are allegedly 'depressed'). 
Having wrongly feared that George Orwell's 1984 nightmare of drabness 
and surveillance would come true, we missed the much more accurate 
warning in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Huxley didn't just foresee the state rummaging about in the womb, the 
abolition of parents, the family and private life, the cheery 
disposal of the old and ill, and the distraction of a wage-slave 
population by flashy entertainment and sex.

He predicted the invention of an all-purpose happiness drug called 
'Soma'. It would keep the middle classes content, and could be used 
in spray form to quell riots by the poor. He said it would have 'all 
the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects... 
there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a 
gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, 
three for a dark eternity on the moon'.

They haven't actually invented it yet. Huxley's Soma was harmless, 
which today's drugs somehow never are. But they are working on it. 
And you might like to know the name of the brilliant, subtle, 
well-funded campaign to legalise marijuana launched almost half a 
century ago by the late Steve Abrams (I discussed it with him at 
length before he died). It was 'Soma'.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom