Mark Speight’s London Landmark, Legalise Drugs And Libby Purves
“THE ROOF WHERE TV MARK KILLED HIMSELF,” announces the Star’s front-page headline.
The Star is excited to have found the “exact spot” where children’s TV presenter Mark Speight committed suicide.
And so it is that another London landmark is unveiled. And who would not want to visit the site, take pictures, perhaps paint a picture as Speight used to on the telly. Bring the kids and make a day out of it.
But the Star is not yet finished with Mr Speight RIP. Having told us that Mark chose to hang himself at Paddington “because it reminded him of romantic weekends away with fiancée Natasha Collins” (Michael Hutchence RIP) the paper talks of drugs.
The Star says that away from the TV studio Speight and Collins, who died scalded after taking vodka and cocaine, “indulged in a Kurt Cobain lifestyle” (Cobain was the Nirvana singer who shot himself.)
It’s a waste of life. Says the Star: “Now, hands up all of those who say we should legalise drugs.”
Well, hands up at Anorak Towers. But not hands up at the Times, where Libby Purves says:
Curse cocaine, curse the trade that feeds off poverty and crime, and above all curse the culture that sniggers about it and turns blind eyes for the sake of cool. While we’re about it, call down brimstone on cannabis, too, bringer of psychosis and – according to yesterday’s letter in The Times from the Pembrokeshire Coroner – ever more road deaths.
The question is not if drugs are bad for you but if they should be legalised.
Cocaine is illegal yet still Speight and Collins managed to get hold of it.
So what difference if cocaine is illegal or legal, other than that as a banned substance it stands more chance of being impure, of being associated with other crime as prices fluctuate wildly and of being something people don’t talk about or admit to taking unless they want to be rebellious?
Says Purves, “a paid-up child of the 1960s, reader of the Doors of Perception, flowers in the hair, all that”:
And while the drugs still are illegal, it is worth remembering that even if by lucky chance they don’t kill you or send you mad, they will certainly have killed someone else on their way to you – a kid shot on his bike, a peasant farmer, an enslaved Colombian “mule” dying in agony as a condomful of cocaine bursts in her stomach.
Actually, the skunk weed of which Purves speaks can be grown in a home farm by just about anyone. And the deaths are due to greed and the need to cultivate and move illegal drugs without detection. That’s a risky business.
Legalise drugs and save lives…
Posted: 15th, April 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Celebrities, Tabloids Comments (16) | TrackBack | Permalink
