Baldy Blogger dies

RIP to the Baldy Blogger, the award-winning, brave Adrian Sudbury who died in his sleep last night.

Adrian did more than anyone to demonstrate the validity of blogging as an activity.

His online testimony of his illness helped to demystify the medicalese surrounding leukaemia and cancer in general.

And his selflessness in sharing his experiences, and explaining and contextualising them for the lay person, is some feat given that he was suffering a terminal illness.

He died at the age of 27. But he achieved more than most people do in three times long a life.

Baldy blogger, RIP.

Harney's not the only one should quit

Of course, Mary Harney should quit as Minister for Health with immediate effect. Her performance in the role has been little short of diabolical.

But it is worth recalling, as 97 more women fret about their cancer results, that there is a concept often cited by our Teflon Taoiseach known as collective cabinet responsibility.

They're all responsible for this mess we call a health service. All of them. Some of them are particularly responsible. Some of them, you could say, are more responsible than others.

On this list from the Department of Health, you can see that the two front runners to replace Bertie Ahern as Fianna Fail leader (and de facto Taoiseach of the nation) are BOTH former health ministers.

It is worth remembering how Micheal Martin, as health minister, commissioned over 200 reports which were not subsequently acted on while simultaneously robbing nursing home patients of up to €2 billion which the state had to pay back.

The senior civil servant in the Department said that he had told Micheal Martin about this scandal and had even given him the file in Martin's office. Martin denied this utterly. The file has never been found since, needless to say. Martin remains a cabinet minister. The civil servant moved sideways to the Higher Education Authority.

Brian Cowen, who charmingly called the Department of Health 'Angola', due to the amount of political landmines to be found underfoot, was also Minister for Health for three years. His time in Hawkins House is notable by its lack of anything notable. He didn't do a thing, tiptoeing around hoping no bombs went off until he could scamper for the safety of another Department.

If you were to believe some people, the Irish health system is permanently a wreck, unfixable and always was. This is nonsense.

A potted history of Irish health would run something like this:

The churches ran health provision forever, then the state, having missed the opportunity to create a National Health Service like the UK have, finally and belatedly intervened and the health boards were created in 1970.

Things remained okay for a while, then Charles Haughey slashed a quarter of all hospital beds, because we all had to tighten our belts.

Since then, those beds, that infrastructure, has never been replaced, while the population has exploded. In the Eighties, the scandals began. Organ retentions, blood infections, the lies, the spin. This was the period when the administrators came to power in health. But at least they were monitored by public representatives on the health boards.

When Mary Harney rationalised the health boards into the HSE, in itself not a bad idea, she made two massive errors. Firstly, she eradicated the ability of people to be elected to monitor the administrators. All of a sudden, no one was watching the watchmen.

Then she vowed that no jobs would be lost. The result was that we now have up to eight times as many health administrators as are needed, most aren't doing anything to justify their salaries, and none of them can be sacked.

This led directly to scandals varying from the millions upon millions spent on IT projects that either didn't work or didn't exist to the fact that neither Harney nor her overpaid mudguard Brendan Drumm even knew about the 97 more women whose cancer tests were wrong until yesterday.

By all means, by any means necessary, Mary Harney should quit with immediate effect. Her poodle Drumm, the €400,000 man, must also go.

But so should those who share collective cabinet responsibility for this unholy mess costing Irish lives. I'd start with Martin and Cowen, who have both directly contributed to the ongoing horror. But I wouldn't end there.

Ahern himself interfered in the decision of where to place the national children's hospital by making public statements, with the result that it went to the Mater, in his constituency, and his former employer.

Cullen ensured that Waterford would not get public radiotherapy but a privatised system instead. He even turned the sod on the site of their private hospital for them.

The entire cabinet share responsibility for the beleaguered state of our health service. If any one of them had a single shred of honour, they'd leave now.

Losing the war on drugs

If there ever was a war on drugs, I can only assume that it was fought in order to secure cheap and easy access to illegal drugs for all.

If they fought against the proliferation of 'recreational' drugs, then they have badly lost, a long time ago.

It doesn't matter how many 'Just Say No' campaigns you run, or how many Colombian fields you napalm when illegal drugs are now freely available in rural primary school classrooms, as I became aware of last week.

At that point, if not many years before, you've lost the war.

Anyhow, if there still is some sort of a war on drugs, then the battlefield is about to shift, at least in Britain, where leading medics and scientists have sat down and examined the potential negative effects of twenty different recreational drugs and ranked them for how much damage they cause.

The results aren't surprising to me, but no doubt they won't make a lot of anti-drugs campaigners very happy.

Top of the list? Why, heroin and cocaine of course. Now heroin you can understand. Nasty smelly junkies with their lives in a mess. Of course heroin is poison. But cocaine? Trendy, upmarket, middle class cocaine?

Surely some mistake. Let's look at how they conducted this 'survey':

* They asked a group of 29 consultant psychiatrists who specialise in addiction to rate the drugs in nine categories.
* Three of these related to physical harm, three to the likelihood of addiction and three to social harms such as healthcare costs.
* The team also extended the analysis to another group of 16 experts spanning several fields including chemistry, pharmacology, psychiatry, forensics, police and legal services.

So basically, it's about as comprehensive and scientific an examination as you can get. And yup, cocaine is one of the worst there is. Bad news for marketing executives, catwalk models and Ulster paramilitaries there.

But there's even worse news for the alcohol and tobacco industries. Alcohol was ranked as the fifth most dangerous commonly used recreational drug in Britain, and tobacco the ninth.

Let's just pause and ponder that for a moment. When you abuse alcohol, it is more dangerous than smoking. It is more dangerous than addiction to amphetamines. Think about that one next time you go binge-drinking on St Patrick's Day. It's not a pleasant realisation.

But what about that dangerous gateway drug cannabis and all its scarily potent skunk variations? What about ecstasy, the pill that kills?

They clocked in at 11th and 18th place respectively.

In other words, smoking fags is worse than smoking pot, and a good ecstasy pill is better for you than either.

So to summarise, two of the most dangerous drugs of abuse are currently legal, while much more benign substances are banned.

If the war on drugs had ever been really about saving lives and people's futures from drug dependency, then surely we lost it back in the early 20th century, when alcohol prohibition was lifted in America and cannabis and most other more benign substances were banned.

Then we lost it again when we permitted big tobacco to keep selling their cancersticks, despite discovering the health risks they cause and the fact that they are extremely addictive.

The experts in Britain are to be applauded for applying the rigours of the scientific approach to a subject that for too long has been placed beyond debate by those who sought to demonise drugs as a cause of all society's ills.

But they aren't telling the kids anything they didn't already know.

For every kid like Leah Betts who died on ecstasy, there are literally millions who didn't. Who danced their asses off and went home sweaty and happy.

For every time some pompous suit or judge has lectured about how cannabis is a gateway drug, the highway to dopefiend hell, there are literally millions of people who puffed a joint, munched a spacecake and listened to some music, rather than reaching for a heroin needle and a gun to mug someone with.

And everytime someone watched an older relative wheezing in the pulmonary ward of a hospital, their lungs rotted by carcinogenic tobacco, or fell victim to a raging drunk incapable of reason who beat them, raped them, robbed them or mowed them down in a car, those people realised what the really dangerous drugs are.

It's time to reclassify our opinions on drugs. Then reclassify the drugs themselves.

Tobacco should be banned. Being drunk should in itself carry a legal penalty. And cannabis, LSD and ecstasy ought to be legalised with the sort of caveats about heavy machinery and driving that currently apply to alcohol.

And that's not just my opinion. That's got the latest scientific research backing it up, which is more than the 'Just Say No' brigade have.