Like many of the ascending stars before her who bore a similar fate, the tragic end to the brilliant but short-lived career of Amy Winehouse has polarised public opinion.
Predictably the social network sites have been littered with spontaneous commentary, some reflecting the views of the ignorant or else the plain cynical. All vying to be the first to find a timely joke amid the word search of lyrics on her album sleeves or else pronouncing to their cyber audience that the world is a better place without another addict in our midst. The desire for instant self-gratification in cyber space mirrors the instantaneous nature of the very drugs being described.
In contrast the more compassionate bloggers and social commentators seek meaning from the tragedy, how could this have happened, why wasn’t it prevented and how can we stop this happening again?
As Russell Brand rightly states in his tribute post to the singer, ‘Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today’.
The sad reality is stark, Amy Winehouse died at the flat where she lived in North London on her own, sometime during a humid Saturday afternoon. Nothing can now change that fact and her lyrics, brought to life by her unique intonation, take on an ethereal, haunting quality almost overnight.
Whilst the details have yet to be released by the coroner there is little doubt in the minds of the media and the general public that Amy died as a result of her spiralling substance use, be it drugs or alcohol. Few have responded with real surprise, her drug use was already a well known fact, the focus over recent years of the same derision and uncharitable humour that manifested in certain quarters of the internet during the immediate hours following her death.
Amy was cremated in the Jewish tradition at Golders Green Crematorium on the 26th July, an occasion attended by her grieving family who have found themselves at the centre of a maelstrom that few can struggle to comprehend.
Little more than five miles away from Golders Green Crematorium is the site of another cemetery. Built in the nineteenth century along the architectural lines of the fashionable Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Kensal Green Cemetery hosts the resting place of a number of notable figures, including the writer Willkie Collins.
Buried in the intervening years between the First and Second World War a story bearing similar characteristics to that of the late Amy WInehouse unfolded in a media moral panic that swept across the newspaper headlines. It is a story that ended in a quiet corner of Kensal Green Cemetery in 1922.
Freda Kempton was a dancer who lived in the twilight world of London’s burgeoning jazz scene. Sleeping through the daytime at her flat in Westbourne Grove, Freda would rise in the afternoon, sometimes spending time with her much loved nephew, before preparing herself for a night of dancing to the latest hot sounds that brought the Flapper Girls onto the floors of Tottenham Court Road’s dance clubs.
Other girls would remark on Freda’s distinctive dance style, which set her apart from her peers, whilst her landlady reported that the young dancer had a peculiar tendency to grind her teeth when she encountered her in the hallway returning tired from a night still reverberating from the distinctive beat of frenzied jazz rhythms.
Few of the people intimate with Freda were aware that her ability to stay up dancing all night and her telltale perpetual jaw movement were symptomatic of her excessive cocaine use.
Discovered as an alkaloid derivative of the coca erythroxylum plant, indigenous to South America and first isolated in 1859 by Albert Niemann of Gottingen University, cocaine was already well understood as a powerful stimulant of the central nervous system.
None other than Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had extolled its virtues as a panacea for common ills, including fatigue and various forms of neuroses.
However, by the time Freda Kempton stepped onto the dance floor of the notorious 43 Club on Gerrard Street, Soho, cocaine possession and use was already outlawed in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
One might be forgiven for assuming the rationale for legislating against drugs in the early part of the Twentieth Century was a direct result of the same health concerns that we harbor today, underpinned by the ‘Just Say No’ campaigns of the 1980s.
The truth is curiously more malevolent and is directly linked with the paternalism of the Edwardians as they struggled to come to terms with the shifting landscape of society and the total annihilation of the bloody First World War.
The newspapers of the time carried stories of soldiers returning from the front ‘crazed’ through consumption of ‘Forced March Tablets’ aimed at enabling fatigued soldiers to cover longer distances and arrive on the battlefield ready to fight, pills that contained cocaine as a key ingredient. At the same time reports appeared of Canadian soldiers openly selling cocaine in Leicester Square in a bid to supplement their service rations. Cocaine and other drugs were viewed suspiciously as imports into the United Kingdom, brought back by soldiers whose experiences were beyond the pail of comprehension and who now appeared alien to those who poured out onto the streets to welcome them home, or otherwise symbolic of the new world, a world which was moving at a faster pace and which threatened to corrupt Englishness with its slang terms and hedonistic jazz craze.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean citizens of the United States breakfasted to lurid newspaper tales of black men who had gone on a rampage of violence having first taken cocaine, as if the drug had somehow awakened an inherent physical threat to an unsuspecting white population.
Played out as a backdrop to the sensationalist journalism of this period was an encroaching reality, a reality that grated on the psyche of a paternalistic society: whilst the war had stolen the lives of men on a hitherto unprecedented scale it had also served to emancipate women in the same breath.
Drug overdoses such as those of Freda Kempton and Billie Carleton, a stage actress who had died several years earlier on the night of the Great Victory Ball in 1918, were sensational. It was revealed in the coroner’s report that Billie Carleton had died as a result of a cocaine overdose, though as Marek Kohn rightly points out in his excellent book ‘Dope Girls, The Birth of the British Drug Underground’, it was more likely the result of Veronal, a barbiturate supplied by her doctor. Notwithstanding, her death galvanized public anxiety, which became amplified through the media. The message was clear and simple, there were inherent dangers if society stood by and watched whilst women strayed from the safety of their homes and their responsibilities to their husbands and families. Both Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton were airbrushed by the media, their modernity and emancipation replaced by the imagery of a butterfly upon a wheel, too innocent to withstand the harsh reality of a world beyond the hearth.
Drug use became the common denominator by which society could articulate its fear of female emancipation, inter-race relationships and sexuality. The inquiries into the deaths of both Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton gravely pointed at their relationship with drugs, their independent lifestyles, relationships they had with men from different ethnic backgrounds. In the case of Billie Carleton her close friendship with Reginald DeVeulle, a gentleman whose occupation as a dress designer and his involvement in an earlier scandal involving a cross dressing party, was dredged up in court to highlight the dangers of fraternizing with men of dubious sexuality. Drug use was the common thread, knitting together the disparate fears and prejudices of a world that was changing beyond all recognition.
For Freda Kempton the inquiry highlighted her relationship with Brilliant Chang, a restaurateur in the West End of London. Freda had been acquainted with Chang in the weeks before her death and the newspapers revealed how she had purchased cocaine from Chang on the night she died. Chang was eventually deported from the United Kingdom, but not before the frenzied media had described in characteristic xenophobic visceral how Chang was purportedly ensnaring vulnerable white women into a life far from the ideals of their Victorian and Edwardian forbearers.
‘Following the verdict of deportation - 'some of the girls rushed to Chang, patted his back, and one, more daring than the rest, fondled the Chinaman's black, smooth hair and passed her fingers slowly through it' (Empire News, 1922).
Whilst legislation began to emerge on the heels of the public reaction into the deaths of Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton, it was not until Henry J Anslinger set up the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in America that the phenomenon of drug use became a more potent tool for political force.
Armed with a talent for manipulating the media, Anslinger set out on an unprecedented campaign for power through a well-orchestrated crusade to defend the morality of decent white Americans. By targeting as ‘dope dealers’ anyone suspected as communists, Mexican immigrants, the counter cultures emerging out of the jazz scene and anyone else who didn’t fit with the values of the white hegemony, Anslinger built his empire of narcotic enforcers.
Films warning the population at large that drugs, such as cannabis would turn sisters or daughters into morally questionable vamps hell bent on thrills, or else waifs cowering from the light in darkened bedsits, waiting in vain for their dealers to mercifully arrive with their next hit, captured the fears of Bible Belt America.
With titles such as ‘Reefer Madness’ and ‘The Cocaine Fiends’ few could question the effects of that first dabble and Anslinger, ever keen to promote the urgency of the Federal Bureau of Narcotic’s mission, would readily lend his weight to endorsing this genre of exploitation movie.
The profound impact of such propaganda has had an unprecedented impact in the years since, leading to the creation of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 and ultimately the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in the United Kingdom.
In the fortieth year since the Misuse of Drugs Act our knowledge of the complex relationship that drugs have with the neurological pathways in our brains has developed in a way that Anslinger could never have foreseen. We understand that drugs lock into key areas of our neurological system, often referred to as ‘pleasure circuits’. Simply put these complex neural messaging centres are essential to human survival, they guide our primal instincts, the need to eat, the desire to sleep, the fight and flight response and ultimately the need to procreate, thereby ensuring the continuation of the species. If the pharmacopeia of naturally and synthetically produced drugs light up these areas of the brain is it small wonder that they result in a compulsion to take more? The brain is sending an unadulterated message to the user, ‘I need heroin, crack, amphetamine to survive’.
Whilst learning in this field of science is advancing in an unprecedented way, our adjectives for people who use drugs remain firmly shackled to the moral panics of the early part of the twentieth century, a language still littered with prejudice and myth, influenced by the then media, the rise of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement and the powerhouses of the global enforcement administrations.
Take for example the term ‘junkie’ a term with its origins in the metal trade, scrap which heroin users sold to support their habit during the nineteen hundreds, not dissimilar to the term ‘tinkers’, used in the past to describe travelling communities.
Perhaps unwittingly language has perpetuated the dehumanizing of people who use drugs, ‘smack-head’, ‘crack-head’, ‘alcoholic’, ‘waster’, ‘druggie’ the list goes on and on, the staple of many an ice-breaker exercise in drug awareness training courses up and down the country.
We refer to people who use drugs as ‘unclean’ and observe from our pedestals their often repeated attempts to get ‘clean’, imagery not that far removed from the National Socialist Party’s descriptions of Jewish people in the 1930s. As a result drug users become something other, outsiders from the accepted conventions of society. They become, in the parlance of the forefathers of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, people who have a disease.
In much the same way, links between drug use and race are as inextricably linked today as they were at the time of Freda Kempton and Brilliant Chang. Take for example the overt racism of Anslinger’s rhetoric during the 1950s
'There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others’.
As repulsive as this quote may sound to the contemporary ear, it is worth noting that such links between the vulnerability of white women, immigration and drug use remains a staple of the modern media moral panic, a phenomenon as familiar today as in the days of Freda Kempton. The following provides a recent excerpt from a Judge’s summing up of a case involving a young black man, as reported in a London newspaper,
‘The case has everything about it that is un-English, drugs, knives, guns and the exploitation of whores’.
In his summing up of the case the newspaper went on to describe how the perpetrator, a young black man, had benefitted from growing up with adoptive white parents in a middle class ‘respectable mainly white area of Leeds’. Despite such ‘blessings’ the young man quickly found himself in trouble with the police.
In the United States today sentencing for possession of crack cocaine, by comparison with cocaine powder, carries considerably stiffer penalties. The net result is that poorer communities with higher proportions of black and Hispanic people are much more likely to end up in prison, whilst white middle class Americans who use powdered cocaine on a recreational night are far less likely.
So whilst Russell Brand concludes in his blog that ‘Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death’, it would appear that a person’s ethnic background will play a significant factor in this outcome.
In the immediate aftermath following the death of Amy Winehouse the tabloid newspapers scrabble for any information. Was her death the result of drugs, her heavy use of alcohol and the damage to her body resulting from this combination? Does society have a responsibility to protect and if so what is the mechanism by which this should happen?
Like a nation caught in the aftermath of some terrible natural disaster the default is to act instinctively, driven by a need for answers, the desire for someone or something to blame. Only then might we absolve ourselves from having failed in our paternalistic duty.
Perhaps it is time to take a step back, though, and pause before jumping on the back of the well-worn clichés and moral panics that have defined our relationship as a society to drug use over the last hundred years. As Russel Brand points out, isn’t it time we started to look at drugs as a health issue rather than a matter of criminal justice?
By taking drugs out of the criminal justice system and into the realms of health we instantly take control back from the networks of organized criminals, moving drugs into a tighter legislative framework.
As Transform, the charity campaigning for a review of drug law, states in its publication ‘After the War on Drugs’, ‘Only legalizing the most widely used drugs, subjecting them to strict quality assessment and making them available through controlled outlets will allow people to make intelligent choices’.
Isn’t it time to take back control of our health? And in a world outraged by the deceptions amidst elements of our media, who are prepared to stop at nothing to make headlines, isn’t it time we put a stop to the moral panics that keep millions of people worldwide trapped into a cycle of addiction?
For further information on the work of Transform please visit www.tdpf.org.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment