Straight dope on getting high

18 March 2015 - 02:10 By Andrew Donaldson
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Andrew Donaldson
Andrew Donaldson

If you're into crime. . .

The Dangerous Game by Mari Jungstedt (Doubleday) R220

It's puzzling that the fashion industry doesn't feature more often in murder mysteries. It's got all the ingredients: insane jealousies, outsized egos and money-grubbing galore. Jungstedt, one of Sweden's more successful crime writers, has tossed all that and more into this procedural featuring her regulars, detective Anders Knutas and journalist Johan Berg, as they investigate a spate of murders at a modelling agency. It's all good, pacy stuff - but perhaps its most gripping aspect is an account of a young model's battle with anorexia.

The issue

Losing your mind is just not what it used to be. Back in the old days, the recreational substances of choice were all illegal and our average party animals took their chances on the street buying cocaine, ecstasy or marijuana. These days, and thanks to the internet, there's a new generation of "legal highs", such as "miaow miaow" (more technically, mephedrone), which are apparently now the drugs of choice.

They're cooked up by rogue scientists in the East who sell the stuff by the bucketload through the post to consumers all over the world. Whenever the law catches on and bans a particular chemical compound, the manufacturers subtly change the formula and give it a similar-sounding name, and business continues - legally - as if nothing had happened.

It's an underworld that author Wensley Clarkson has explored in his forthcoming Legal Highs: Inside Secrets of the World's Newest and Deadliest Drugs (Quercus). The problem, Clarkson suggests, with this "legal" stuff is that, like the illegal substances, consumers don't know what they're putting into their bodies.

Given that no amount of prohibition is going to stop consumption, he argues the best way forward would be to regulate the game to protect users from toxicity.

Crash course

Shortly after Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, the archly conservative morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse made a speech calling on "ordinary women" in Britain to emulate the example of the new queen by putting their dedication into washing up and cooking. Many men no doubt agreed with her.

It's an incident that's detailed in Virginia Nicholson's amusingly caustic social history, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s (Viking). Nicholson is particularly outraged at the lack of sex education for girls. Typical advice from the self-help manuals of the day: "Now you're a woman, take care of your three 'Fs': your face, feet and fanny." I wonder what my mother, who worked as a nurse in the 1950s, would have made of that.

The bottom line

"For most of us, the feeling of a finger tracing our lips is delightful and arousing in a romantic setting with a lover but decidedly unerotic when it takes place in a doctor's office." - Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind by David J Linden (Viking)

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