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What is prohibition really about?

As I am prone to do when I am trying to understand something, my first port of call is a dictionary. Prohibition is the act of prohibiting, or state of being prohibited. An order or decree that prohibits. To prohibit is to forbid an action or activity by authority or law. Essentially prohibition is control. Control means to exercise restraint or direction over, dominate, command, to hold in check, or curb.

I’d argue prohibitions function within our society is to control. On the face of it prohibition controls the manufacture, transportation, and sale of a prescribed set of substances, namely drugs. It also controls behaviour. Prohibition controls an individuals right to make a choice, good or bad, to take a certain action, that is take a specific drug.

A question comes to mind, why do they want to control what individuals do? At this point I think it is necessary to understand who I mean by “they”. They are the government, those people we elect to represent us. But if that is the case, why aren’t the views of the drug users represented? I presume the argument would come back that we live in a democracy, and the majority think drug taking is bad. But why? Why do we think drugs are bad, when every culture I can think of takes drugs in one form or another?

Putting that to one side, another question comes to mind. If these are the same people who allow individuals to choose to smoke and drink, why can’t that same people allow individuals to choose to take drugs. Rebuttals might sight the addictive nature of drugs. I don’t think the drugs that are currently prohibited are any more or less addictive than cigarettes or alcohol. Individuals get into just as much trouble with legal substances as they do with those prohibited. If the government can allow people to make a choice, take the risk of doing cigarettes or alcohol, why don’t they allow individuals to make the choice and take drugs? Logic dictates that they can, but they don’t, so why don’t they?

The answer I keep coming back to is that it is less about what people take, and more about the act of taking. Prohibition isn’t about the substance, prohibition is about controlling what people do. While I think this is an argument for the abolition of prohibition, it doesn’t answer the question, who actually controls the machine of prohibition?

A glimpse can perhaps be found in the preface of Richard Lawrence Miller’s Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State. “People convinced of their superiority (seek to) rescue a country threatened from within.”

What is prohibition really about? I think it’s about power. It’s a machine that allows the state to control its population.

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Paramour

Came across the word paramour today. Knew it. But never really understood it. Was interested by it’s meaning and etymology.

Par·a·mour.
1. An archaic word for beloved. Circa 1300. From the Old French. Literally. Through love.
2. A lover. Especially one in an adulterous relationship.
3. Now usually derogatory. A lover. Especially an adulterous woman.
4. A woman’s lover. Fancy man. Lover. A significant other to whom you are not related by marriage.
5. A woman who cohabits with an important man. Kept woman. Mistress. Fancy woman. An adulterous woman. A woman who has an ongoing extramarital sexual relationship with a man. Odalisque. A woman slave in a harem. Concubine. Courtesan. Doxy.

Interesting how it goes from the Old French. Through love. To doxy. A word I associate with the hard talking dialogue of Film Noir. That turns out is slang for a sexually promiscuous woman.

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Director seeks feature film script

I am confounded by an advert typical of those posted on mandy.com.

Director seeks feature film script, drama or thriller only. Low budget. Salary min wage. Apply to: Julian.

Why would anyone reply to an advert like this?

Would Julian reply to an advert like this?

Why would anyone work with someone who shows so little respect for your efforts as a writer?

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Collaboration adverts

Doing that thing again. I see adverts posted on mandy, read them with some interest, then discard them as a waste of time.

The problem is I keep going back for another look. I know they’ll be a waste of time, and I will achieve nothing by pursuing them, but I still find myself thinking about applying.

Has anyone ever got anything other than a headache by replying to “collaboration” adverts?

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Another rejection

Got another letter from the BBC Writers’ Room today. They returned The Singularity with a letter telling me they’ve “decided not be taking things further”. Not unexpected, I never expect anything else.

Still stings though.

I did get a brief critique. Apparently “it is worth noting that only a relatively small proportion of scripts we receive are given feedback”. Still haven’t had time to digest what they had to say, and probably won’t for a while. I need to rewrite Carrion before I take another look at The Singularity.

Onwards and upwards.

I wouldn’t be doing it if it were easy.

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Why aren’t there more riots?

A couple of days ago I flicked past Newsnight and heard the term “feral rich” for the first time. Two words you don’t often hear said together. They were referring to an article by Peter Oborne.

Open Democracy

Originally written for The Telegraph, I found a copy on Open Democracy.

Mr Oborne’s article highlights the “terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite”. He points to the scandal over politicians expenses. The hypocrisy of the government’s efficiency adviser Philip Green, sending a billion pound divided off shore.

While their actions may well have been within the law, they were not in Mr Oborne’s opinion, or mine, moral. Mr Oborne notes that “an almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up” among those at the top. He offers the example is Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who in the House Of Commons debate about the riots remarked “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

While Mr Oborne racks up a steady count of politicians all guilty of hypocrisy. Exposing the “get what you can” mentality that infects our society from top to bottom, and argues “that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”. I think you have to go back thirty years, to the government of Margaret Thatcher, to understand the true causes of what happened a couple of weeks ago.

Put simply you reap what you sow. Mrs Thatcher’s period in office set in motion a series of social changes that we are only now starting to pay for. Her premiership brought with it a social shift that positivity promoted an ethos of rampant self-interest. It is my opinion that the recent banking crisis was caused by individuals who began their careers while she was in office. Her ethos rose with them through the industry. It was her brand of greed that ultimately brought the banks down.

Prompted the massive bail outs, that has lead to the cuts, caused the unrest we saw in May, and ultimately exploded in recent lawlessness. The looters wanted what those at the top of the pyramid have, and got it, the way those at the top get it, by taking it.

I think Mrs Thatcher’s legacy roots deeper still. She changed the nature of our economy, from manufacturing to service. In doing so she condemned an entire generation of people to a life on benefits. Those people who now live the nightmare of joblessness, are exactly the same people who would have found work in manufacturing. Those failed by the education system, are now forced to compete in an employment market that is saturated with graduates. The irony is, with graduate unemployment now at its highest since the mid-nineties, even the most menial job is hard to get. What’s left for those without a university education? Minimum wage jobs that make befits seem like a pay cut?

Cutting benefits is not the solution. Creating jobs is the solution. Jobs that pay enough to give people a decent standard of living. How can that happen, when the cost of living is rising, and those at the top of the Sunday Times Rich List are able to increase their wealth by eighteen percent? It can’t. Because to create jobs you have to spend money, and this government is intent on deficit reduction. A deficit that should be paid off by those who caused the problem in the first place. The bankers put their interests about everyone else, and we’re paying the price. Not just in cuts, but in the social misery of poverty. Those at the bottom don’t have the luxury of walking away from their debts, why should the “feral rich” at the top?

The question shouldn’t be why did the riots happen? The question should be. Why aren’t there more riots?

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Snared by Facebook

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about not being on Facebook. A couple of days ago I created a profile.

Not sure why I took the plunge, but I’m still not one hundred percent sold on it. I think I like my privacy too much, and Facebook ultimately seems a little too intimate.

I think it might actually end up being a bit like my encounters with both LoveFilm and Blockbuster’s DVD postal services.

Their business model is built on the premise that they offer a more flexible renting solution. The reality is that you let some monkey in a warehouse choose the films you watch over the weekend.

Just as the LoveFilm’s of the world have found a way of providing a poorer service and making it seem like a benefit, Facebook promises the ability to connect to lots of people, some of them you might actually know. In return you are prompted to give away a massive chunk of your privacy.

Ultimately “the entry fee might not be worth it”.

You’ll know for sure what side of the line I fall if my Facebook profile suddenly disappears.

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Premise versus premise

Over the last few weeks I have read both Robert McKee’s Story and John Truby’s The Anatomy Of Story. While reading these two books I have also been working though some ideas for redraft of Carrion. Not sure if it is a good idea to try and assimilate both treaties in quick succession while still writing, but as paid work has cut my writing time in half, I feel the need to keep pounding the keys, or lose whatever momentum I have trained into myself.

Prompted by what I have read, I started to think about the premise of Carrion. Truby assert that the premise “is your story stated in one sentence. It is the simplest combination of characters and plot and typically consists of some event that starts the action, some sense of the main character, and some sense of the outcome of the story.” On the other hand McKee asserts that the premise is simply “an open ended question: What would happen if… ?” For example. “What would happen if a shark swam into a beach resort and devoured a vacationer? JAWS.”

What Truby calls premise, McKee calls the controlling idea. “A controlling idea may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.” What McKee calls the controlling idea Truby calls the designing principle. “The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole. It is the internal logic of the story, what make the parts hang together organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”

While both notions of premise make sense, Truby’s version sounds to me like the logline, and seems too detailed to be what McKee describes as “the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story.” If Truby is right when he says “if your premise is weak, there is nothing you can do to save the story” I need to seriously rethink the foundations of Carrion.

When I first started work on Carrion. The initial inspiration came from an idea that they, the government, the powers of prohibition, genetically engineered insects to eat drugs. The whole script was written from that starting point. Characters, plot, dialogue, I now realise were built on shaky foundations. With insights I gained reading Truby, I now realise that drug eating insects was too nebulous an idea, and lacks any notion of what’s at stake in the story. With some work, and the help of McKee, I have come to another “what if” question, what if the war on drugs escalates into civil war?

According to Truby this is still not strong enough, and needs to be expanded to include the event that starts the action, some sense of the main character, and some sense of the outcome of the story. While I still have the character of Carrion’s previous draft, I know this draft has a different outcome. What it is I don’t know yet, but I do know I have a lot more work to do.

The thing I’ve realised while writing this is that while both Truby and McKee offer invaluable insights into the craft of screenwriting, neither has the definitive answer, but they are both useful as tools to clarify my own understanding.

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Fear of facebook

I’m not on facebook. People keep telling me I should create a profile but I’ve resisted. There’s something about the whole thing that makes me very uncomfortable.

I know it’s a completely irrational prejudice, fuelled by something I read, claiming that among other things, an investment company set up by the CIA owns shares. A bunch of multinationals like Coca Cola also have shares.

Facebook is essentially a massive marketing tool, allowing companies to harvest information about its patrons, and target them with direct marketing, or use the information as free market research, or keep tabs on them in some Big Brother kind of way.

Putting the paranoid conspiracy theory away for a second, what company doesn’t harvest information about individuals likes and dislikes. I posted on twitter recently about my frustrations with EDF Energy. I’d been overcharged, and wanted a refund. EDF contacted me through twitter offering to help. I didn’t reply, I didn’t trust that it was EDF, so ignored their repeated advances.

This highlights something for me. While Twitter is a very public arena it feels very private, I hadn’t given much thought to the notion that a company like EDF would be monitoring the twitter timeline. Truthfully I felt a little stalked, and I think that’s another of the things that makes me feel uncomfortable with facebook.

While facebook is a great tool for connecting people, it also gives access to those who you would rather not have in your life. We all have them, that work colleague you’d rather not talk to, or the long lost friend who is better staying lost.

Social networking sites like facebook allow the kind of personal access I’m reluctant to give to anyone but those closest to me. At some point I know I am going to have to hand them my details, join the club, for professional reasons as much as anything, but for now I think I will stay clear of the microscopic spotlight that facebook exposes you to.

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Drugs as a tool

I’ve been reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the intricacies of giving meaning to their story.

For those who haven’t read the book, Mr. Truby approaches story as if it were a body, and dissects it as if her were doing an autopsy. He has a chapter on technology (tools). In it he observes that within a story “tools are an extension of the human form, taking a simple capability and magnifying its power”. Why do I mention this? Because while reading Truby’s book, I have also been working through some ideas for major redraft of Carrion.

One of the ideas at the centre of Carrion is that insects have been genetically engineered to eat drugs. Within my story they are physical manifestation of prohibition. A tool that takes the ruthless unrelenting enforcement of prohibition to its merciless conclusion, the physical destruction of anyone who takes drugs. With that in mind, I started to think about drugs as a tool, and asked the question, what kind of tool are drugs?

This quickly becomes more complicated than you think. It’s all too easy to view drugs simply a tool to alter your mood. I’ve written before about the link I see between drugs and prohibition. In a previous post I outlined a paradigm that uses drug prohibition as a tool for social control.

Why they won’t stop the war on drugs

Certainly that is one function drugs play within society, but it’s not the only one. I read a paper recently by Tammy L Anderson that points to A Cultural-Identity Theory Of Drug Abuse. The paper differentiates between drug use and abuse. “The theory proposes that drug abuse is an outcome of a drug-related identity change process featuring three micro-level (personal marginalization, ego identity discomfort, and lost control in defining an identity), two mesolevel (social marginalization and identification with a drug subcultural group), and three macro-level (economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and popular culture) concepts.”

Without getting into the intricacies of a theory that describes twelve hypothetical relationships that lead to drug abuse. It does point to another way drugs are used. As a tool of cultural identity. From my own experiences I can say there is certainly an identification between those have used drugs, and those who have not. You only have to look at the way those who drink alcohol view those who do not to see a shared identity works.

Conversely in this instance, because alcohol is a socially acceptable drug, those who do not drink are the ones viewed with hostility. This binary polarisation of “us” and “them” points to the dynamics at work when looking at the way illicit drugs are viewed. Cultural-identity theory argues that drug abuse is a consequence of a multitude of marginalizing experiences. “The greater the number of marginalizing experiences… the greater the risk for drug abuse.”

If that is the case, and drug abuse is a consequence of an accumulation of negative experiences both personal and social, drugs become a consequence of negative forces that define those who eventually abuse drugs, and not the other way round. This perhaps accounts for the vicious way in which the sober world treats drug users. There’s a sense of guilt felt by the sober world, a guilt that recognises drug use is not simply people being somehow weak willed, a guilt that can not be solved, and ultimately elicits hostility.

There is a scene in David Mamet’s film The Spanish Prisoner that explains the psychological origins of human cruelty.

Steve Martin explains the psychological origins of human cruelty in “The Spanish Prisoner”

The key line comes at the end of Steve Martin’s speech, when Campbell Scott asks him why his employers will start to act cruelly toward him, Martin replies. “To suppress their guilt.”

For me, and certainly within the context of Carrion, I’m starting to see drugs as a tool of guilt, and motivating forces for both protagonist and his antagonist.