Party Vibe

some aspects of this are funny – but not so much the publicity over £10,000 of public money being lost – this sort of fiasco plays straight into the hands of the anti-drug types.

If I’d been working on that project as a manager I’d have bollocked whoever wrote that copy too – in fact it would never have got as far as press..

I appreciate what they tried to do and TBH think its a good idea having a balanced drug leaflet – but lets face it, recreational drug use still remains outside the law and advocating it is a dodgy area for any public funded body. furthermore putting these kind of “user-friendly” bits in a leaflet from an organisation the old bill are part of is tantamount to grassing up these new methods to them anyway!

They should have stuck to the facts, not tried to be “street” nor over alarmist, and put their leaflet out in the same matter of fact terms as something like NHS direct (this is after all a health issue) and that money could have been put to better use?

There is, surprisingly enough, loads of well-researched and fairly non-preachy drug info from official and respected sources and on British government websites; but a lot of it is buried deep in the site databases of the parent departments (not on sites such as frank etc which dumb it down!) and could do with being spread more openly but perhaps in such a way that middle england couldn’t immediately seize upon it as “pro-drug” info.

Even if the “kids” won’t read the leaflet, many promoters, party organisers and youth workers would have done..

Originally posted by globalloon

BTW, £10,000 is nothing to these people. In Devon the Primary Care Trust has overspent by £3 million. To redress the balance, they are cutting this amount off their butdget for ‘non-core’ mental health services. They define ‘non-core’ as drug and alcohol related mental health problems. 🙁

At the same time they have awarded themselves a pay increase at double the rate of inflation and doubled their pensions at a cost of about £4 million.:mad:

what you are seeing here (and the convoluted method in which these services are “delivered” to the end users) is capitalism at its most raw.

put quite bluntly, the value of a human life is being assessed in financial terms, and the healthcare managers with their university degrees, professional qualifications and their long hours worked in the office (despite the fact that many actually achieve nothing) have won this round of the battle (and a war this is, its actually costing lives at the frontline).

The saddest part of this is that knowing a few NHS managers in person, its clear that very few of these people deliberately set out to do stuff like this; most joined the Health Service with the idea of making people better whatever their circumstances.

Unfortunately wider society has become a lot less tolerant in the last few years, and those who do not support recreational substance use (both within and without the healthcare industry) certainly do not support any help being funded from the public purse. Quite simply, they would rather see these people die (and thus cease to be a burden on the NHS) – there are many middle englanders not shy to say this!

The darkest irony is that its increasingly the professional middle classes and their children who are suffering from mental and physical health problems caused by overuse of recreational substances often brought on by an attempt to “escape” from their mundane existences; yet they continually refuse to pay a pittance towards sorting out a problem of their own making..