THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Our beautiful, new and sophisticated youth culture is striding ever onward and upward, reaching the very highest peaks of attainment. For example, a friend of mine went recently to a local supermarket, where he found himself in need of the lavatories. These, he found, were lit by a dim blue light. A notice on the walls apologised for the inconvenience caused — no pun intended, presumably, since supermarkets are not usually resorts of fun and wit — but the blue lighting was necessitated by the misconduct of certain members of the esteemed public.
My friend's curiosity piqued, he went to the manager to ask what kind of misconduct it was that was discouraged or prevented by blue lighting. Most sexual alternatives — one dares not call them perversions these days — are, after all, perfectly practicable in dim blue lighting. 'Injecting drugs,' said the manager. 'They can't find their veins in blue lighting.'
What a retrograde attitude! What
bigotry! It's harm reduction we go in for these days, not condemnation. We should therefore be making it easier, not more difficult, for addicts to inject themselves. The dim blue lighting might drive the addicts to use the femoral veins in their groin, and some of them will miss and get the artery instead, with gangrenous consequences. And whose fault will that be, I ask you? The supermarket's, of course. Could callousness go further?
Let us turn our attention, however, from the supermarket to that other pillar of modern British popular culture, the prison. There I see prisoners every day who have injected in their groins and even in their necks. The philosophical person (such as 1) cannot help but reflect upon the melancholy circumstance that while the great 18th-century prison reformer, John Howard, began his famous book, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons, with remarks upon how prisoners often entered prisons fit, strong and healthy, but within a short time were reduced to mere shadows of what they were, it has fallen to our enlightened century for the opposite to be true: prisoners enter the prisons in a state of near-starvation and depart from incarceration fit, strong and healthy. How many times have I seen young men return to prison as scarecrows who left prison only three months before as fine specimens? What would John Howard say of a society in which freedom was for so many a concentration camp? But let us not labour in minute particulars — the General Good, after all, is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.
On the day I learnt of the dim blue lights in the supermarket lavatories, I saw a patient in the prison who had said that he wanted to hang himself, so outraged was he at the injustice being done to him. I asked him of what it consisted, this injustice. 'They say I robbed an old lady on the street,' And did you?"No, I never. When I rob someone, I put my hands up to it.' Were there any witnesses other than the woman herself?' There was this man who says he saw me done it. But that's ridiculous."Why?"Well, I've burgled his house, haven't I?"What's that got to do with it?"Well, as far as I'm concerned, once you've burgled a man's house, he's discredited as a witness.'
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