The Director of Public Prosecutions has today published interim guidelines on prosecutions for assisted suicide in England and Wales - they’re available here (and Northern Ireland will get its own consultation process).  I’ve not had time to consider them in full, but there’s a number of things that stand out to me as worthy of comment. more…

The Department of Health today launced Exercise Prometheus, an

exercise for the social care sector to assess and develop its resilience planning in readiness for a second wave of the pandemic swine flu. Designed as an ‘off the shelf’ package primarily for use by local authorities in partnership with their local  providers of social care, the exercise has been developed by the Health Protection Agency from experience gained in previous pandemic influenza exercises.

I like this a lot - although I have to admit that the main attraction for me is the choice of “Prometheus” as the title.  It’s nice to see that someone in the DoH has a classical education and a nerdy obsession with etymology.

This is a very strange story that’s been picked up by the Daily Telegraph: a German Aids charity has been attacked for launching an advertising campaign - and a pretty sexually explicit one at that - in which people who spread HIV are presented as Hitler.  I’m not sure whether the target is people who have unprotected sex knowing that they’re HIV+, or just the sexually careless more generally.  Whatever: UK Aids charities aren’t happy:

“This advert has absolutely nothing to do with us or World AIDS Day campaigns in the UK, which we coordinate,” a spokeswoman for the National AIDS Trust said.

“Nor does it have anything to do with World AIDS Campaign who coordinate international campaigns and this year are focusing on human rights of people living with HIV.

“Of course there are many HIV organisations that run their own campaigns, however I think the advert is incredibly stigmatising to people living with HIV who already face much stigma and discrimination due to ignorance about the virus.

“On top of this it fails to provide any kind of actual prevention message (e.g. use a condom) and may deter people to come forward for testing.

“The advert is also inaccurate because in the UK thanks to treatment HIV is a manageable condition that does not necessary lead to AIDS.”

The Telegraph story has a link to the advert, which is also available via YouTube was available on YouTube before it was taken down for a terms of use violation (because it was vaguely pornographic, maybe?). Be warned, though: it’s not safe for work (at least, not if you share an office with people you don’t know well), and probably almost certainly not safe for kids either.  The actual campaign’s site is here; it’s less sexually explicit (apart from the advert, of course, which you can watch there if you really want), but you might want to turn down the speakers if you’re not into vaguely industrial music.

For what it’s worth, I kind of agree with the National AIDS Trust on this.  The implication the people with HIV are genocidal madmen manqué doesn’t seem to be quite right.  And, while I think that HIV/ Aids is one of the (many) areas in relation to which the media ought to stop being so prissy and prudish, I’m not sure that this is much of an improvement.  I don’t have any problem with people being shocked out of HIV complacency - the “Don’t Die of Ignorance” campaign was a hell of a jolt at the time, and right on the money; and little gratuitous nudity here and there adds to the gaity of nations (anyone who denies this being either a sexless robot or a liar).  But somehow the two don’t sit together all that well.  Maybe it’s just because I kind of suspect that the ad will mostly be watched by teenage boys who’ll simply not pay any attention to the at-any-rate facile slogan.  They’ll be looking elsewhere.

Ho hum.

Over on the Philosophy and Bioethics Blog I run a series called Academic Ease, posts aimed at making the life of academics easier/lazier. I thought today I might share one of those hints over here.

One of the curses of a modern academic is trying to ensure that the files on your various computers remain in sync, and inevitably you end up making a mistake and copying an older version of something on top of the new version (I still think chapter 6 of my thesis isn’t as good as the version I copied an older version over the top of, despite trying to restore the changes I had made).

more…

I found myself yesterday at the Wellcome Collection, one of my favourite museums in London and somewhere I visit reasonably frequently (not being too big, and conveniently located on the Euston Road, it’s perfect to fill those odd hours between the end of the hangover and the train back to Manchester).  The permanent exhibition has a couple of things that I could happily go and see again and again, but it’s the temporary ones that are the real draw - and the current one, Exquisite Bodies, is something I’d thoroughly recommend.

In the 19th century, despite the best efforts of body snatchers, the demand from medical schools for fresh cadavers far outstripped the supply. One solution to this gruesome problem came in the form of lifelike wax models. These models often took the form of alluring female figures that could be stripped and split into different sections. Other models were more macabre, showing the body ravaged by ’social diseases’ such as venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcohol and drug addiction.

It’s these waxworks on which the exhibition primarily focuses - and they are remarkable.  Joseph Towne’s models, made for teaching purposes at Guy’s hospital, are more than just educational tools: they’re works of art in their own right, the clear ancestors of work by Ron Mueck.  The exhibition has clear echoes, too, of Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds shows, and of the Spectacular Bodies show at the Hayward Gallery a few years ago.

Some of the works on show would be used as devices to educate not just medics, but also the general public, about their bodies - they would be shown at fairs, and used for public “dissections” (with men and women being admitted to separate shows, of course…).  Representations of the effects of VD seem to have been popular - and, let’s face it, we know why: there’s the same ghoulish attraction today.  Perhaps that’s why some of the exhibits are behind a curtain, and why the show’s not recommended for under-18s.

For myself, these worries seem to be unjustified.  There was a couple of children there with their parents yesterday, and there’s nothing that’d worry me were my hypothetical children to see it; as a poster advertising a “dissection” in Boston, Lincs, points out - to the enquiring mind, there should be no taboo; facts are facts are facts.  Besides: if it’s images of genitalia that you want, diseased or otherwise, my guess is that a serious-minded museum isn’t going to be your first port of call.  Under-18s with access to Google know that, too…

A little while ago, I mentioned Jamie Ross’ admirable Cancerous Capers blog.  Well - for all the best reasons - there won’t be any more updates.  His reason?  Having cancer was tedious enough; but with radiotherapy over, banging on about not having it would be even more tedious.  Assuming he gets the all-clear in a couple of months, there’ll be nothing more to add.

Good.  I wish him well.

It’s another one of those posts about drug policy, I’m aftaid: this week’s All in the Mind covered the Portuguese experiment with decriminalisation (about which I posted recently), and is available to listen for the next few days.  Depressingly, one of the contributors dropped a fairly broad hint - accurately, I think - that the UK would not be willing to make any comparable experiment, not because of any evidence against its advisability, but because of the cowardice of MPs and the bone-headedness of the commentariat (and electorate) to whom they’re in thrall - this is about 13 minutes in.  (On which notion, remember this?)  The same contributor also pointed out that the three main political parties have been forced by this reality to admit tacitly that criminalisation probably isn’t the best move, but cannot actually say that this is what they think clearly and publicly - hence they’re not only pushing a policy that plainly doesn’t work, but also one in which they really don’t believe.

By spooky synchronicity, over at Practical Ethics, Roger Crisp considers the recent pulling of Release’s “Nice People Take Drugs” adverts, and suggests that

[m]odern attitudes to drugs mirror those of advocates of temperance in the nineteenth century, who were moved by the terrible harms done to individuals, families, and communities by the abuse of alcohol. Few these days campaign for the prohibition of alcohol, and it is widely thought that a licensing system can mitigate a good deal of the harm of alcohol without unduly restricting the liberty of individuals to consume alcohol should they wish

- which seems to be on the money.  Noone who argues for a reform of the drug laws is saying that there should be a free-for-all: it’s just a matter of pointing out that humans like getting off their chops (as do other animals, apparently), and that we aren’t going to let small considerations like legality and wisdom get in the way, so we might as well grow up about it and come up with a policy that reflects this.

Meanwhile, Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science column addresses similar concerns through the lens of the US’ reaction to the WHO’s report on cocaine in the 1990s.  I don’t want to give away the plot, but it’s fair to say that the word “petulant” could be used with justice.

The Guardian has a feature in its “Ethical Living” feature called “You Ask, They Answer”.  This provides a forum in which readers can put questions to firms, people and so on.  This week, the subject was Neal’s Yard Remedies, purveyor of… um… “remedies” to the kind of people who go in for aromatherapy and homeopathy and the belief that natural is best because there are no CHEMICALS in nature. 

The grilling supplied by readers is impressive and heartening.  A lot of it is along the lines of “Why do you sell pointless crap and, in doing so, undermine the scientific method, spout bullshit, and potentially put people’s health in danger?”  (I’m simplifying a bit, but the gist’s about right.)

NYR’s response is… well, it isn’t.  They don’t seem to want to play any more, and won’t be answering.  Or maybe the answers have been provided but, in the best tradition of homeopathy, not in any detectable way.

Tristram Engelhardt is giving a lecture entitled “Moral Pluralism and the Crisis of Secular Bioethics: Why Orthodox Christian Bioethics has the Solution” at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Wesley House in Cambridge on the 3rd June.  It’s a provoking title - and my guess is that I’d probably disagree with just about every word after “Good evening”.  Notwithstanding this - in fact, because of it - I’d like to go, just because I’m fascinated to know how the claim in the talk’s title could be made to have even a chance of working.  But I can’t make it.

So: I have a request.  Is there a reader who is going who’d be willing to give me an account of the talk that I could post on the blog?  In fact, let’s go one better: Tristram - if you happen to be reading this - could you send me a copy of your lecture?  My email address’s in my profile.

In the meantime, I’ll satisfy myself with the irony of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies having its home in Wesley House.

I’ve spent the morning looking over the Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s consultation paper, A Comparison of the Cost-Effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs, which was published today.  The full report is available as a .pdf here (note the filesize - at 445k, it’s HUGE) - or there’s a summary on Transform’s blog, here.

The rather plain title of the document belies its content: it’s well worth a read, and is fairly fizzing with righteous indignation:

Current approaches ignore the basic finding that the policy of prohibition itself is the direct source of what is perceived as ‘the drug problem‘ - specifically the vast majority of drug-related crime - rather than drug use per se.  The Government has also repeatedly failed to acknowledge that prohibition is a policy choice, not a fixed feature of the policy landscape that must be worked within, or around.

The political context of these analytical shortcomings cannot be ignored. Whether it is an ideological commitment to prohibition, investment in populist drug war posturing, or fear of the domestic and international policy implications of questioning the status quo, there are clearly substantial obstacles to mainstream policy makers moving forward on this issue that have nothing to do with rational policy analysis and debate. (p8)

I’ve blogged on a similar theme before, and my natural instincts are to agree with a lot of Transform’s document.  Whether or not you agree with Transform, though, it does seem that there’s a good reason to take a long, hard look at current drugs policy.  Prohibition might, in the end, turn out to be the best policy.  But, at least at first glance, it doesn’t seem to work all that well, and there are probably probing questions that are worth asking.  We shouldn’t be accepting prohibition on faith.

UPDATE: Mark Easton’s BBC News blog has picked this up and analysed it in more depth.