Drugs
Mary Whitehouse’s publishers also produced Gang Girls, The Degenerates and Bikers at War
The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish…
LA used to be fun – dope has just made it dull
Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that…
Drugs and drag queens in New York’s vanished clubland
In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for…
Acid reign
In 1988–9, British youth culture underwent the biggest revolution since the 1960s. The music was acid house, the drug: Ecstasy.…
A QC’s guide to cocaine
Drug-taking is less glamorous when you know how the trade really works
Vaping’s appeal isn’t about the nicotine. It’s about the gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
Gods and monsters
Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…
Onwards and downwards
This is a very upsetting book. The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond spent a year and a half living in low-income…
Confessions of a Saga lout
Baby boomers like me aren’t giving up irresponsible hedonism as we age. We’re just getting worse at it
Who killed murder?
The mystery of violent crime’s dramatic decline
A sex vampire on wheels
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
Doomed youth
It’s often said that there are only seven basic plots in literature. When it comes to biographies of rock stars…
Bottom Gere
The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes…
Poverty + anarchy + drug dollars = Mexico
You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas,…
Men behaving badly
Jamie Lloyd’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming is a pile of terrific and silly ideas. Mostly terrific. The action takes…
How ‘stress management’ can make your blood pressure soar
‘Stress management’ seems to be perpetually on the rise
Barometer
Family business Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Trudeau, was elected to his father’s old job as Prime Minister of Canada.…
The truth about me, Dave and the drugs
This week I woke up shocked to find myself on the front page of the Daily Mail. Apparently I’m the…
Marvellous, murderous city
When Stefan Zweig first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he was overwhelmed not only by the city’s magnificent…
The trip of a lifetime
Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became…
House in order
The shaming of Lord Sewel was a classic tabloid exposé. The fact that a peer of the realm (albeit one…
Barometer
Safe house Lord Sewel is unique in leaving the House of Lords in disgrace. Until the House of Lords Reform…
Caught on the net
Going online does not make you invisible – as the adulterers who used the hacked site Ashley Madison are discovering
Low life
Ninety-two readers (thank you!) sent accounts of their worst debacles on drink or drugs. I printed out each one and…
Elysian fields
Glastonbury is a model for radical policy reform, says Steve Hilton
