Anticipatory "News"

A great example, this morning, of how far the crafts of News and Spin seem to have wandered, arm in arm, down a silly path.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7882708.stm

The story hitting the headlines this morning boils down to this:

The government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs "is expected" to recommend that Ecstasy should be downgraded from Class A to Class B. The Home Office has announced that it will reject any such recommendation.

In other words, one body has let it be known - either by leak or by Press Release - what its findings are, and the other has speculatively released word of what its reaction would be, if the first body were, indeed to say what it says it might. What a ridiculous game this is!

Of course, none of this bogus posturing will have any effect whatsoever on the propensity of British youth to get "off their face" on their chosen substance of a weekend.

I don't know which is more of a waste of time, this sort of cobblers or Police Officers handing out Fixed Penalty Notices and "Street Cautions" to lads with fragments of cannabis in their pockets.

Apparently, the anti-drugs strategy is working. Stand on the streets of Soho of an evening and see how apparent that seems!