Butterflies and Other Insects
If modern Britain found her soundtrack and her cargo cult in the sixties, she found her special vices too. In February 1967 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested at the latter’s Sussex manor house Redlands during a raid by police which uncovered amphetamines and dope. Richards and Jagger received jail sentences and heavy fines, though ended up serving no more than two days behind bars in Brixton before their appeals. The whole thing had been orchestrated by the News of the World and set off a heated national debate, with The Times leading the way to protest about the excessive sentencing. In a famous editorial, ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?’ its editor William Rees-Mogg questioned the severity of the sentence, calling it ‘as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts’. A month later, The Times carried a full-page advert which declared the law against marijuana ‘immoral in principle and unworkable in practice’. The sixty-five signatories included medical experts, Nobel laureate scientists, some politicians, the novelist Graham Greene and the Beatles. By then the Beatles had been introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan, and Paul McCartney was about to cause a further furore by admitting to taking LSD as well.
The purpose of the drugs had changed in the few years since the Beatles and others hit Hamburg. Once they had been used to keep performers awake, and then to calm them down after exhausting days or nights on the road. By the mid-sixties the agenda was rather more ambitious. LSD was a truth-bringer, allegedly opening minds to higher planes and brighter-coloured realities. This delusion was imported from the West Coast of America, though British writers had praised lysergic acid long before. Jeff Nuttall, a counter-culture writer of the time, declared that it was being launched as ‘something other than mere pleasure, as a ready window on the Zen eternal, as a short cut back to the organic life, religion and wonderment’.
Neither the raptures of the counter-culture and the druggy atmospherics of Beatles music during the years when they reinvented pop, nor even campaigners, not much different from those who had successfully backed the Jenkins reforms, would manage to shift the State’s hostility to such substances. Sex might be packaged and marketed and so might rock, but drugs were something else, the pleasure that would remain forbidden. Rock certainly helped extend the drugs culture. Heroin, the most dangerous example, spread steadily from a small and wealthy entertainment elite, through middle-class would-be rebels, until it finally emerged with gangs, dealers and all the paraphernalia of misery on council estates. In 1953 there were 290 known heroin addicts in Britain and by 1968 there were 2,780. These numbers are bound to be far below the true figure. On the same basis, the figure by the turn of the century was 25,000. Cannabis, a less dangerous and far more widely tolerated drug, was little used in the fifties outside small sub-cultures but by the mid-sixties there were between 2,000 and 3,000 arrests a year. The figure for 2000 was 97,000. Finally, while in the sixties cocaine was little used by comparison with other drugs, an academic survey suggested that by the new century, some 46,000 people in London alone were using the particularly dangerous version, crack cocaine. The sixties introduced mass drug use to Britain as the musical and hippy enthusiasts promoted it as a social and personal good. The authorities decided to destroy the drug culture as a social evil. Both were confounded. Nobody became wiser or more interesting through using heroin, LSD or dope, and the battle against drug use has been entirely lost. The victims began with a steady stream of performers and hangers-on who died from overdoses or drugs-related accidents and, more important by far, are the hundreds of thousands of poorer, less talented children who followed them after having far less fun.