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VICE - Valium Is Killing Scotland's Drug Taking Poor

Albion

Albion

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One filthy grey evening in February, I meet Jack and his friends in a dank bar near The Cowgate. Strewn with broken glass and smattered with the acrid remnants of stomach bile, red cabbage and whatever else made up that particular meal before it found its way on to the street, this delightful area of Edinburgh is known to locals as "The Street of Shame". That's maybe because, despite being very pleasant during the day, come evening it's flooded by hordes of lads on tour, bedraggled students in fancy dress and cackling hen parties, who swarm towards the cheap bars on this side of the city, leaving streams of vomit running in their wake.

Jack begins by telling me about the evils of methadone and the legend of how it came to Britain, care of German chemists, American soldiers and Adolf Hitler himself. In the last days of the Second World War, Hitler relied on amphetamine to stay awake and, according to urban legend, then took methadone to help him sleep. Jack explains that there's an anagram hidden in the word methadone: "the mad one". We both laugh. Then we search for anagrams in the word Valium, but there are none. After methadone, Valium is the drug that is killing Scotland, contributing to, or responsible for, 32 percent of drug-related deaths in 2011.
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Full article: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/valium-is-killing-scotlands-poorest-men

I haven't finished reading yet, but it seems to be a good article. Vice's serious drugs articles tend to be alright.

Also a little insight into phenazepam's impact:

“It wasn’t Valium, but it looked like Valium, smelled like Valium and tasted like Valium,” Steve says, describing a scare involving the similar, but cruder Russian tranquiliser Phenazepam. Until last year, the drug was legal to import, linked to serious hospitalisations and believed by some agencies to be used to mimic blue Valium tablets. “This stuff was like, a hundred times stronger. These guys thought: ‘I can take 20 of these pills no problem,’ but they weren’t coming down for two weeks. They were walking about in a bubble. It became very, very dangerous for a while.”
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Someone's making a lot of money from renewing these guys' valium prescriptions...Rotten stuff.
 
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What's wrong with having a Valium script? Mine helps me loads.
 
You're not really abusing 'em though, Treac. Can see how it makes some folk uncomfortable when people are basically given scripts simply to abuse recreationally. I'd still say it's ultimately safer for all if they are given what they want/need rather than having to rely on unreliable black/grey market sources. But do accept that can be a hard sell to convince Tommy Taxpayer the benefits of.
 
Is it just me who reached the end of that article and wondered what the point was, aside from cheap scaremongering?

It's this kind of demonisation of benzos that makes it more difficult for those who would truly benefit from being prescribed them.

Not only that, but the article makes no mention whatsoever of alcohol's prominent role in most 'diazepam deaths', although admittedly it mentions the connection with methadone use, indicating that diazepam abuse is mostly prevalent among those already receiving opioid maintenance treatment (and thereby actually reinforces anti-prohibitionist arguments, though that's another story). Furthermore, the article admits that substistution of diazepam for phenazepam by unscrupulous dealers is a major part of the 'problem' which the article, lest we forget, fails to clearly identify.

Sheer sensationalist rubbish of the kind that barrel-scraping journos routinely churn out. Though this bit of comedy made it almost worthwhile:

Clueless Vice Journo said:
Valium – or diazepam, as it's technically called in Scotland
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So what do they call it in Guatemala, then, chumpo? :D

Of course benzos are potentially harmful. Hardly news though, is it?

Tabloid hack journalism. I'm no fan of Vice (The Face for the social media generation), but this is truly shoddy.
 
jancrow said:
Oh hang on I meant i-D magazine.
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Those were the days. Proper style mags. Always about a decade behind the tastes and sensibilities their intended audience too.

I remember a Suede cover story in The Face where they had Brett Anderson against a background of a naked, bubble-permed woman (in soft, smokey focus). This was in 1999, for fuck's sake. =D

Then again, those mags seem quaint and harmless these days, however much harm they did in making bourgeois ideals and aspirations acceptable within the 'counterculture'.

I wonder how Vice will fare. Time will tell.
 
Typical crap reporting. Its not diazepam that's killing folk off its the combinations that it's taken with that's doing it.
Diazepam isn't gonna kill them its the heroin or alcohol its mixed with that's gonna do that, should have made that clear for readers.
 
it seems unfair to say vice are shit and they suck at journalism,

this is one writer and they are reporting in a field where we are mostly experts, hence why we would likely be unsatisfied with their efforts

relatively speaking vice is much better at entertainment journalism than lets say daily fail or any other tabloid newspaper for e.g.

also idk why everyone is defending valium like its a godsend drug, it fucks up a lot of peoples lives
 
I stayed in a Hostel in the Cowgate back in about 2001 . They had no beds , the lights were on all the time it was fukin torture . Ended up teaming up with this n hitching back to civilisation
. It's a harsh place they had a Pool Table though:\

The Cowgate Centre that was the name
 
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