Bloggery doggery doo

In which your humble author, as is his wont, makes a brief and unnecessarily facetious roundup of responses:

Laura (Drugs): Just to nitpick, mephedrone isn't "known" to have caused any deaths (and very few illegal drugs are). There's certainly been a lot of headline drivel-slinging, most of it based on button-pushing words like "suspected", "linked" and "fear"... but you'll notice that none of those articles explicitly suggests that mephedrone has been the medical cause of any deaths. That's because there's no evidence that it has; only yet another frantic journalistic caracol of implication and scare-mongering.

Wainwright and Smith, for example, had been mixing mephedrone with alcohol and methadone (which are two things you should never take together anyways, let alone adding anything else). In fact, the only case in which mephedrone has been medically implicated as contributing to a cause of death is actually described as being due to the "adverse effects of methadone and mephedrone" (emphasis mine).

It's especially telling that the only factual information any of those articles provides concerning the impact of mephedrone is the report that "180 pupils had skipped classes after taking the drug at a secondary school in north-west Leicestershire." Oh yeah, the end of the world is clearly nigh...

Chris (Drugs): "If you really have no clue about whether you should take drugs, stick to the simple rule of DON’T."

Nooo. If you really have no clue about whether you should take drugs, it's well past time you found out!