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http://www.newstatesman.com/200603060045

Illegal highs Book Reviews Ned Denny Monday 6th March 2006

The Devil's Picnic: a tour of everything the governments of the world don't want you to try Taras Grescoe Macmillan, 359pp, £12.99 ISBN 1405045817

Coming to this book a few days after the vote to ban smoking in pubs and clubs in England, I was pleased to find some lines from C S Lewis that seemed to damn the motion from beyond the grave. "Of all tyrannies," he wrote, "a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."

Now, I'm nothing but the most uncommitted of joystick fiends, and I'm all in favour of there being pubs (or rooms in pubs) which don't leave you feeling as if you've been marinated in tar. But there's an even worse smell that clings to these holier-than-thou edicts: not of fag ash but hypocrisy - the awareness that they issue from a group of people who are hardly, shall we say, paragons of moral probity. And I'm not talking about their smoking habits.

If you dislike being treated like a teenager by governments that routinely defend (and perpetrate) the morally indefensible, then you are certain to enjoy The Devil's Picnic. Far from being the lads' mag outing that it at first appears - oh so naughty, but about as subversive as a stroll through Harrods Food Hall - Taras Grescoe's book is a perceptive, cogent and witty analysis of the enduring folly that is prohibition. The C S Lewis quotation heads the chapter on Singapore, the "perfectly ordered surveillance state" that is looking increasingly like the paradigm of a looming new world order.

Founded by a Cambridge-educated law-yer who made citizens carry ID cards and referred to them as "digits", Singapore's ruling party holds sway over a paranoid and irrationally prohibitive regime that cloaks itself in the robes of parliamentary democracy. Political protest is in theory permitted, but is so hedged around with rules and regulations as to be ineffectual. Security cameras are everywhere, and a host of so-called "antisocial" activities - the government defines the term - are punishable by fines or prison sentences. All sounds somewhat familiar, no?

But as Grescoe wanders the islands' pristine walkways with his chewing gum, poppy-seed crackers and copy of Fanny Hill, which are all banned items, he finds that Singapore's slick efficiency conceals a numbed and dispirited populace. In a culture of rampant prohibition, it seems, the only real winners are technology and capital. Other societies that are superficially more permissive often use prohibitions as a way of diverting attention from dangers that lie far closer to home.

Journeying through France and Spain, Grescoe samples sublime raw-milk cheeses and Iberico ham from acorn- fed pigs - both traditionally made, farm-produced foods that are banned in the United States on health grounds. But as he rightly points out, the industrialised farming methods sanctioned by the US department of agriculture churn out meat that is not only bland but also potentially deadly (500 Americans die every year from listeria-contaminated hot dogs and luncheon meat - almost ten times as many people as the country executes).

The defining prohibitions of the mod-ern world, though, have been those concerning alcohol and "drugs": in effect, any intoxicant not taxed and regulated by the state. The war on drugs has been fought on similar lines to America's disastrous Prohibition of the 1920s, the resultant black market then as now keeping gangsters earning and users dying. Gres-coe travels to Bolivia and witnesses the absurdity of western military might waging war on a plant - a course of action now also being pursued by the British in Afghanistan. He notes that infinitely better results could be achieved if a fraction of the money used to buy attack helicopters was spent on treating addiction, the root of the whole problem. The trouble is that spending time with junkies back home isn't half as much fun as flying round the world shooting at people.

While we're on the subject of fun, it is worth acknowledging the almost magical aura that illegality bestows on its chosen substances. A telling statistic is the mere 8 per cent of teenagers who smoke dope in the stoner heaven that is Holland, as opposed to the 16 per cent in the ultra- draconian US.

Most insightfully of all, Grescoe ob-serves that it is a consequence of having been wrested from their traditional, often sacred, contexts that drugs have become so vulnerable to abuse. In fact, it may well be that a reacquaintance with the visionary intoxicants of tribal religions

(mescaline, ayahuasca, iboga) is one sure way out of the nihilistic rut that addiction of any sort implies. But what's the chance of our government adopting that as its drugs policy? Don't hold your breath.