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Police Chief: ID cards, the surveillance society and eroding civil liberties

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

JAMES SLACK

A chief constable has broke ranks to complain about a lurch towards a “surveillance” society which is “eroding” civil liberties.

Colin Langham-Fitt also became the first senior officer to question the need for ID cards.

He said the controversial government scheme - which has rocketed in cost to more than £5billion - would be targeted by criminals.

Mr Langham-Fitt said: “They could become the gold standard of ID crime.

“It could raise the standards and stakes for those who wish to clone them or subvert the system.”

Ministers insist police broadly support the use of surveillance technology, including four million CCTV cameras.

The Home Office is even introducing talking CCTV cameras and considering the use of controversial “spy” satellite technology.

Mr Langham-Fitt, who is acting chief constable of Suffolk Police, said: “There should be a debate about the ongoing erosion of civil liberties in the name of the fight against terrorism and the fight against crime.

“Are we all happy to have our cards monitored wherever we go, to be on CCTV and to have our shopping tracked?

“With all this surveillance available, the question needs to be asked - are we happy with that? Does it make us feel better and safer?

“I haven’t got the answers but I would welcome the debate - a debate beyond the cliched response of ‘If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about’.”

He added: “Every measure like this is going to impinge on civil liberties.

“The debate has to be had - are these sensible precautions in a dangerous world or are we reacting to things in the belief they will solve them but at the end of the day they might not have any impact?”

Criticism by a chief constable is the latest blow to the ID cards scheme, which has been widely derided and whose cost has spiralled by £640million in the past six months.

Last week Jack Straw, expected to replace John Reid as Home Secretary, said it would be under review by the new Government led by Gordon Brown.

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The secret world of code-breaking

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

I wonder what Bruce Schneier would have to say about this aritcle..

Published in The Independent

In the age of instant global communication, the ability to encode - and decipher - secret messages has never been more valuable. Andy McSmith explains why code-breaking is flavour of the month

Codes are as old as language. Language allows you to communicate with anybody; a secure code lets you pick and choose the cipient of the information you want to impart. From the beginnings of recorded history we find examples of people communicating in code, that amuse or appal us. And codes have lost none of their importance in the 21st century.

Tomorrow will see the release of a film based on a real-life example of a code being used to torment and manipulate. Zodiac is a fictionalised version of the story of a serial killer who taunted the California police with coded messages which, he claimed, would reveal his identity. Those sections of the messages that were decoded revealed a sick mind, but not the killer’s identity. Perhaps they were never meant to.

Zodiac is not the first recent film predicated on the challenge of codes - The Da Vinci Code is another well-known example - but it is perhaps a better illustration of why codes matter. The Zodiac’s activities were an example of “cryptology”, which is the art of concealing the meaning of a message. The cryptologist lets you know that he is sending a message, but unless you have the key to the code, it does not mean anything.

There is a whole other branch of the science of codemaking, called steganography, which is about passing messages in such a way that the message itself is concealed. Understanding the message is not hard; the challenge is to find it. This general category includes clever dodges that we would not call codes, although we may marvel at their ingenuity. Histaiaeus, in ancient Greece, wanted to send a message to Aristagorus of Miletus, inciting him to revolt against the Persians, but needed to be very sure that the Persians did not suspect anything. So he shaved a messenger’s head, wrote the message on his pate, and dispatched him to Miletus as soon as his hair had grown again.

A speedier and much commoner form of steganography involves concealing a message within an innocent-looking piece of text, for instance by making pinpricks in a book under selected letters which spell out a message. This was popular in the days when it was expensive to post a letter in Britain, but the Post Office delivered newspapers free. Families would communicate through newspapers covered in barely visible pinpricks.

A variant, if you are the person writing the original text, is to conceal the message in the words themselves. The journalist Stephen Pollard, best known as the author of a biography that helped destroy the career of David Blunkett, also very nearly destroyed his own career with a steganographic message.

On his last day working as a leader writer at the Daily Express, six years ago, Mr Pollard wrote a cleverly crafted editorial, in which the first word of the first sentence began with the letter “f”, the first word of the second sentence began with “u”, and - well, you see where this is going. It was a not-so-fond farewell directed at the newspaper’s proprietor, Richard Desmond. Unfortunately for Mr Pollard, his new employer, The Times, failed to find it funny and ripped up his contract.

One pleasing example of this kind of coded message is in the St James version of the Bible. The 46th word of Psalm 46 in the St James Bible is “shake”. The 46th word counting backwards from the end of Psalm 46 is “spear”. The St James Bible came out in 1610, the year that William Shakespeare celebrated his 46th birthday. England’s finest scholars, set to work producing this translation of the Bible, were required to include a frontispiece paying a grovelling tribute to England’s much despised king, James I. Evidently, someone decided to conceal an acknowledgement to a person they genuinely admired. There is also the case of Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, in whose carvings cryptographers claim to have discovered an encoded piece of music.

The ancients generally had more reason to use concealed messages than cryptographic puzzles. A message in jumbled writing, or numbers, or symbols will arouse suspicion and could get a person into trouble even if its secrets could not be unlocked. Samuel Pepys wrote his dairies in a cryptographic code, but he was not afraid someone would find out that he was keeping a diary; he just did not want the idly curious to know what it said.

Cryptography took off with the invention of the radio. From the First World War onwards, commanders have communicated with their juniors by messages sent across the airwaves, which the enemy can easily pick up. The codemakers’ task was to ensure that the message was quickly and easily understood by its legitimate recipient, and no one else. This produced a new form of warfare between codemakers and codebreakers, which the codebreakers usually won.

The commonest form of cryptography is substitution, where letters are jumbled up according to a concealed pattern. This has usually proved to be an activity for men, despite the advice given in the Kama Sutra that women should learn it, so that they can conduct their love affairs in secret.

Hundreds of thousands of people have seen a quaint example of substitution cryptography when they watched Borat’s film Cultural Leanings of America. As participants sang a song in English, up came what looked like Russian subtitles, which were gibberish to any Russian. The subtitles were decoded by a smart Moscow graduate writing a dissertation on Western culture. On a Russian keyboard, you find a Cyrillic letter that looks like the Latin “u” where we would expect to find a “q”, a letter vaguely resmbling a “y” where we expect a “w” - and so on. The film-makers attached a Latin keyboard to a computer that was programmed to produce Cyrillic writing, and tapped the keys as if they were typing out the song in English. To decode the resulting nonsense, a Russian needed to attach a Cyrillic keyboard to a computer programmed to write Latin.

The weakness of any code based on an alphabet is that every codebreaker knows the relatively frequency with which different letters appear in a given language. In a passage written in English, every eighth letter, approximately, is an “e”, one letter in 11 is a “t”, and one in 1,000 is a “q”. If you know the normal percentages for each letter, you can crack a mono-alphabetic code.

There is a film based on a novel by Robert Harris about the Enigma machine, a German computer which instead of substituting one alphabet for another, used 17,576 substitutions simultaneously. It was easy to read a message sent out by Enigma, if you had your own Enigma machine and an up-to-date codebook that told you the right settings for that day. Without either, the messages should have been impossible to read. Yet the codebreakers in Bletchley Park did it. Their success was an enormous contributor to the Allied victory.

Today’s codemakers and codemakers use immensely more sophisticated methods. Enigma encryption was a piece of cake compared with 128-bit encryption. But today’s codebreakers also have at their disposal computers vastly quicker and more powerful than the Bletchley boffins. The battle continues.

But don’t worry, you don’t need a super computer to crack the Independent code. All you need is a brain and a bit of time.

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Prozac is 20 Years Old - Time to Learn the Facts

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

It’s sold as happiness in a blister pack - a cure-all that has changed the way we think about wellbeing. As Prozac reaches its 20th birthday, Anna Moore presents 20 things you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world.

The Observer

1: Depression has deepened

In 1971, when LY110141 - the compound that became Prozac - was developed, depression was rarely discussed and antidepressants largely restricted to the psychiatric unit. People went to their GPs with ‘anxiety’ and ‘nerves’. Tranquillisers such as Valium were a likely response.

Eli Lilly, the company behind Prozac, originally saw an entirely different future for its new drug. It was first tested as a treatment for high blood pressure, which worked in some animals but not in humans. Plan B was as an anti-obesity agent, but this didn’t hold up either. When tested on psychotic patients and those hospitalised with depression, LY110141 - by now named Fluoxetine - had no obvious benefit, with a number of patients getting worse. Finally, Eli Lilly tested it on mild depressives. Five recruits tried it; all five cheered up. By 1999, it was providing Eli Lilly with more than 25 per cent of its $10bn revenue.

Fluoxetine was handed to Interbrand, the world’s leading branding company (Sony, Microsoft, Nikon, Nintendo) for an identity. The name Prozac was picked for its zap: it sounded positive, professional, quick, proey, zaccy. It was marketed in an easy-to-prescribe ‘one pill, one dose for all’ formula and came when the medical profession and media were awash with horror stories about Valium addiction.

Prozac hit a society that was in the mood for it. National campaigns (supported by Eli Lilly) alerted GPs and the public to the dangers of depression. Eli Lilly funded 8m brochures (Depression: What you need to know) and 200,000 posters. Previous antidepressants were highly toxic, lethal if overdosed on and had other nasty side-effects. Prozac was pushed as entirely safe, to be doled out by anyone. It was the wonder drug, the easy answer, an instant up, neurological eldorado. When launch day dawned, patients were already asking for it by name.

Twenty years on, Prozac remains the most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide, and many feel they owe their lives to it. It is prescribed for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (formerly known as PMT). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, antidepressant prescriptions rose from 9m to 24m a year.

Strangely, depression has reached epidemic levels. Money and success is no defence: writers, royalty, rock stars, supermodels, actors, middle managers have all had it. Studies suggest that in America, depression more than doubled between 1991 and 2001. In the UK, an estimated one in six people will experience it - and it costs more than £9bn annually in treatment, benefits and lost revenue. Meanwhile, according to the World Health Organisation, depression is set to become second only to heart disease as the world’s leading disability by 2020.

2: Bio-babble has replaced psychobabble

Serotonin was not well known 20 years ago. Now, if you ask the person sitting beside you what it is, he or she may tell you it is linked to happiness, that levels get low in depressed people … that Prozac tops them up … so does chocolate … or aerobics … maybe yoga …

Except it isn’t strictly true. Or has been repeatedly challenged. And is yet to be proven. According to David Healy, professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University and author of Let Them Eat Prozac, it’s pure ‘bio-babble’ which has replaced the psychobabble of the Sixties and Seventies. Healy spent a decade studying the neurotransmitter serotonin in depressed people and found little evidence to support the theory of ‘chemical imbalance’.

‘The idea was forwarded in the Sixties - and the man behind it, Dr George Ashcroft, later took it back,’ says Healy. ‘Through the Seventies and Eighties, it was seen as a simplistic idea; now it’s seen as very convenient - it sounds so neat. There’s something in you that’s low that needs to be put right. It makes you happier to take a drug.’ (Witness Brooke Shields, who described it as ‘comforting’ to discover her depression was ‘directly tied to a biochemical shift’. Or the writer Lauren Slater in Prozac Diaries describing Prozac as ‘a drug with the precision of a scud missile, launched miles from its target only to land, with a proud flare, right on the enemy’s roof’.)

Prozac is a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI). Previous tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) worked on three neurotransmitters associated with mood (serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline) whereas Prozac just concentrates on one: serotonin.

‘The idea that it’s been a major step forward for Prozac to select serotonin only is just hypothesis,’ says Malcolm Lader, professor of clinical psychopharmacology at the Institute of Psychiatry. ‘There’s no science behind it.’

The theory that emotions are governed by serotonin levels is highly simplistic and works just as well the other way around (ie, our emotions, our stress levels alter our brain chemistry, so it’s at least a two-way street). Other important factors that contribute to depression include life experience, family history, hormones and diet. However, the oft-repeated ‘chemical imbalance’ theory (the fault is not in ourselves, but in our precious bodily fluids) is promoted on depression websites owned by drug companies and in advertising.

And just like scuds, Prozac turned out to be less precise than originally supposed. Experiences with it range from miraculous to mediocre. The writer Zoe Heller found that within weeks of taking it, she stopped crying and could get out of bed. Others describe it as a detached benevolence, or a comforting numbness. It makes some people feel anxious, agitated and unable to sleep. There are those who stop taking it, as they feel no effect at all.

Interestingly, reports gained through the Freedom of Information act revealed that in half the 47 trials used to approve the six leading antidepressants, the drugs failed to outperform the sugar pills. When they did, it was by only two points on a 52-point depression rating. Frosties, anyone?

3: You never too young

Enter liquid Prozac in peppermint flavour. In the US, a survey of drug companies found that between 1995 and 1999, use of Prozac-like drugs for children aged seven to 12 increased by 151 per cent, and in those aged under six by 580 per cent. In 2004, children aged five and under were America’s fastest-growing segment of the non-adult population using antidepressants. ‘Selective mutism’ (fear of speaking in social situations) is one affliction common in preschoolers and has been treated with Prozac.

In the UK, too, the trend has been upwards. Between 1992 and 2001, prescriptions of SSRIs for under-18s increased tenfold - despite the fact that none has a licence for use in children. In 2003, the NHS warned against all SSRIs in under-18s except Prozac, after studies showed they rarely performed better than a placebo, and came with disturbing side-effects.

In America, the SSRIs, including Prozac, now carry a ‘black box’ warning that the drugs could increase suicidal behaviour in children. It’s thought that prescriptions are falling in both countries as a result.

4: Animals are in on it too

Romain Pizzi, specialist in zoo and wildlife medicine for the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), remembers prescribing Prozac to Mercedes, Edinburgh Zoo’s polar bear.

‘We can’t say it’s “depression” [the bear was suffering] but it’s abnormal behaviour, a coping mechanism for animals held out of their natural habitat,’ says Pizzi. ‘Polar bears wake from hibernation and travel long distances in search of food - their instinct is to roam. Every spring, Mercedes would wake up ready for a massive migration and she’d start swimming and pacing a particular route, wearing her fur and skin down as she rubbed it in the same place. Large cats do the same, pacing, shaking their heads. Antidepressants dampen down some of the behaviour and, hopefully, reduce the stress.’

Pet parrots are also on the receiving end of antidepressants because they are highly intelligent birds that self-mutilate if bored, while cats and dogs may suffer from stress or separation anxieties. ‘A dog can’t sit on the sofa and discuss his worries, but he can howl the house down or chase his tail or chew everything to pieces,’ says Mark Johnston, an RCVS specialist in small animals. ‘Urinary marking is common in cats - it could be because he’s being beaten up by other cats or another cat is coming in through the cat-flap.’

If training and behaviour modification are unsuccessful, about one in 10 animal patients will be given antidepressants. Reconcile is a newly launched beef-flavoured version of Prozac aimed at dogs. ‘Drugs may sound drastic - but it could literally save their lives,’ says Johnston. ‘If you’ve got a dog that’s persistently aggressive, you won’t put up with it for long. The last option is euthanasia.’

5: Pain is the new pleasure

Prozac’s high celebrity uptake helped make SSRIs the It-drug of the Nineties - the pharmaceutical Fendi bag. Where once celebrities sought to hide their depression - Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Vivien Leigh - the Prozac era has helped wipe away the stigma. Depression is part of the job description - celebrities are expected to suffer somehow, then preferably write about it in an autobiography (Ulrika Jonsson, Kerry Katona, Gazza) or talk about it (Winona Ryder, Dame Kelly Holmes, Melinda Messenger, Johnny Depp, Gail Porter, most comedians and half the cast of EastEnders) or be treated in Arizona clinics for addiction to antidepressants (Robbie Williams). Most usefully, their empty Prozac prescription bottles can be collected as pop art (Debbie Harry).

Prozac has also featured in some tragic celebrity headlines. Michael Hutchence was found to have taken the drug when he committed suicide. Diego Cogolato murdered designer Ossie Clark while psychotic on a mix of Prozac and amphetamines. Anna Nicole Smith died after what is thought to be an accidental overdose of prescription drugs - including Prozac. Five months earlier her son Daniel had died after mixing two SSRI antidepressants with methadone. Her dog, Sugarpie, was also on Prozac.

6: Prozactly, prozacted, prozactive, prozaction

Prozac is now in the dictionary, no more a slavish noun but a fully fledged adjective with rights of its own. According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, someone lively and excited may safely be described as ‘on Prozac’.

7: Booked on Prozac

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation placed the drug firmly on the literary map in 1994. At that point, Wurtzel was 26 and had everything her generation was supposed to want (long legs, long hair, rich friends, glib friends, false friends, smart remarks and a loft apartment in Greenwich Village), but she’d suffered depression for as long as she could remember (she first attempted suicide at summer camp, aged 12).

Her memoir starts with her parents’ unhappy marriage and leads to countless breakdowns, hit-and-miss lithium prescriptions and hopeless love affairs. At the same time, though, Wurtzel gets into Harvard, wins a Rolling Stone college journalism award, works as an arts reporter, drives around England in a BMW and lives an impossibly cool rock’n'roll life of the sort only hallucinogens can provide.

The story ends on a high note with Wurtzel given a diagnosis of ‘atypical depression’ treatable with a new drug called Prozac. In the final pages, she feels safe in her skin, looking forward to each day - ‘the black wave’ has gone.

The New York Times dubbed Wurtzel ‘Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna’, while NME described the book as having ‘the same relevance and resonance as On The Road, Catch-22 and Generation X’. A massive hit, it brought home the latest dead-end whinge of youth culture and showed that being young, cool and gifted in the Nineties could still leave you cold; but worry not, there was now an answer - in green and cream capsule form.

Unfortunately, the story was hard to put down. Seven years later, Wurtzel was still taking Prozac but also addicted to Ritalin, pornography and tweezing her leg hairs. Now she wrote about them in a less gripping, less successful More, Now, Again. By the time the film of Prozac Nation was made, starring Christina Ricci as Wurtzel and Jessica Lange as her mother, America’s love affair with Wurtzel was over and it went straight to DVD. She is now a student at Yale Law School.

More memoirs followed, including Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary (1998), which starts when she takes the drug and is finally freed from her OCD, which had resulted in suicide attempts, self-mutilation and five hospitalisations. After a decade on Prozac, she had a doctorate from Harvard, and was a writer, teacher and a wife.

A more recent addition was Brooke Shields’s Down Came the Rain, an account of her struggle with postnatal depression, in which she was saved not by Prozac, but Seroxat, another SSRI which followed like a pilot fish in Prozac’s unsleeping wake.

8: Tom Cruise vs Brooke Shields

In May 2005, Tom Cruise was promoting War of the Worlds and Shields was promoting Down Came the Rain. Scientologists are vehemently opposed to all forms of psychiatry. (According to L Ron Hubbard, psychiatrists are corrupt, barbaric and also members of a worldwide conspiracy bent on creating a government on behalf of Soviet Russia.) On NBC’s Today show, Cruise took this theory a stage further and launched a personal attack on Brooke Shields, calling her ‘irresponsible’ for praising an antidepressant when vitamins and exercise would have cured her.

Papers and pundits debated before the anxious eyes of the world, polls polled (’Is Scientology killing Cruise’s career?’; ‘Should Cruise and Shields kiss and make up?’), Brooke Shields suggested Cruise stick to saving the world from aliens and let women with postnatal depression decide what treatment options are best for them. Watching at home was Paula Fortunato, wife of Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom (the enormous media company behind Paramount). She told her husband that Cruise’s rant had turned female fans against him. Three months later, Cruise was fired after 14 years with the studio. ‘Paula, like women everywhere, had come to hate him,’ Redstone told Vanity Fair. ‘The truth of the matter is I did listen to her. His behaviour was entirely unacceptable to Paula and to the rest of the world. He just didn’t turn one woman off. He turned off all women, and a lot of men.’

9 Vanilla Ice is ‘crazy like Prozac’

Vanilla Ice’s ‘Prozac’ track featured in his strange 1998 comeback album Hard to Swallow, where he ditched his rap-for-teeny-boppers persona and came over all tattooed, pierced and head banging. There was a slight confusion over the lyrics (’We gets crazy like Prozac/ Hype enough to start a party and illy have a heart attack’), which seemed to be referring to a strong stimulant rather than a drug widely thought to be calming. It was suggested that Vanilla Ice - who has been treated for both depression and attention deficit disorder - got his prescriptions muddled.

One interviewer tried to clarify things with the singer. ‘It confused me a little because “Crazy like Ritalin” is closer to what you guys do. You know, jumping around like you’re hopped up on stimulants.’ ‘Yeah, that would work too,’ agreed Vanilla Ice. The interviewer persisted: ‘To me, Prozac would mellow you out, and you’re certainly not mellow on this record.’ Vanilla Ice replied, ‘That’s what Prozac does for you, you get crazy and you need Prozac. Crazy, like people on Prozac.’ So that clears that up.

10: The ills are alive…

Prozac musical influences are also hinted at by Prozac Ruin (thought to be the best punk-rock band in Llanelli) and Housewives on Prozac (rock’n'roll mothers whose opuses include advice on fine dining: ‘Eat Your Own Damn Spaghetti’ and the slightly antisocial composition ‘I Only Wanna Pee Alone’). Prozac songs are in strong supply: ‘Prozac Smile’ (The Dead Stars on Holiday), ‘Daddy’s on Prozac’ (Joseph Arthur); ‘All My Friends Are on Prozac’ (Suffering and the Hideous Thieves) and ‘Prozac vs Heroin’ (The Brian Jonestown Massacre). Those of us with philosophical inclinations can reflect on the brevity of human existence with ‘That Prozac Moment’ (Mr T Experience).

11: The Prozac diet plan

Prozac has long been rumoured to help weight loss. Louise, 44, from Kent, was prescribed it for depression, but stayed on it longer than was strictly necessary when she found it suppressed her appetite. ‘It was a very mild cocaine sort of feeling, an amphetamine speedy thing,’ she says. ‘I didn’t get hungry and I was always doing stuff. I lost nearly a stone. My sister bought some online when she saw what it did to me.’

Brazilian Diet Pills, also widely available on the internet, contain fluoxetine, Prozac’s active ingredient. In America, some doctors now prescribe Prozac to treat obesity - though it hasn’t been approved for this purpose. The weight-loss company Nutrisystem also launched a diet programme, ‘Phen-Pro’ - a combination of Phentermine and Prozac - despite Eli Lilly’s strong reservations.

In fact, trials have suggested that Prozac can result in an average, short-term weight loss of up to 7lb 4oz in obese patients. However, it has also been associated with weight gain after the initial loss of appetite wears off. (Louise is now the weight she was before taking them.) Weight gain on SSRIs is a popular topic in depression chatrooms.

12: Less sex

Though it can take 10 years for a drug to win its licence, the actual controlled, scientific studies used in evidence often last just four to six weeks. It’s not surprising, then, that the existence or extent of most side-effects surface only after drugs have been taken up and tested in their millions by the general public.

Sexual dysfunction has turned out to be one of Prozac’s hidden extras. Sarah, a 36-year-old stylist from London, who takes Prozac for panic attacks, has had a fairly typical experience. ‘It has cured me and calmed me, but I haven’t had an orgasm since the day I started,’ she says. ‘I still want to cuddle, but beyond that, I feel no physical arousal at all. Nothing. It’s a trade-off. My partner can’t decide which me he prefers. The neurotic, weeping basketcase who still enjoyed sex a few times a week or the calm and collected one that’s completely frigid.’

The implications go beyond mere sex. According to Helen Fisher, anthropologist and author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, SSRIs could seriously impede our ability to fall and stay in love. The bliss we feel when we’re loved up - that elation, exhilaration and slight insanity - are the result of high levels of dopamine. SSRIs increase serotonin and curb dopamine. The result is that anti-love feeling, a contented, non-discriminatory ‘well, whatever’.

Though initial tests put sexual dysfunction as present in fewer than 30 per cent of cases, the figure is now generally accepted to be more than 60 per cent, and a recent study put it at 98 per cent. With 54m people taking Prozac worldwide, that’s a lot of sexual dysfunction. Symptoms include decreased or absent libido, delayed or absent orgasm, impotence or reduced semen volume in men and reduced vaginal lubrication in women.

13: More sex

On the upside, Prozac is now offered to men suffering from premature ejaculation.

14: Lives lost

Prozac has been persistently dogged by claims that it can trigger suicide - not just in depressives but also in healthy volunteers. Some SSRI users have reported agitation and an inability to keep still, a preoccupation with violent, self-destructive fantasies and a feeling that ‘death would be welcome’. In Germany, Prozac was initially refused a licence after trials resulted in 16 attempted suicides, two of which were successful.

The SSRIs have made hundreds of court appearances. The first big case was in 1989, when Joseph Wesbecker walked through the Standard Gravure printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky with an AK47, killing eight employees, then himself. Wesbecker had been on the newly licensed Prozac less than a month and had become increasingly agitated. The families of those killed sued Eli Lilly but agreed to a secret settlement.

More followed. After six days on Prozac, Patricia Williamson, 60, killed herself in her bath in Texas while her husband ate breakfast downstairs. Eli Lilly settled out of court. Don Schell had been on Seroxat (marketed as Paxil in America) for 48 hours when he shot his wife, his daughter, his nine-month-old granddaughter and himself at his home in Wyoming. Schell’s son-in-law was awarded $8m by manufacturers SmithKline.

In the UK, Reginald Payne, a retired teacher from Cornwall, suffocated his wife then he jumped off a cliff after 11 days on Prozac. His sons issued court proceedings against Eli Lilly. In Losing a Child, Linda Hurcombe describes the impact of her 19-year-old daughter Caitlin’s suicide. Caitlin, from rural Shropshire, had asked her GP for Prozac, as she was feeling down; she had also heard it could help her lose weight. She had marked the subsequent days in her diary ‘PZ Days’.

David Healy, who has testified as an expert witness against both Eli Lilly and SmithKline, estimates SSRIs can produce suicidal thoughts in one in 500 users.

15: Lives saved

According to most psychiatrists, the risk of not taking an antidepressant when suffering depression far outweighs any risks of taking them. For many users, the drugs can restore, even save, lives. Though depression appears to be on the increase, in this Prozac-enriched era the UK suicide rate - 8.5 deaths per 100,000 - is actually at its lowest level since records began.

Carmine Pariante, consultant psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry, is sceptical of the claim that SSRIs carry a special suicide trigger. ‘I remember having to be very vigilant in the first weeks of prescribing the old antidepressants, simply because before taking them, patients could be too low to commit suicide. They were then given a lift and possibly had the energy to put a plan into action.’ The Institute of Psychiatry’s Malcolm Lader agrees it is hard to prove, calling it ‘a small signal against a very noisy background’.

Interestingly, there is also evidence that SSRIs lower non-suicide death rates in depressed patients. A study from Finland published in the British Medical Journal found antidepressants could reduce incidents of strokes and heart attacks.

16: Brushes with Prozac

The artist Stella Vine (right) named her 2004 exhibition, which featured such troubled subjects as Sylvia Plath and Courtney Love, after the drug. Vine - the former stripper now famous for her vivid, haunted portraits of Princess Diana, Kate Moss and the heroin victim Rachel Whitear - has herself yo-yoed on Prozac, finding it has both enabled her to function but blunted her painting.

‘I remember when I was working as a nightclub hostess, one of the girls showed me her writing and it was really incredible. I asked why she had stopped and she said she started taking Prozac and couldn’t write any more,’ says Vine. ‘I thought I’d never make that trade-off.’

In 2001, though, Vine did ask her GP for antidepressants. ‘I’ve always been a highs-and-lows person, but this time, I was very, very depressed, just about doing the basics, the whole world collapsing, and when I started on Prozac, there was an incredible rush,’ she recalls. ‘I ate less, had more energy, I was speeding around the park with my dog, ecstatic to talk to the other dog walkers. It breaks the cycle of sitting on the sofa thinking about suicide, but in a way, it’s a waste of time. Nothing is being sorted out and healed.’

Vine describes herself on Prozac as a ‘la-di-da, hazy version’. ‘I can paint the outline of a person, but I can’t engage with any emotion in it,’ she says. ‘The really good work takes place when I’m not on Prozac. It’s hard to describe, but it’s more vivid and intense, a heightened awareness. I may have finished several undercoats and I get this great moment of absolute clarity. Suddenly I know what will make the whole thing work. That never happens on Prozac.’

Prozac’s effect on creativity has been much debated - usually with the starter question ‘What if Van Gogh had taken Prozac?’ Perhaps he’d have given up art and become a life coach. Another possibility is that we’d now have more of his paintings.

17: Dilute to taste

In 2004, Prozac was discovered in our drinking water. The Environment Agency said the drug was building up in British rivers and ground-water supplies, probably via the sewage system. Some used it as evidence that Prozac was overprescribed. The Lib Dems called it ‘a case of hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public’. The government’s Drinking Water Inspectorate said the quantities were too diluted to have an effect (and poured themselves yet another glass, laughing maniacally through rolling eyeballs).

18: Prozac by post

Chicago artist Michael Hernandez de Luna created the fake Prozac stamp and successfully mailed it through the US postal system. Other de Luna stamps include an obese fast-food-fed Barbie doll and Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress.

19: Enter Viagra

Pre-Prozac, drugs had names that were scientific and which referred to their compound. Prozac’s branding and direct-to-consumer advertising, which has ultimately blurred ‘ordinary life’ with ‘treatable illness’, proved a valuable lesson in drug pushing. Enter Viagra, part medical treatment for sexual dysfunction, part lifestyle drug for sexual enhancement. Within two weeks of Viagra going on sale in the US, doctors were writing 40,000 prescriptions a day.

20 Goodbye Prozac, hello Cymbalta

All good things come to an end, though, and in 2001, Prozac lost its patent. Eli Lilly lost $35m of its market value in one day - and 90 per cent of its Prozac prescriptions in a single year. Eli Lilly has now come back with Cymbalta, which it hopes will be the next Prozac. This was approved by America’s Food & Drug Administration despite another very shaky start. Traci Johnson, a healthy 19-year-old college student, hung herself in the Eli Lilly laboratory while testing the drug at high doses, in return for $150 a day. Cymbalta is a painkiller and antidepressant combined because, according to its logo, ‘Depression Hurts’. Read all about it, carry out a self-assessment checklist and watch some inspiring real-life stories on www.cymbalta.com

The high celebrity uptake made it the It-drug of the Nineties. And where once celebrities sought to hide their depression, Prozac helped wipe away the stigma

Prozac’s effect on creativity is much debated - often with the question ‘What if Van Gogh had taken Prozac?’ Perhaps he’d have given up and become a life coach. Another possibility is we’d have more of his paintings.

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No Dissent on Spying, Says Justice Dept.

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer

The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.

The department’s affirmation of Gonzales’s remarks raised fresh questions about the nature of the classified dispute, which former U.S. officials say led then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and as many as eight colleagues to discuss resigning.

Testifying Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Comey declined to describe the program. He said it “was renewed on a regular basis” and required the attorney general’s signature.

He said a review by the Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in spring 2004 had concluded the program was not legal.

Comey said he and the others were prepared to resign when the White House renewed the program after failing to get a certification of its legality — first from him and later from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, while Ashcroft was ill and heavily sedated at George Washington University Hospital.

Gonzales, testifying for the first time in February 2006 about the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which involved eavesdropping on phone calls between the United States and places overseas, told two congressional committees that the program had not provoked serious disagreement involving Comey or others.

“None of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today,” Gonzales said then.

Four Democratic senators sent a letter to Gonzales yesterday asking, “do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it,” prompting the Justice Department’s response.

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Prince Harry decision causes fury

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

PRINCE Harry’s military career could be at an end after the British Army decided he would not be sent to serve in Iraq, sparking a public backlash.

The decision to keep the prince, 22, home safe has angered the families of other soldiers who say their children deserve the same safeguards.

Briton Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon died in a roadside bomb attack, said: “If it is too dangerous for Harry, it is too dangerous for the rest of the troops out there. If he can’t go, why are our boys there?”

British Army bosses ruled yesterday that Prince Harry, couldn’t go to war because plots to kill or kidnap him posed an unacceptable risk to him and his fellow soldiers.

The royal was said to be “very disappointed” at the shock decision to stop him flying out next week.

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Brown will enter No 10 unopposed

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

Gordon Brown has secured the backing of enough MPs to ensure he will not face a contest to become the next Labour leader and prime minister.

Mr Brown has 308 nominations, prompting his only rival, left-winger John McDonnell, to concede. He was 16 nominations short of the 45 required.

Mr McDonnell said he was disappointed on behalf of Labour Party members and it was a “blow to democracy”.

Mr Brown should now take over unopposed after Tony Blair steps down on 27 June.

Nominations officially close on Thursday, but there are not enough remaining MPs to allow Mr McDonnell to run.

‘Mathematically impossible’

He said: “With Gordon Brown having gained 308 nominations from Labour MPs, it is now mathematically impossible for me to reach the nominations I require to stand. There will not now be an election.”

He congratulated Mr Brown, but said it was a shame party members would be denied “an opportunity of participating in a democratic election for the leader of this party”.

“I had hoped by standing I would have given them a voice in this crucial decision.”

Mr Brown’s campaign said they would await the formal voting figures announced by the party on Thursday before making any statement.

But his campaign manager, Commons Leader Jack Straw, said that they were “delighted” the party was “uniting” behind the chancellor.

Labour MP for Cannock Chase, Dr Tony Wright, earlier told the BBC he had nominated Mr Brown as leader, but it had not yet been added to the Labour Party website.

This gives the chancellor more than the 308 nominations needed to avoid a contest.

Remaining MPs

Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay’s office has reportedly said he would be nominating Mr Brown, although this has yet to be confirmed by the BBC.

A Labour spokesman said the party would not be commenting further on the nominations until they closed at 1230 BST on Thursday.

Of the other MPs yet to declare, the speaker cannot nominate and the deputy speaker, Sylvia Heal, has told the BBC she will not nominate anyone.

That leaves 15, including former home secretary Charles Clarke and former welfare reform minister and long-standing opponent of Mr Brown, Frank Field.

Candidates who get 45 or more nominations go to a ballot of party members, trade unionists and Labour MPs and European Parliament members.

In the deputy leadership contest, in which there are six candidates, only International Development Secretary Hilary Benn - with 42 officially listed nominations - has yet to get through to the national ballot.

But a source close to Mr Benn told the BBC on Wednesday that he now had the required 45 backers.

Backbencher Jon Cruddas, Education Secretary Alan Johnson, Justice Minister Harriet Harman, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain and Labour chairman Hazel Blears have all got through.

Those candidates who make it on to either ballot paper will take part in 10 hustings around the country ahead of a special conference in Manchester on 24 June, when the new leader and deputy leader will be named.

But even as the sole leadership candidate, Mr Brown will still take part in hustings.

On Wednesday he was at a campaign event in Manchester, outlining his ideas for an “environmental corps” for young people to combat climate change and saying he wanted the World Bank to be “a bank for the environment”.

Mr Blair and deputy Labour leader John Prescott will hand over on 27 June.

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Labour’s ID card sums are ‘laughable’

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

The cost of a biometric United Kingdom to support the national identity card scheme has risen by £400m since October, in addition to an extra £200m needed to process foreign nationals.

In real terms, the Home Office estimates the ten-year project will cost taxpayers a total of £5.55billion, according to a six-month audit of the scheme released last week.

In its analysis, Identity Cards Scheme Cost Report, officials said that a “greater understanding of the work required” explains why costs to the taxpayer will increase £60m a year until 2014.

Thereafter, the cost of maintaining ID cards will decline to the tune of £20m a year, bar arising “uncertainties,“ meaning taxpayers will fork out between £560m and £600m every 12 months.

Under Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006, the Government must spell out the programme’s likely cost every six months, as part of a projection covering its next 10 years.

The latest estimate follows the previous cost report in October 2006, which projected costs from then, to October 2016 for ID cards and ePassports at £5.4billion.

But the initial cost excluded £400m needed to train a growing number of staff to deliver ID cards; a number “which may well change in the light of more detailed work,” the new report says.

Although the updated estimate does not include the costs that will fall on other organisations which use ID cards, it does project the cost of issuing the identifiers to foreign nationals - £200m.

The reasons given for scaling up the costs of the project failed to ring true for Phil Booth, national coordinator for NO2ID, the anti-identity scheme lobbyist.

He told Contractor UK: “It [the government] claims that it’s got a better idea of some staffing costs now that the International Passport Service’s interrogation centre network has begun to come online.

“-But this has been planned in detail for well over 18 months, and none of the
Centres are actually open for business yet. It’s hard to believe that this could account for £640 million in any case.”

The government’s self-imposed ‘optimum bias’ in its cost reports for ID cards was “laughable,” he added, citing operating costs to have quintupled since initial estimates as low as £1.1bn over 13 years.

Mr Booth reflected: “The Home Office’s culture of secrecy about its estimates and workings make it hard to assess, let alone believe, any such ‘adjustments’ at this late stage.”

Like the scheme’s other critics, including the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, he wants to see the scheme stopped in its tracks.

But the National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, yesterday said it has no plans to scrutinise the UK-wide scheme, though the IT programme would fall within its remit.

Appeals to examine it for value for money from groups like Intellect, the hi-tech trade body, which failed to respond to a request for comment, would not alter its mind, a spokesman said.

And even if scrutiny was applied, there is disquiet about the powers of the scheme’s closest watchdogs.

“Unfortunately, the NAO and Public Accounts Committee don’t seem to have
sufficient teeth to stop the scheme,” Mr Booth said, responding to questions.

“The point of the Section 37…was so that Parliament could oversee the costs of the programme – but unfortunately, as it was never stated exactly how Parliament could intervene, for example to halt the programme or trigger a full independent audit, the reporting process seems to be a bit of an empty exercise.”

David Davis, the shadow home secretary said: “It is also no surprise the Government has had to revise their cost estimate up by so much in less than a year and undermines their criticism of the independent London School of Economics cost estimate of up to £20bn.

“The public should brace themselves for more increases every time this estimate is updated.”

Aside from the figures, both opposition parties voiced concern over the government’s decision to defer the release of the cost report from its original date of April 9.

Instead, the news of more cost to the taxpayer was released on May 10 – the date Tony Blair announced his departure, prompting Tory accusations that Labour was trying to “bury bad news.”

David Heath MP, of the Lib Dems, said he hoped that from now on ministers would appreciate that “when they have a statutory duty to report to Parliament, it is not an optional request, it is a requirement.”

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Toddler fined £89 for dropping two crisps

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

A woman was handed an £80 litter fine after her toddler grandchild dropped some crisps on the pavement.

Barbara Jubb had picked up the packet of Quavers when it fell from the hand of 20-month- old Emily.

But she failed to pick up two stray crisps that spilled from the bag.

Within seconds two council litter wardens swooped and issued her with an £80 fine.

“This is diabolical,” said Mrs Jubb, 57. “£80 is a lot of money, especially if it’s just because a baby dropped two Quavers.

“I saw these two women coming toward me with clipboards. One of them produced a card and said, ‘We are from the council and I’m going to fine you for littering’.

“I said, ‘What litter - it’s just two Quavers, it was my granddaughter, she dropped them’.”

“People were standing around listening-they were just laughing, they couldn’t believe it was happening.”

The incident happened when Mrs Jubb was waiting for a bus with her daughter Selena, Emily’s mother.

They were on their way back to their home in Crawley, West Sussex, after a hospital visit in which Selena was diagnosed with a heart condition.

Mrs Jubb added: “It was only when I got on the bus that I read the notice and realised they had fined me £80.”

Selena, 29, said: ‘At first we didn’t realise we had been fined. These two wardens had come up to us and given us a notice.

“When I read it on the bus I realised my mum had been given an £80 fine. Luckily Emily didn’t have a clue what was going on. I think they are targeting vulnerable people.”

A spokesman for Crawley Council said: “People leaving their rubbish behind - or dropping litter anywhere other than a bin - is totally unacceptable.

“It annoys responsible residents who help us to keep the town clean and tidy and the council will not tolerate unsociable behaviour.”

The council did however allow Mrs Jubb’s appeal against the fine, saying the penalty would be waived because of the ‘exceptional circumstances’.

toddler

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