Morts Musings

According to this article in the Telegraph, this year is the London Marathon’s 30th anniversary, and it’s looking pretty certain that the total cash raised for charity, by the event, is going to top the half billion pound mark.

It’s actually a bit of a fund raising phenonomen, Marathons in other parts of the world don’t have nearly such a strong philanthropic ethos as the London Marathon, which has had charitable status since before it’s first race was even run, & is now the world’s biggest annual one day charitable fund raising event. Last year’s participants raised £47.2 million, & it’s expected that the 2010 London Marathon’s 36,000 runners will raise at least as much, if not even more!

This year there are a whole host of charities helping to organise runners, and their fund raising, for example Oxfam have a London Marathon page which offers help, and related events, for runners, & even goes so far as to provide a post race massage for those who are raising cash for them.

Marathons, as a sporting event, are actually a relatively recent invention. When the modern Olympics were established in 1896 the organisers wanted an event which would tie the games with their classical Greek counterpart, &, with those first games being held in Athens, the idea of an event inspired by an important episode in ancient Athenian history obviously seemed the way to go.
The historical derivation comes from the Battle of Marathon, which was fought between the Athenians and the Persians, in 490 BC, during the first Persian invasion of Greece. The Athenians won the battle, and, in the process, also halted the Persian invasion, that much is historical fact.
However there is also a legend that, following the battle, the soldier Pheidippides was ordered to return to Athens, with news of the victory, as quickly as possible. The story tells that he ran all the way back to Athens, without a break, burst into the Athenian Assembly, and managed to gasp out news of the victory, before collapsing and dying.
There’s a fair degree of doubt over whether this part of the story is true. Various Greek writers give differing names for the runner, plus it’s also recorded that the Athenian army forced march back to the city, on the same day as the battle, to guard against the possibility of a naval assault by the Persians. Details which seem to cast doubt on whether there ever was a Pheidippides, or whether such an epic feat would be required to deliver news of the victory to his countrymen.

In any case, the most likely route from Marathon to Athens was calculated as being approximately 26 miles, and this was the distance which was set as the length of the modern Marathon race. During the early years the exact distance of the race was left with the organisers of each individual Olympics. The modern distance of 26 miles 385 yards only became a standard from the 1924 Olympics onwards, although it was first used during the 1908 London Olympics, on which occasion the extra 385 yards were added to the course to ensure that the finishing line was in front of the Royal Box, in the Great White City Stadium.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen the Govt reject the advice of experts when they fail to come to the conclusion’s which the Govt would like them to, but to me the sacking of Dr Nutt, chair of the Govt’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, last weekend, when he had the termerity to give an expert opinion which contradicts the Govts uninformed, but official, line, sums up the hubris & utter arrogance which have been hallmarks of both the Brown and Blair govts.

It also quite clearly reveals that the govts objections to cannabis and ectasy seem to come down to “drugs are illegal because they’re bad, and they’re bad because they’re illegal”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these drugs are 100% harmless, but if an expert, whose job it is to know, is stating that they’re less harmful than substances which are legal and freely available then surely that has to be a pretty good arguement for their legalisation?
OK, you could take the opposite tack and say that maybe tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal instead, but apart from being a non-starter in terms of getting the populace to accept such a move, not to mention how much it would cost the exchequer in terms of lost duty, there comes a point where govt has to butt out and let people make their own choices (and take responsibility for them) even if there is some risk involved; Else we’ll eventually end up as a society of joyless wage slaves whose only purpose is to be good little workers. I mean, if you want to start talking about banning anything which is dangerous then lets start by looking at privately owned vehicles; how many deaths and injuries do they cause each year on our roads? By contrast we’re talking about cannabis & ectasy, susbstances which routinely kill less people each year than bed related misadventures!

There’s also the fact that history has shown that prohibition doesn’t work, where someone stands to make a profit you’ll just get a black market economy spring up to meet consumer demand for prohibited goods. As things stand in this country millions of otherwise perfectly law abiding, productive members of society are criminalised because they want, and choose, to smoke cannabis. If the govt truly represented the people they’d accept that for most users cannabis is a relatively benign substance with minimal knock on effects for wider society, and they’d legalise it.
Yes I said legalise it, forget decriminalisation, although it’s often touted as an acceptable method for govt to look the other way and quietly accept that maybe cannabis isn’t such an evil drug after all, decriminalisation is in fact the worst of both worlds from a societal point of view. Users are still forced to interact with the black market, organised criminals, in order to get the stuff, and this has a number of wider implications. It means that there aren’t any safe guards on quality, no product information in terms of the strength of any particular batch, and most importantly of all, money spent on cannabis is going to support organised crime!
On the other hand if it were legalised these issues could all be eliminated; users could be sure they knew what they were getting, and wouldn’t be funding criminals, but on the contrary could be providing revenue for govt.

At a time when we’re being told that, due to the banking bail out, our country is going to be in debt for decades to come you’d think that the govt might be open to new means of raising revenue. The Home Office estimates that in 2006 the UK drug trade was worth between £3.5 and £5.8 billion, not enough to solve the country’s money woes, but getting a slice of any figure which is measured in the billions isn’t to be sniffed at!

Really it seems like a no brainer to me. Now that “the genie’s out of the bottle” it’s never going away, people are going to take these drugs, they’ll find a way to get them because someone else can make money from supplying them. When even the experts are saying that dope is less harmful than substances which society already makes freely available, why can’t the govt just get over the outdated dogma that “drugs are bad m’kay” and do the thing which would benefit everbody except the organised criminals?

This piece in the New Scientist lays out the wider picture, in terms of the govt’s rocky relationship with it’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. There’s also a petition running on the No. 10 site here, if you want to join the call to re-instate Dr Nutt.

Healthcare Charity Campaign to Raise Blood Pressure Awareness

Over the course of the past eight years’ annual national blood pressure Testing Weeks, held in the second week of September every year, over a 1.5 million people have had their blood pressure measured for free.

The campaign has been so successful that the campaign was a winner at The Charity Awards 2008 for its work on the Awareness Week.

Health professionals, including pharmacists, nurses and occupational health officers, will run well over a thousand official venues which have signed up  to offer free blood pressure checks during the event, on behalf of the charity to help test the nation’s blood pressure and educate people about what their numbers mean.

Are You 1 in 3?

This year’s theme asks  ‘Could you be the 1 in 3?’.  One in three adults has high blood pressure and it’s the biggest cause of death and disability in the UK through the strokes and heart attacks it causes – and although reports of recent research has lead some healthcare advisors to encourage everyone to take blood pressure lowering drugs it is still vital that people have their readings taken regularly in oreder to detect any increases early.

When & where can I be tested?

The awareness week runs from 7-13 September 2009. To find out where you can have your readings taken visit this page and enter your town or postcode to find the nearest venues and opening times.

Healthcare Appeal

On the run up top the event BBC Radio 4 will broadcast actor Timothy West highlighting the tragic consequences of undetected high blood pressure and describing his own experience of the condition in a special broadcast on the  Radio 4 appeals page

What should I do if I have a raised reading?

If you have a raised reading, don’t panic. It may mean that you have high blood pressure, or it may be a one-off raised reading. The important thing is visit your GP to have it checked again to find out more. If your GP diagnoses you with high blood pressure, it can be treated and controlled, through changes to your lifestyle and, for some people, also with medication.

Diagnosis of High BP

High blood pressure cannot be diagnosed after a one-off reading.  If the first reading is raised, it is recommend that  a follow-up check with a GP is done soon afterwards.

Measure Blood Pressure at Home

The purpose of the week is not only to identify those with high blood pressure but to educate and empasise the imprtance of  regularly getting your blood pressure checked – as a result more and more people are buying home monitors and following correct procedures to measure their blood pressure at home – studies show that measuring at home more accurately reflects your true readings. No longer do you need to use the old fashioned cumbersome sphygmomanometers and  take awkward, inaccurate readings with a stethoscope – there are many affordable clinically validated automatic monitors on sale to the public.