Ever since Home Secretary David Blunkett announced last week that cannabis will be reclassified from class B to class C, the Daily Mail has been running a campaign to make him reconsider. Every day they have been running headlines on how terrible life is in areas of Lambeth where “drugs usage is rife”. They completely ignore the fact that most of the crime surrounding drugs is caused purely because they are illegal. Today’s headline is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. They have a photo of three or four people enjoying a joint in a sunny park. An innocuous enough site you might think – but not to the Daily Mail as only yards away children play innocently unaware of the fiends in their midst. It’s all total nonsense, of course.

And here’s something that doesn’t change. Both politicians and the tabloids still have a knee-jerk reaction to drugs which make it impossible to have an intelligent conversation on the subject. In the ten years since I wrote this entry, cannabis has been reclassified back to class B and the government have sacked a scientific adviser on drugs because he insisted on giving them scientific evidence on drugs.

Big Brother still isn’t news, but most of the tabloids continue to act like it is. In particular The Star has had a Big Brother story on its front page just about every day for the last two weeks. Here’s how it works. The Star hacks watch out for news the from the show and blow it up out of all proportion. Today’s headline is a great example. They claim that Jade is pregnant.

Their evidence for this seems to boils down to the fact that she’s a bit porky and she eats a lot. Now I know that Jade isn’t the brightest kid on the block, but I strongly suspect she would have picked up on some other clues if she was really pregnant.

This shows one big change in the last ten years. No-one cares about Big Brother at all any more. Channel 4 realised that and they very sensibly killed it off a couple of years ago. Channel 5 have been broadcasting it since then. It’s running currently but I couldn’t name one of the housemates. I haven’t seen a single front-page headline about it this year. Of course, there are other reality TV shows that grab the headlines instead. As far as I can see, that’s mainly the talent shows.