Monday 16 December 2013

The Wild and the Innocent

My favourite Audie Murphy western is The Wild and the Innocent (usual date 1959, the Audie Murphy web site gives 1958, directed by Jack Sher)...

http://www.audiemurphy.com/movies26.htm

Audie Murphy and Sandra Dee are the rustic innocents, who attract the interest of corrupt sheriff, Gilbert Roland (and here I have to put in the !).

There is this exchange between the sheriff and his sidekick - from memory...

Sidekick:  What do you make of them, Sheriff?

Sheriff:  Very dangerous.

Sidekick:  How so?

Sheriff:  She doesn't know how beautiful she is. 
             And he doesn't know he's in love with her.




Sunday 1 December 2013

A historical source...

I recently found that one of my first publications has become a historical source. Which is a bit spooky...

SEE...
John Davis, The London Drug Scene and the Making of Drug Policy, 1965–73
Twentieth Century British History (2006) 17 (1): 26-49.

'...It is important, though, to distinguish this sort of multi-drug use, spurred primarily by the junkies’ search for heroin substitutes, from the poly-drug use characteristic of the wider London scene that was rooted in eclecticism and experimentation. ‘The typical young user’, a Medical Research Council Working Party concluded in 1970, ‘is now much more often a poly-drug abuser than someone exclusively dependent on any one drug.’60 Hard figures are, as usual, hard to find. Elizabeth Tylden’s study of cannabis users found that whereas 80% of users surveyed in 1965 had used no other drug, this was true of only 11% of users surveyed in 1970; the proportion ‘on multiple drugs’ had risen from 2 to 21%.61 Patrick O’Sullivan, working with teenage users in Camden, found that experience increased with age: those approaching twenty had experimented ‘over the years... with most of the “soft drugs”…  Through experience and contacts they had therefore built up a good deal of drug knowledge of the kind lacking in those younger groups.’62...'

And Note 62 is

62  P. O’Sullivan, ‘A Square Mile of Drug Use’, Drugs and Society 2/2, November 1972, 14.