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no viable system but the one that places them in a tower of ineffable privilege. How fortunate that there is no possibility of change. How extraordinary that any alternative that is offered is either studiously ignored or viciously discredited.
    Coming to believe that my life could be different, that I could be restored to sanity, was an integral step in my recovery from addiction. I believe it is vital too on a social scale.
    You’ve probably noticed by now that I keep alluding to God. Unless you’re that bloke on the yacht and are only paying cursory attention to this book as the sisters begin to squabble and the bubbly begins to flatten. To be honest, oligarchs are not the intended readership of this book. If you are one, I’d like you to gently place the book on the deck, for posterity, and leap into the briny.
    The reason I keep mentioning God is because I believe in God. A lot of people are surprised by that, what with it being 2014 and this being a technologically advanced secular culture.
    God is primarily regarded as the preserve of thick white people and angry brown people. Since Friedrich Nietzsche (deceased) declared, “God is dead,” we’ve been exploring the observation of British writer G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The death of God doesn’t mean man will believe in nothing but that he will believe in anything.”
    I’m a good example of that: at thirteen a believer in Lakeside, at eight a believer in biscuits, at seventeen a devoted wanker, at nineteen a fanatical drug user, before winding up in the monastery of celebrity.
    After the troubling Mind-shop epiphany I went back to my old school, to see if it was as bad as I remember it or if it had somehow managed to burrow downwards from the gutter. Whenever I’m in front of young people, I sense the authority figures present prodding me to deliver a kind of “Just Say No,” “If I can do it, you can,” “Pull yer’self up by yer’ bootstraps” monologue of individualistic triumph over adversity.
    This is awkward for me because that is not my message. I don’t like dispatching trite little diatribes on behalf of an establishment that I despise, and often have to wrench the pendulum of my extreme nature back to equanimity before I tell kids to riot, or torch their exam papers or their school.
    I have it in me, this extremist, destructive impulse. When the pie-eyed teens in the school hall, where I, decades before, had grasped the tendril with which I would swing out of Essex, like a tubby Tarzan, look to me full of
X Factor
ambition and Xbox distractionand tell me that they “want to be famous too,” I wince, but I want to tell them they’ve been swindled. That they are being horribly misled by the dominant cultural narratives.
    In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn’t relinquish its lessons and I certainly wouldn’t tell other people, least of all young people, not to drink and take drugs.
    The war against drugs, which is a war against drug addicts (about which Bill Hicks beautifully observed, “If there’s a war against drugs and we’re losing, that means that the drugs are winning.”), is a good example of the system’s disingenuity on an individual, legal, and global level.
    Drug addiction is an illness. Criminalizing people that are ill is cruel, yes, but also insidious. It’s also bloody futile: no self-respecting drug addict is remotely dissuaded from pursuing their habit by the legal status of the drug that they are taking. All criminalization achieves is unsafe, unregulated drug use, the demonization of users, and the creation of an international criminal economy. You know this, I know this, and more worryingly the people who maintain this system know it, so why is it being maintained? Who benefits?
    Well, on this I’m qualified to postulate. I may not have successfully overthrown a government or devised more productive, fairer, and more enjoyable social systems before, so there