Come Down With Me

A fantastic TV show has been on for the last couple of nights in the UK called “Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial” on Channel 4 about MDMA, which is the good stuff in ecstasy. They are performing MRIs on people under the influence of the drug, in a double-blind trial, to discover how it works on the human brain, as well as performing a variety of other tests on the 25 subjects. These subjects included a writer, an editor of The New Scientist, a politician, a priest, an ex-SAS soldier, and Keith Allen. The aim of the show was to open up the public to the idea that this drug could be used as a cure for certain mental health conditions. It was a wonderfully frank and public look at one of the most talked about recreational drugs on the planet.

Whether you agree or disagree with people taking MDMA for fun, we should explore the effects of such a mood altering drug for a number of reasons. The main reason is the obvious benefits such a drug could have on the treatment of a variety of mental illnesses including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. To simply dismiss a drug’s usefulness for such serious and common diseases as above, on the grounds of an arbitrary law enforced by every human civilisation seems very archaic.

Think about some of other medications, and how regularly they are prescribed considering the vast harm they cause. Chemotherapy is an example. It kills you. It is literally poison and the reason it works is that is destroys your cells, including your cancerous ones, and when your body starts healing, it is hoped that your body will fight the cancer and manage to beat it in this weakened state. Chemotherapy is used very regularly and with good reasons; it saves lives. And it is legal.

Is cancer more dangerous than post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? In most cases, yes. Cancer will kill you while PTSD may just ruin your life and mental health. Is MDMA safer than chemo? According to the limited scientific data available, yes, but we simply don’t know enough about MDMA to be sure of the side effects. Hence research is needed… And now!

Mental health isn't valued as highly as physical health by the general public. I think this is because we are led to believe that those suffering from mental illness are somehow weaker and we respond less sympathetically to them. They are not weaker. They are just unfortunate, similar to someone who develops breast cancer. They are unlucky.

Another issue with that some illegal drugs, such as DMT and MDMA, are never researched on because of patents, believe it or not. The patents are old and have expired. Therefore these massive companies have no interest in seeing if these drugs can be useful aids in helping us fight certain mental illnesses. Why? Because if a company spends their money finding it out, any rival pharmaceutical company can use their research and release the drug without spending all that precious R&D money. It is within the best interests of the company to create a new chemical they can patent that can help, even if it less effective than MDMA. That and the fact that researching a drug that is outlawed internationally costs a LOT of money.

Why is MDMA outlawed internationally? Scientific studies suggest it is less dangerous than horse-riding (according to the ex-advisor to the UK government on the misuse of drugs, who also helped with this Channel 4 programme) and less dangerous than aspirin (according to a top UK police chief). Are these highly respected members of society wrong? Maybe, but the truth is we simply don’t know because the research isn't there. The only thing we do know is that the media machine made it abundantly clear that you should not say something so positive about an illegal drug and expect to keep your job.

We have parents of teenagers that have died from ecstasy screaming that it kills, against thousands of regular users who swear by it. The fact is that many people have died from MDMA because of poor communication by the media. It is stressed that you must drink a lot of water and this has caused people to die from drinking too much water (Leah Betts being the most infamous example). Drug takers must research the drug before taking it! It is time we put aside our biased sunglasses that are based on either personal experience with the drug, or a screaming negative-focused media. It is time we let the scientists do what they do best and test their hypotheses. They need to do this to help the thousands of people that could benefit from its use.

And they also need to do it to relay the idea that mood altering drugs aren't necessary bad, m'kay. People are different. We have ups, downs, good weeks, bad weeks, productive periods, and lethargic periods. People also enjoy different pursuits. Some like tennis, some like getting incredibly drunk, some like a good book, some like one night stands. This variety in behaviour and activities is what has made us such a successful and intelligent species. Why do the global authoritarians believe that taking a drug that alters the chemical balance in your mind is a bad thing? Who thinks that alcohol should be banned? Alcohol would appear to affect more of the brain than MDMA, according to the latest studies.

Our brains are just massive bags of chemicals reacting with the environment around us anyway. The food we eat, the coffee we drink, the amount of sleep we get, the traffic on the way home – all these things alter our mood. This change in mood, change in perception, is beneficial. It allows us to see things differently, to think differently, to experience differently. Variety is the spice of life, a common cause of creativity, and this is a good thing. So why can’t a capable person, able to make decisions based on the evidence available, be allowed to take certain specific substances that alter their perception? They know the risks involved, which are lower than driving or alcohol. So why can’t fully functioning adults buy this substance legally, where it can be taxed and regulated?

I do think that people under 18 should not take these mood altering drugs though. The mind is developing and flooding it with an artificial chemical will have unknown and possibly dangerous consequences. The data isn't there to suggest it is terrible but from my experience of seeing people take drugs from a young age, I would think it is not advisable.

The line of thought that suggests that street MDMA is cut with poisonous chemicals and therefore banning the substance somehow stops the problem is a circular argument. First of all rat poison, or whatever toxic chemical these evil drug dealers apparently use to cut a drug, will be far more expensive than caffeine, or aspirin, or a variety of other substances. Why would they cut it with poison? They are running a business, an illegal business at that. Do you think hurting your clients is a good business strategy? It summons the police to you for one, and ruins your client base! Furthermore, this is an exact reason to legalise. If it was regulated by the government you wouldn't have these problems. People are going to take drugs, no matter how many times someone tells us lies about the effects. This line of argument is moot and should be squashed away in a box of terrible ideas for eternity.

Relying on the mass media for information is a dangerous game. If you only got your worldly knowledge from news networks and tabloids, you'd be seriously distressed about everything. They don't print good news about anything, let alone taking an illegal drug. If I only believed what I read in the news then I would think every teacher is a sex offender, every footballer is a racist c***, immigration is out of control, and the country is seriously in trouble. My point is that reporting news is really about reporting negative news, because it is more interesting and sells more papers.

The issues with recreational use of MDMA are the same as alcohol. You have to:

1. Know you limits.

2. Know when you are using it too frequently.

3. Stop if you start to have negative effects.
4. Use in a comfortable setting.
5. Be informed about how it will affect you. (www.erowid.org)

These rules are difficult to follow because of the rituals and cycles of behaviour people get in to with crowds of friends. But if you use any drug to excess, it will cause you problems. The problem is that so little is known about addiction, and the best way to break people from addictions, that illegality is viewed as the best solution. Pushing the problem to the other side of the law only moves the problem. It doesn't stop it and it certainly doesn't solve it. It is time we accepted that people will use and we need to learn the best way to educate, to regulate, and to treat addiction.

To finish, I would like to point out some annoyances I had with the Channel 4 TV show. I didn't like some of the leaps they made from the tiny survey. At one point, one of the experts suggested that because only 1 out of the 25 test subjects had negative effects from MDMA that perhaps only 4% of the population would be affected negatively in this manner. A much bigger test group is needed before such a wild hypothesis can be made – otherwise it is just speculation. However, this was a live show and unfortunately such exaggerations can be spoken in the moment, so I'll let it go...

What I won't let go is the terrible camera angles that they insisted on using. During an interesting discussion, they suddenly cut to a black & white camera that was panning across the studio. Terrible directing there. The content is interesting enough, the speakers are very clear - let's listen to them without the distracting angle changes please. My viewing enjoyment suffered... Maybe some MDMA would help??

The "live" aspect of the show also made it cut-away from people too soon and Jon Snow would interrupt experts mid-sentence. I feel like an edited version would have been better, however I wonder whether an edited version would've been allowed on TV...

There is a large scope for some very interesting and enlightening experiments involving MDMA and other drugs. I hope to see and read about a lot more studies. For instance, most ecstasy users will take other drugs while on MDMA and also be in a completely different environment to the test subjects who were inside an MRI scanner and hospital building. These other influences need to be looked into and studied to see how they alter the MDMAmazing experience.

One day in the future we may look back at this time of our history as the prohibition years, like America with alcohol in the early 20th century. We may say that forcing this massive economy underground into the hands of criminals caused considerably more harm than legalisation has. We may say that the best cure for PTSD is MDMA. We may even say that MDMA is a beautiful chemical that when used in moderation in the right setting can improve one's life and break down boundaries between people. I wonder whether this will happen in my lifetime... I seriously doubt it.

P.S. A cult hero / new meme has been born in the form of Shabs...

Things You Own End Up Owning You

This is a fantastic line from a brilliant book and also one of my favourite films, Fight Club. It's one of the many quotable lines from the film and this is my middle-class, "I've moved back in with my parents", interpretation of it.

My mum loves to have a tidy kitchen and everything has to be in its right place. This includes the dishwasher. It has to be 100% full, all the plates must be rinsed, and everything in its particular spot of course. I appreciate a good Jenga mission when it comes to dishwashers and I definitely fall on the rinsing plate side of the dispute - it is not a food disposal machine for Christ’s sake! So yeah, I get where my mum is coming from. However I am somewhat inconsiderate when it comes to taking glasses from my room to the dishwasher.

That journey is one I took 3 times the other day as I had 10 glasses in my room. I filled the top part of the dishwasher while the bottom part was around 90% full. This left my mum in a predicament that she has to deal with every couple of days: How to fill every available space in the dishwasher before putting it on. She told me that I should just wash them up rather than use all the space, as there was still room for a couple of plates.

I realised that this is what Tyler Durden meant when he was speaking about things owning you. You buy a dishwasher because you don’t want to clean things by hand anymore. Old school washing uses more water, takes longer, and messes up your beautiful hands. But then you become so obsessed by the dishwasher and the control you have arbitrarily put on it in one way or another, such as having to fully load it before letting it run - you lose sight of why you bought it. It is there to do the washing up for you, to make your life easier, not to force you to do washing up and to agitate you into filling it 100%.

You feel obliged to complete the ritual of the item, in this case making sure it’s fully loaded. This is true with many things we have. Something like facebook. If I have a notification, I have to look - it’ll drive me crazy if I don’t. Another example is when I first got a mobile phone. I bought it so I could keep in better contact with my friends (and to play Snake). But then I hear the vibration of a new text while I’m drifting off to sleep, and I have to read it! If I don’t know who is texting me instantly, it’ll bug me and I won’t sleep, even though the last thing I want now is contact with my friends telling me how drunk they are!

I bought a car so I could be comfortable in it and drive around in style. I ended up cleaning it every 5 days and driving myself mad when I accidently spilt coffee on the interior.

If I buy a tablet computer to make things simpler and easier, I'll end up spending hours figuring out how it all works, only to never use half the functions. If I were to use it, it would take longer than a computer, and will ruin aspects of my social life.

If I hear my smoke alarm bleeping. I have to heed its warning, and escape my burning house alive.

Okay maybe that last one is helpful but do you get the point? You buy things with good intentions, but you end up being overcome by your addiction of being obsessive with things. You eventually spend hours doing something that doesn't benefit you and you don't even enjoy yourself doing it. It just becomes another task you have to do.

What is particularly ironic about this whole post is that it was all started by a Fight Club advertisement on my facebook wall. That inspired me to write this and spend my time on this. Things you own end up owning you.

Opportunity To Work On A Short Film

안녕하세요,

Sobweb Productions is looking for a talented young British Korean who can help with an online TV production. The show is a comedy about three Brits who move to Busan, South Korea to teach English, and the excitement, trials and tribulations they encounter whilst living there. We are filming the short film in London with the aim of it leading to a commission for a six part television series.

South Korea is a fantastic country with a vast history and a very bright future, and it is leading Asia and the world in a variety of areas. However it still remains somewhat of a mystery to the majority of British people who tend to think of China and Japan when considering East Asia.

We talk about the importance of globalisation in the UK but what we really mean is westernisation. If we truly want globalisation, the western world needs to absorb some other cultures as well. This project will help to bridge this gap and put South Korea in the spotlight and into the British public’s consciousness.

The show informs the audience of various Korean quirks from a western standpoint in a humorous way. The production also shows how South Korea is leading the world in technology and the aesthetics of the show reflects this.

We are looking for someone who shares our vision, is committed and dedicated to the production and will put their all into it. Any experience in film making is preferred but not essential.

We want someone who will act as our primary Korean handler. We need a keen partner to work with our location manager and find places suitable for shooting in Korea Town, New Malden, London. This is where we plan to shoot the film that we hope will lead to a commission.

This is an independent production and will provide you with experience in programme making and pre-production. However, it will not provide you with an immediate salary as funding is limited for this independent production.  This job will reward you with great experience and knowledge that you are helping to spread the word about Korean culture, throughout the UK. We hope that we will be able to provide future paid work if the short film is successful in securing a commission.

Major Roles

- Improving the screenplay by ensuring that possible cultural inaccuracies are reviewed and addressed.

- Working with our location manager to scout and secure locations in Korea Town, New Malden.

- Helping with auditions for Korean actors.

- Providing on-set expertise in Korean pronunciation and customs.

Minor Roles

- Help to secure funding with Korean companies and art grants.

- A small amount of translation work, primarily for the screenplay.

Experience Required

- Fluent in Korean

- Good communication skills in English

- Detailed knowledge of Korean culture

- Currently living in London.

- Has spent a minimum of 3 months in South Korea.

If you would like to apply for this fantastic opportunity, please send an email to contact@sobwebproductions.co.uk explaining why you would like to get involved and the skills that make you the perfect fit for the role (in English please). Applications close at the end of October 2012. We will start interviewing immediately so get those applications in!

There are other roles available in the team so if you have experience in film and would like to share some of that, please contact us. Sobweb Productions is a young production company in its early days but we are growing in numbers. We look forward to welcoming you to the team. 

감사합니다,

David Sobell & Kathryn Pascoe

Director & Producer

In The Beginning...

I've known since I was a child that I wanted to be a comedian. I found out two things when I was 12 that changed everything though. Number one was that comedians are not lizards that change colour. Number two was that I was dyslexic.

I started writing screenplays at 18 and haven’t stopped since. I am now at a point in my life where I wish to pursue it in a more serious way. This is why I am bringing a team together to produce a short film or pilot which will then hopefully get commissioned for a short series.

My first major life choice was to study the dream that is Comical Engineering. Unfortunately my newly invented dyslexia had struck again. I wasn’t going to be engineering comical situations but was in fact learning about heat transfer and fluid systems. Trying to make these subjects funny was like trying to breaking one of the laws of thermodynamics (which are impossible to break by the way.)

After studying Chemical Engineering for four years and working for a year as a process engineer, I realised that as much I enjoyed it, I have other ambitions. I chose to move to South Korea, a country I knew very little about, to teach English. It was there that I decided that I wanted to create a show about this fascinating culture. It was so cliche and predictable - I was following in the footsteps of so many others, on the way to becoming a sitcom writer; study chemical engineering before moving to South Korea to teach English.

It has become clear that if I want to get my Korean show made, I will have to do it myself. No-one is waiting around for my script with a few hundred thousand pounds in their hand. I am grabbing this project by the horns and learning to steer – it’s all very exciting. This website (and its brand new domain!) will promote the production, as well as acting as a release valve for all those pent up moments of angst we encounter as a team.

I am looking for contributors and anyone who wants to help with the production. There will be a lot more information coming in the next few weeks so stay tuned. You can help Sobweb Productions and the show by sharing this website, liking this post, and becoming a fan on facebook. Thanks for reading.

Death of a Traveller. Birth of a Blue Steel Hitler.

My mum bought me a “Welcome Home” balloon. It was one of those overly fancy ones made of tin foil. It floated around my bedroom proudly displaying to everyone that I was not only home, but I was welcome. Feeling truly welcome is one of the most pleasant feelings one can experience, and when I returned home after 17 months in Asia, the welcome I received was mammoth. When you live somewhere as an ethnic minority, in a culture that is so wildly different to your own, you grow to miss the feeling of being at home. I didn’t have a problem with feeling welcome in Korea; 99.9% of people I met (yes I met over a 1000 people so that percentage is accurate) were very kind at made me feel at ease. At ease, but not at home.

Home is a place that brings back childhood memories, like the first time you watched the Wizard of Oz. And now I have come to realise that the crazy cow Dorothy was right. There really is no place like home.

So anyway, this awe-inspiring balloon that was making my life worth living has decided to piss its helium all over my room and start sinking... slowly. We are talking weeks - seven and a half to be exact - for that balloon to descend to my floor and its sinking is having an unexpected effect on me.

I take this falling balloon to be a symbol, a metaphor for a dying set of personal beliefs. I have returned from travelling feeling like a bit of hippy with a luscious ginger beard. My attitudes are very different from when I left and seem alien to some of my friends. But my hippy ideology is slowly being corrupted by our culture and is crashing down to consumerist earth. Just like this damn balloon.

Why can’t it just float forever? How hard is it to make a completely air tight tin-foil container that can hold my dreams aloft, above my TV, touching the ceiling for a lifetime!? It’s a strange thought but that’s me in a nutshell. I add meaning to the meaningless. This balloon means nothing. It isn't trying to convince me to progress with my life. It doesn't represent my travelling free spirit and its decline as the “real world” sinks in. The balloon isn't forcing me to drop with it, deeper into the depths of the soft carpeted floor of a middle class England life. It's just a balloon.

I know all this but when that balloon finally hit the ground, a bit of the explorer inside me died. I looked in the mirror and I saw a very hairy, ginger faced man staring back at me. The balloon had fallen and I felt I only had one option left... Shave the beard off.

I no longer felt like a man of the forest

One hairy ape....

First I neatened it up slightly

No more neck beard!

Check out those chops!

I'll call this the cheek patch...

Zebra cheek is the new clean shaven

I've never looked so stylish...

...until now

The zebra chin is the new zebra cheek

I'm sure I'm making some hearts melt out there...

If I was a porn star, this is how I'd look

Zebra tash didn't work so well

The Blue Steel Hitler

Don't worry, I did clean up.
And yes, I also removed the Blue Steel Hitler...

Hello World

Welcome to Sobweb – the latest website that will be falling into the world of obscurity over the next year... or not, depending on which manic depressive tendency I'm exhibiting at any given moment.

This project, let’s call it a project, is all about creativity and the journey it can take you on. We all have our creative moments. That flash of genius as it comes thundering through our consciousness – be it about a personal decision, a book you’ve been thinking of writing, or just a witty facebook status. It happens to everyone, all the time.

What you choose to do during this “divine” inspirational moment varies from idea to idea, and person to person; some things get written down, others painted, some ideas are tweeted, or sometimes a thought process it just marvelled at before disappearing into the clutter of our mind.

After this flash of creativity, when the thunder is now just a mere whisper, doubt creeps in. This doubt and fear can be paralysing at times and can stifle the most imaginative ideas. Sometimes this a good thing; I don’t think the horror movie idea about bed bugs that eat people, which was conceived on a long car journey in Scotland, was ever going to be the blockbuster we believed it could be in the moment. But then again who knows? Maybe it could have been with the right direction and a dash of good fortune.

A lot of good ideas are lost every day as a result of this fear and this doubt. We are afraid of failing. And for good reason. Evolutionarily speaking, failing at something would normally lead to death. If you don’t time that rock throw correctly, that lion will be eating your face. You can understand why we as a species are afraid of failure and of creativity in particular. You might think “Actually, I won’t throw a rock, I’ll think outside the box and try talking to the hairy fella.” A few days later that lion is crapping out bits of you, and that creative thinking has cost you your life. Fear is there for a reason. Unfortunately the instincts controlling our response to fear have not evolved nearly as rapidly as our society has.

Death is no longer a realistic consequence of creativity. We can throw off the shackles of our genetic carefulness and put on our “I don’t give a shit what you think” hat. We can develop ideas, stories, pictures, and we can share them globally, with our fear being potentially realised merely by trolls and dislikes.

This is what Sobweb is about – sharing ideas and sharing our own flashes of genius, be it a recent one or something that you may have stored away on your C: drive somewhere. I have two main passions in my life: writing and listening. I love to hear other people’s stories and I love to tell my own. So please, tell us about some of your own inspired moments by clicking "contact us" and sending us something. It will most likely get reposted, with full credit to you of course.

This fear can be overwhelming and unsettling, and this is what we at Sobweb struggle with every day as we try to pursue our dreams. We want to create an independent production about a different culture to our own, exploring the far eastern country of Korea, in a comedic setting. Sobweb will be growing in numbers over the coming months and we hope to welcome people with passion for this project.

This site is about our journey of creativity; the joy we get from achieving the next step or the overwhelming sense of failure that can paralyse the most imaginative of ideas. We want to share our journey and we want you to share yours.

I'll leave you with a TED talk I recently watched that has inspired me somewhat. I'm not really a TED watcher but I got linked on Facebook and ended up spending an hour or so watching a few talks. Enjoy.