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A couple of examples of panics surrounding "legal highs"; described as "more worrying than illegal drugs" and "dangerous synthetic drugs".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/11408722/Why-legal-highs-are-more-worrying-than-illegal-drugs.html

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The rural county saw a massive surge over just four years, with the total 117 times the level seen in 2011, when just seven incidents were recorded by police.

It also saw the largest year-on-year rise from 347 in 2013.

Hampshire saw a significant rise from nine to 403 incidents between 2011 and last year, a more than 40-fold increase.

South Yorkshire's figures jumped from six to 465 in the same period, including a nearly four-fold rise year-on-year.

And another rural county, Norfolk, reported a 13-fold increase from 2011 to 2014, up from 20 to 258.

Essex reported 125 incidents last year, up from just 23 in 2011.

A legal high marketed as 'Benzo Fury'

"As well as posing worrying health risks, these figures suggest 'legal highs' are placing increasing pressure on public services," said Christian Guy, director of the CSJ.

"It is too easy for young people to walk into high street shops and buy these drugs - many of them as dangerous and addictive as Class A substances.

Many legal highs are marked 'Not for human consumption' in a bid to evade the law

"If we want to start responding to the problems caused by 'legal highs' we need to clamp down on those making a living out of selling them."

The think-tank has called on the Government to create new police powers to close shops that persist in selling so-called legal highs.

The drugs, which are formally known as new psychoactive substances, mimic the effects of illegal substances such as heroin, amphetamine and cannabis.

Despite being known as "legal highs", many of the substances been outlawed - such as mephedrone, or "miaow miaow" - but dealers keep one step ahead of the law by subtly changing the chemical compositionof the drugs.

The number of deaths associated with the use of legal highs jumped from 12 in 2009 to 97 in 2012 in England.

Last October a Home Office report said decriminalising drugs would have little effect on the number of people abusing the illegal substances.

It prompted a major row in the Coalition as it indicated that decriminalising drugs - even Class A substances such as heroin and cocaine - could have some benefits in the criminal justice system.

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Rural areas see surge in 'legal highs' abuse

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The rural county saw a massive surge over just four years, with the total 117 times the level seen in 2011, when just seven incidents were recorded by police. It also saw the largest year-on-year rise from 347 in 2013. Hampshire saw a significant rise from nine to 403 incidents between 2011 and last year, a more than 40-fold increase.

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Lots of fuss was made about two members of One Direction smoking a joint on holiday in Peru (referred to as the "joint smoking video scandal"). It "caused a rift" in the band, and their families, as well as concern for fans. This seems to be an example of both youth as 'victims' and 'folk devils' simultaneously. One of the parents expresses concern that her son is "in danger of falling foul of pop super-stardom"; whereas others expressed concern over how their actions would affect fans.

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(Photo: Rex)

ONE Direction are holding peace talks to ease tensions between bandmates following the online drug video scandal.

Singer Liam Payne has stepped in to act as peacemaker as relations between the boys become strained.

Harry Styles is furious that Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik put the band's reputation on the line after a video of the two of them smoking a joint and laughing about taking drugs was revealed.

Liam, 20, spoke of the troubles facing the group for the first time, tweeting: "Hopefully we stand the test of time." The star told his 17million Twitter followers: "I love my boys and maybe things have gone a little sideways. I apologise for that."

There is no suggestion the band will split and friends are adamant everything can be resolved as they continue their world tour.

Liam believes they were stupid and reckless after a leaked film showed them puffing on a spliff in a tour van while in Peru.

A source said: "Liam is a calm head and he believes everything can be sorted out. Lots of bands go through these moments, but he knows everything will be fine."

Liam publicly acknowledged the band's backstage troubles for the first time, tweeting: "We are only in our 20s we all do stupid things at this age. We all have a lot of growing up to do in an extreme circumstance. I'm not making excuses but it's fact we are gonna fall short somewhere.

"Hopefully we stand the test of time and get it right in the end. I don't take this for granted and I'm extremely grateful to be here doing this.

"Thank you to everyone who has stuck with us through this, just know that we love you guys for it and it means the world."

We can reveal Louis, 22, has promised his shocked mum Johannah he'll "never do it again". During an emotional family showdown this week he originally claimed it had all been "a silly joke".

But he then told her he was sorry and vowed he will not touch drugs again. Johannah, 40, is said to be deeply upset by the video and is worried Louis is in danger of falling foul of pop super-stardom.

She fears the band's entourage are not doing enough to protect them as they continue their sell-out world tour.

A source said: "Johannah is very concerned about Louis and thinks that his inner circle could do more to protect him. She realises though that they can't be with him 24 hours a day and thinks he is stupid for doing what he appears to have done."

The peace talks come as the Sunday Mirror can reveal the bandmates spent much of their weekend apart, despite being on tour together at Manchester City's Etihad Stadium, where they performed to 60,000 fans again last night.

On stage the boys have appeared distant and after gigs have spent their free time apart, with Liam going to his sister's birthday party and Harry visiting his mum at her Cheshire home after their Friday concert.

It also emerged this week that the group have been travelling on separate jets during their world tour, with smoking said to be causing further rifts within the band.

Liam smokes normal cigarettes and Niall and Harry, both 20, often fly on a different "non-smoking" private jet.

But a source said: "Liam has stepped in to try to pull everybody back together. He knows the damage that can be done by letting these things fester, and is determined to get the group back on track. It won't be easy and a lot of issues need addressing."

After a crisis meeting with their management before their gig in Sunderland on Wednesday, the band ordered their legal team to launch an investigation into how the video got on to the web. A source said: "The boys insist the footage has been stolen from them."

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One Direction hold peace talks with family and management as drug rift pushes them apart

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ONE Direction are holding peace talks to ease tensions between bandmates following the online drug video scandal. Singer Liam Payne has stepped in to act as peacemaker as relations between the boys become strained.

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There is a host of articles, books and other writings on the English riots in August 2011. These are just some examples that appeared on the Guardian back-log of related articles since the riots began up until this year.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/05/riots-inequality-poverty-self-esteem

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/28/uk-riots-twitter-facebook

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/30/national-archives-1981-riots-parallels

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'Have-a-go hero training' urged for public to tackle antisocial behaviour

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Police cuts mean active citizens need courses in self-defence and defusing conflict, Royal Society of Arts report says

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"Mods & Rockers & Other Folk Devils".

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Every now and then the country gets its knickers in a twist about one thing or other. Whether it be The Mail accusing refugees of eating swans or hysteria about teen pregnancy. These sweeping waves of mistrust, fear, and criticism (among other things) are known as "moral panics"; the groups they focus on, as "folk devils". Stan Cohen coined both these terms in the late 1960s. We had a chat with him about why people get so freaked out by deviants. By the way--we know people like posts about kittens, sex, and photos of tits, but this is a bit wordy. Vice: You came up with "moral panic" and "folk devils" in the 60s--what were you working on at the time, and how did you come to define moral panics? Stan Cohen: Many of us were starting to write a countercultural version of traditional criminology. People like myself and Jock Young, who wrote a book called The Drugtakers, these were the first few books in what became known as the "new criminology," or "the sociology of deviance." It was the mods and rockers phenomenon that I did my field research on. So were you researching criminology, or sociology? Well I see criminology as a branch of sociology. For me it's the same. It's the sociology of crime, deviance, and social problems. I was working on my PHD in '64-'65, when the original mods and rockers confrontations were happening at the seaside. I used to go down to Margate and places like that over bank holiday weekends, and conduct interviews and fieldwork. Can you give me some quick definitions of moral panic and folk devils? Yes. In terms of the reaction to delinquency, categories like crime aren't fixed, they depend on social reaction. These kind of new theories placed a lot of emphasis on the way society reacts to deviance or rule-breaking. Moral panics are expressions of disapproval, condemnation, or criticism that arise every now and then to phenomenons which could be defined as deviant. The example I took was the perceived misbehavior--what we would now call "anti-social behavior"--of teenagers, which was really exaggerated, and out of proportion to the original events. The moral part is the condemnation and social disapproval, and the panic is the element of hysteria and overreaction. Which subsequently can be applied to all sorts of waves of phenomenon. It is largely created by the media: The general rule is no media--no moral panic. The media are carriers of moral panics, which they either initiate themselves, or they carry the message of other groups. We see things about unmarried mothers, failing schools, the current crisis about children in care. These are all distinguishable moral panics, and the argument is that the reaction to deviance inflates and increases these groups. So if a moral panic is proportional to the perceived moral threat, it is no longer a moral panic? Is it the disproportion that defines it? I think that's right. The theory works on the assumption of disproportionality. That is a point that has divided a lot of people. It is not a requirement of a moral panic that it be exaggerated, but I think you could call it a factor. It's a sticky point. When you coined the term, it was based on contemporary goings on, how do you feel about the habit and practice of applying "moral panic" as a term to historical events like pogroms and witch hunts? Is that a valid use of the term? It can be taken a bit too far. It is fine if it just sees these as historical parallels, but historical examples are obviously lacking some of the main features of contemporary "moral panics." It's OK to use a comparison as long as you realize that we are talking about very different types of phenomenon, particularly in reference to media. These historical panics were not media-driven in the way that modern ones are, nor are they often attached to popular culture. Whereas the groups that I studied were deeply attached to modern pop culture--it just boiled down to a difference in consumer styles, mods were consumers, broken away from 50s style, on scooters, Ben Sherman shirts--the precursor of today's stylistic people. The rocker was drawing on the older, working-class culture, the remnant of 50s culture. Both groups ended up as caricatures of themselves. Do subjects of moral panics ever become empowered by the moral scrutiny they come under? Can a group gain from being folk devils? It's a good question, but usually the power of the media is so great that it just emphasises their lack of power. They are the objects of media reaction. It is true though that sometimes deviants fight back against the labels, the kind of sociological term we use for that is "labeling theory" or "social reaction theory." The power of groups like the media, police, the criminal justice system, professionals, and so on, to label people. But too much emphasis on the power of the social reaction might lead us to ignore cases where subjects fight back. If you look at the history of counter-cultures, you have the least powerful at one end, and at the other the most powerful intellectually motivated countercultures who are folk devils that fight back--they might be empowered, especially if they are treated unfairly. Did you at the time feel that you took any side in the confrontation between the media and the folk devils you were studying? I know what you mean, but I think I was genuinely trying to understand the social reaction. I wasn't fighting a battle on behalf of the mods or the rockers. My personal sympathies lay with the underdog, as they still do. But at that time it was not so great an issue. The mods or rockers were not real carriers of any substantial opposition or political message, that would be to romanticize them far too much. I try to see things from both sides. I spent the day in the clubs and on the beaches, then going back to my flat to change into a suit to interview the police and magistrates in the evening. So are moral panics inherently a bad thing? No. There are good moral panics, panics that highlight worthy problems. Society does, at times, deny the presence of certain problems. Things are normalized. There was a horrible example recently of an incest case where you had two decades of normalization--people had covered it up and denied it, when what we actually needed was a good moral panic. Social reaction theory or MP theory is not very significant if it just looks at the overreaction--it has to produce cases of underreaction too. The singling out of major atrocities for example, those are beneficial moral panics. Things like huge campaigns to solve problems in the Third World, to stamp out disease and so on. Do you think that widespread fears, and general dissatisfaction in a population can make a it less vulnerable to these panics? I don't think so. The jaded argument doesn't really apply. Certainly people are overwhelmed by the amount of information they are getting and that might make some difference. Information overload is a big issue these days. People are asked so often to help a cause, contribute money, and so on. But at the same time we remain in a state of crisis, as always, about the moral boundaries of society. As long as there is not one single set of moral values across a whole society, there will always be these episodes of moral panic. BRUCE LA VRAI

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Every now and then the country gets its knickers in a twist about one thing or other. Whether it be The Mail accusing refugees of eating swans or hysteria about teen pregnancy. These sweeping waves of mistrust, fear, and criticism (among other things) are known as "moral panics"; the groups they focus on, as "folk devils".

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Pearson discussing "panic over youth disorder" in the UK.

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This malaise is nothing new; it was a general current of feeling in the 1920s and 30s. Then, as now, these sentiments were linked directly to problems of crime and criminal justice. In addition to common allegations that the family, community and authority were in disrepair, a key cause of crime was seen as American gangster movies that incited "copycat" crime and immorality.

The King George's Jubilee Trust report of 1939, The Needs of Youth, summed up a catalogue of complaint that is uncannily familiar: "Relaxation of parental control, decay of religious influence, and the transplantation of masses of young persons to housing estates where there is little scope for recreation and plenty for mischief ... The problem is a serious challenge, the difficulty of which is intensified by the extension of freedom which, for better or worse, has been given to youth in the last generation."

These complaints from the inter-war years seem like a carbon copy of our own, and those who voiced them were often to be found looking back to happier times "before the war". But this was not a picture of itself that late Victorian England would always have found recognisable.

Submitting evidence in 1898 to the Howard Association on the subject of juvenile offenders, CG Heathcote, the stipendiary magistrate for Brighton, explained that "the manners of children are deteriorating" and that "the child of today is coarser, more vulgar, less refined than his parents were". It was during the hot summer of 1898 that the word "hooligan" made an abrupt entrance into the English language, in the wake of a rowdy August bank holiday celebration in London when hundreds of people appeared before the courts on charges of assault and drunkenness.

London's original hooligans emerged as what we would nowadays call a "youth culture", having adopted a uniform dress code of peaked caps, neck scarves, bell-bottom trousers, and a hairstyle cropped close to the scalp, with a "donkey fringe" over the forehead.

It was commonly reported that the hooligans engaged in pitched battles between rival gangs, armed with iron bars, knives, powerful catapults, and even pistols and revolvers. They patrolled their neighbourhoods shouting obscenities, playing mouth organs and pushing people down.

What are we to make of these stubborn continuities between past and present that disturb our accustomed ways of relating to youth crime and disorder? We are in the midst of a "moral panic" concerning hoodies, knife attacks, gangsta rap, gun culture, antisocial behaviour orders, "chavs" and "bling". That is not to say that nothing is going on: in some neighbourhoods residents do live in fear of youth gangs and the use of knives and guns is a worrying problem.

Nor is it to say that what is represented in the media is simply "made up". But the images magnify certain aspects of a phenomenon, while obscuring and down-playing others.

What is wrong with government and media responses to youth crime and antisocial behaviour is its emphasis on the unprecedented nature of the problem, while losing its grip on the actual social and historical background. We need to unlock this profound historical amnesia.

· Any comments on this article? Write to society@theguardian.com
Topics

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This panic over youth disorder is nothing new, says Geoffrey Pearson

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This malaise is nothing new; it was a general current of feeling in the 1920s and 30s. Then, as now, these sentiments were linked directly to problems of crime and criminal justice. In addition to common allegations that the family, community and authority were in disrepair, a key cause of crime was seen as American gangster movies that incited "copycat" crime and immorality.

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Stand-up mentioning youths as threatening (he's taking the piss a bit intentionally, but still demonstrates what some people do think).

(37mins 20secs - 39mins.)

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Trying to suggest that there is a link between youths smoking cannabis and violent crime. Although, it is some of the comments in response to this article that are more interesting. Many discuss their attitudes towards police "tweeting" photographs of evidence and "bragging" about their find, but others are more relevant:

"The police are continually criticised, but how many others would confront a drug smoking sword carrying gang?!"

"Good find but a waste of resources looking for people committing a victimless crime. By all means go target hoodies/chavs but do not tar us with the same brush."

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Officers called to Perronet House in Elephant and Castle

They were looking for a gang of youths smoking cannabis

They found the gang who ran away but left behind the blade

Shortly afterwards Sgt David Hunt tweeted the picture

Police officers discovered a 15in knife yesterday while on the lookout for a gang of youths smoking cannabis.

Authorities were called to Perronet House in Elephant and Castle yesterday evening by a resident who said youths were smoking drugs in his stairwell.

When they arrived at around 8pm the gang ran away, but left behind the blade which was seized by Sergeant David Hunt and his team.

Tweeting the picture, he said: 'Just seized this knife maybe saved another life? Unfortunately didn't catch the youth carrying it. The worrying thing is why did they have it in the first place?'

Mr Hunt received a flurry of messages from stunned Twitter users who saw his picture.

A fellow Met police sergeant, Chris Molnar, wrote: 'Great work. I think you've just topped Crocodile Dundee there #ThatsNotAKnife.'

Tube driver Andy Ross commented: 'Excellent job by the team getting that off the streets. My blood ran cold just looking at it!'

Ellen Griffin posted 'Good on you! Horrible to think what may have been done with it,' while Christina Gill added: 'That could take out quite a few lives. Let's get rid of stuff like this in the neighbourhood.'

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Police officers hunting youths smoking cannabis discover 15in knife

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Officers called to Perronet House in Elephant and Castle They were looking for a gang of youths smoking cannabis They found the gang who ran away but left behind the blade Shortly afterwards Sgt David Hunt tweeted the picture Police officers discovered a 15in knife yesterday while on the lookout for a gang of youths smoking cannabis.

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By Adam McNicholas.

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This is a Government whose legacy will not be remembered as one that delivered for the younger generation. Whilst a rigid, single plan deficit reduction strategy guides the programme of government, the fallout of a global economic crisis is playing out in the labour market, diminishing hopes of employment and aspiration for school leavers and graduates alike.

Last week's youth unemployment figures and this week's NEET figures show that there is clearly a lot for us to be concerned about. However, we should be careful not to allow ourselves to indulge too deeply in the gloomy soundings of the Government's 'broken society' claims that have been compounded- if not driven by- the power of the right-wing press. Whilst there are significant policy challenges ahead for addressing the deep rooted social, economic and political realities facing young people, by passively consenting to the depiction of a "feral youth" that has been played out in the media over recent weeks, we are doing a disservice to a majority of young, aspirational citizens. We too will be reinforcing what could become a self fulfilling prophecy.

I don't often find myself agreeing with ConservativeHome Editor Tim Montgomerie but in The Times last week (Monday August 15) he wrote 'For all its problems Britain is a great country... To be born in this country is to have won the lottery of life'. That is not to say Britain's are born as equals; as is certainly not the case. Montgomerie's was however a pitch for optimism amid a chorus of hopelessness. To be born in Britain is, in many respects, winning the lottery of life. The popular uprisings in the Arab world have prompted us to reflect on the relative freedoms that we enjoy, compared with our counterparts in Syria, Libya and Egypt.

Although, justifiably, many young people up and down the country certainly do not wake up every morning thinking their numbers have come up. There are 979,000 16- 24 year olds not in educational, employment or training and in parts of the country there are 10 people chasing every job. For young people seeking employment in this climate, theirs is not a life of security, independence and freedom.

My argument is this. First, if we allow the Government to label society and the younger generation as 'broken', then we risk reinforcing this message, allowing it to penetrate to the national psyche. Whilst we seek to understand the riots that left families with lost relatives, homes and businesses, we must reject the notion that young people are somehow a homogenous group that drains rather than enhances society. This depiction of modern day Britain is at odds with the thousands who responded to the violence by volunteering their time to kick start the clean ups in London, Liverpool and elsewhere in the country.

Second, so far this Tory-led Government's record has offered little in the way of hope for young people. Cuts to education and employment programmes and rhetoric on a 'broken society' are all that can be offered. What messages of aspiration for young people who want to get ahead in life and for those who need support in doing so? Social enterprises, community groups and local authorities have a role to play in rejecting the Government's portrayal of the youth of today. At the least, the press and media have a role to play in questioning it.

So in the months that follow I intend to use this blog to draw on examples of inspirational young people whose contributions as citizens are often overlooked. Drawing from the daily experiences of young people, I will seek to address key policy challenges and encourage debate, from, as well as about, young people, on their aspirations and the realisation of their ambitions in modern day Britain.

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The 'Feral Youth' and the Self Fulfilling Prophecy

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This is a Government whose legacy will not be remembered as one that delivered for the younger generation. Whilst a rigid, single plan deficit reduction strategy guides the programme of government, the fallout of a global economic crisis is playing out in the labour market, diminishing hopes of employment and aspiration for school leavers and graduates alike.

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By Harriet Sergeant. Some quotes:

"Today, Britain is facing a crisis with its youth. In every town and city, [thousands of] boys are failing to make the transition to manhood and a successful adult life."

"It's the biggest problem we have today - with the possible exception of terrorism."

"Many teenage boys' heroes are rap stars and drug-dealers."

"According to the Statistics Commission, of the 1.7 million new jobs created since 1997, a whopping 81 per cent have gone to foreign workers." (Maybe not quite relevant, just the Daily Mail being the Daily Mail and blaming foreign people for our social problems).

One of the top comments (270 upvotes): "You can see how serious the problem is in this country just by watching television. Everything that is wrong with society is there. Idiotic childish programs aimed at the 16 to 40 age group, anti social and even more childish advertisements, especially during the transmission of soccer matches. Pop videos that glorify sex and bad behaviour, dumbed down quiz programs, overpaid non-roll models and there is Little Britain, what more can I say."

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Feral youths: How a generation of violent, illiterate young men are living outside the boundaries of civilised society

The first time I saw Tuggy Tug, he was standing on a street corner in Brixton with half-a-dozen other 15-year- old boys. They were scowling at anyone who walked past

Every now and then, they shrugged up their hoodies to make themselves look more threatening. 'Everyone who bumps into us says sorry,' boasted Tuggy Tug.

His tracksuit was so big that he seemed lost inside it. Under his black hoodie, he wore a red one - in case he needed a quick change of identity.

He was, he admitted, on the lookout for someone to mug. 'I want no one recognising me after I done my business,' he explained.

At 15, Tuggy Tug is still officially a child - but he is already dangerously disconnected from society and its values. What forces have put boys like him in charge of our streets? And how are we to deal with them?

Despite being barely literate, Tuggy Tug was eloquent about the reasons he'd turned to crime. Indeed, his words provided a harrowing insight into why increasing numbers of boys are more likely to do a mugging than a piece of homework.

None of the teachers at his own school in South London paid any attention to him, Tuggy Tug told me, so he hardly ever turned up for lessons.

And his young single mother never disciplined him because he was ' bringing home the bacon' - up to £200 a day from running errands for older drug dealers.

Nor could he see any alternative to crime. 'If you do it the government way,' he said, 'you will wait until you're 80 by the time you can buy a nice, decent tracksuit.' He paused for a moment, 'I probably be dead by then.'

His heroes were rap stars and the older drug-dealers in his area - 'I know a man of 21 who owns five houses and he never went to school.'

And he judged himself by his lack of fear, willingness to use violence and the number of all-important 'links' he has in order to pull off the next drug deal.

After five years, though, he planned to go 'legit', buy a house in the suburbs and play golf all day.

Whatever our opinion of Tuggy Tug, his ambition stands as a rebuke.

The middleclass dream is as distant a prospect for him as becoming an astronaut might be for the rest of us.

He is already set on the path of social deprivation: prison, an early death or, at best, a lifetime on benefits. His life is already wasted.

Today, Britain is facing a crisis with its youth. In every town and city, boys like Tuggy Tug are failing to make the transition to manhood and a successful adult life.

This has terrifying implications for us all. 'Serious youth violence,' says the head of Scotland Yard's Violent Crime directorate, Barry Norman, 'is the biggest problem we have today - with the possible exception of terrorism.

'Nothing frightens people more - and when that violence takes place in a group setting, it is all the more shocking.'

Nine months ago, I started investigating why so many boys are turning into feared gang members and criminals.

During my travels across the country, I talked to more than 50 teenage boys from low-income families, as well as dozens of men in their 20s and 30s from the same background.

I sat in on lessons in school, talked to teachers and encouraged youth-club leaders, school inspectors and charities to reveal the real reasons why so many young men are going to waste.

Tuggy Tug's chances of having a decent childhood, it became clear, had been weighted against him from the start. As a black boy from a low-income Caribbean background, he belongs to one of the two categories most likely to fail at school and least likely to break out of poverty.

White boys from low-income families perform worst: 63 per cent are unable to read and write properly at 14 (compared with 43 per cent of white girls from a similar background).

Black working- class boys do not do much better: at age 14, 54 per cent cannot read or write properly.

The scale of the crisis in our education system is going unrecognised - but we ignore it at our peril.

Between 2000 and 2007, almost four million pupils left school without gaining the basic qualifications of five good GCSEs, including English and maths. Nearly a million pupils left with less than five GCSEs of any grade.

Unlike previous generations, the boys who spill out onto our streets don't quickly grow out of delinquent behaviour.

What happens in school smashes their lives, leaving them antisocial-semi- criminal and dependant on welfare.

Which means we, the taxpayers, have to pay astronomical sums to keep fit young men idle. Youth unemployment, which has just hit 726,000 - its highest level in 16 years - is now costing us well over £90million a week.

And that's not all, of course. Illiterate young men with no other way of proving themselves or of making a living are likely to turn to crime. In 2004, the annual cost of youth crime in Britain was calculated at more than £1 billion - and it will be far higher now.

Worst of all, the number of violent crimes carried out by children and teenagers has increased by a third in just three years.

The number of boys under 18 who were convicted or cautioned over violent offences jumped by 37 per cent over the same period - compared with a rise among adults of less than one per cent.

And most of those who were caught went straight back to crime: 82 per cent of these boys aged 15-18 were reconvicted within two years.

It's not just crime that can have long-term repercussions. Youth disorder on this scale represents a kick in the teeth to accepted conventions of respect and responsibility to others - and it's likely to carry on for generations to come.

Certainly, adults are now less ready to intervene and monitor young people than in the past - and they are right to be afraid.

A white 22-year-old youth called Darren, who lives in a small Lincolnshire town, told me that his gang waited months to take revenge on a middleaged neighbour who'd objected to one of them sitting on his garden wall. When the boy refused to move, the man shoved him off.

After that, Darren and his mates stood outside the man's house for two weeks, 'terrorising him and throwing rocks at his car'.

The police moved them along - but six months later, half-a-dozen of the boys surrounded the man outside a supermarket - 'and we kicked the s*** out of him'. It was only 'luck' they didn't kill him, Darren admitted.

Such incidents were far less frequent in the recent past. This is partly because the institutions that previously socialised and directed young men - the family, the church and school - have either lost or given up their authority.

And these changes have hit boys from poor backgrounds the hardest.

So, too, has the lack of adult males in their lives who can serve as role models.

The number of children living in loneparent households - almost all headed by a single mother - has more than doubled in 25 years.

And what happens when these boys go to school? Despite the billions thrown at education by the Government since 1997, nearly every one of the teenagers I interviewed, as well as quite a few of the men I met in their 20s and 30s, was unable to read or write properly - or had only learned in prison.

A black car mechanic in his 50s, from Brixton, told me: 'Back in the Caribbean, we were taught the three Rs, but that's gone out of the window. After that, everything breaks down.'

'I'm out of jail, but there is no way out for me'

This was certainly true of the dozens of teenagers I met.

Their school days had followed a similar pattern: unable to understand what was going on in lessons but desperate to prove themselves at something, they began to misbehave in the last two years of primary school.

At secondary school, their behaviour deteriorated further. Most either played truant or were excluded.

By 14, the majority of them were involved in crime and drugs - turning up to school only to sell drugs or stolen goods. For them, illiteracy had already turned into a life sentence on the edges of society.

Bigs, the former leader of a notorious Brixton gang who received his first prison sentence at 15, told me: 'Other people go from school to university. We go from school to prison. I thought I'd be dead by 30.

Everywhere I went, I met men whose lives had been blighted by their failure at school. A former burglar told me he'd dropped out at 14 and received his first prison sentence at 18.

Now in his 30s, he lives in a hostel and supplements benefits with a little drug-dealing. He said sadly: 'I may be out of prison, but there is no way out for me.'

A young man in his 20s, living on benefits in Kent said: 'There are things you don't know at 14.'

You need someone to tell you: "If you do this at 14, your life will be better." I'm really trying now, but it's so f****** hard because it is just too late.'

What kind of job can you get when you're illiterate? Forty years ago, a boy could get work in a factory at 16 and be supporting a wife and child by the age of 19.

When the middleaged Brixton mechanic left school, for example, he and his mates could pick from a range of factory jobs and apprenticeships. All gone now, he said sadly.

The loss of our manufacturing industry, combined with the growth of immigration, has particularly affected white and black Caribbean boys from poor backgrounds.

'Round here, Poles do all of the work'

Call centres, and other service sector jobs, demand personal and social skills that are alien to most of the boys I met.

Unlike their middle-class counterparts, they have never been taught the basics, such as shaking hands, speaking clearly or looking a grown-up in the eye.

Sometimes, it took me two or three attempts to understand what they were trying to say.

One teacher in a London inner- city school told me he considered this 'a massively serious issue'.

He went on: 'I have really gifted black boys who can't communicate. You see them struggling. It's quite often the reason they get really upset and frustrated.'

Yet he thought it ' patronising' to try to correct them.

Meanwhile, the arrival of large numbers of skilled immigrants willing to work for low pay has left disadvantaged working-class boys sidelined and unable to land a low-paid job that might lead to something better.

According to the Statistics Commission, of the 1.7 million new jobs created since 1997, a whopping 81 per cent have gone to foreign workers.

The Department For Work And Pensions is jawdroppingly candid about the reasons for this.

UK citizens are on the dole because of 'issues around basic employability skills, incentives and motivation' it says.

What a pity it has not passed this insight on to the Department Of Education And Skills.

In a seaside town, I spoke to a 22-year-old man called Dave about how these issues have affected his life.

Like so many others, he had failed to learn to read at primary school, dropped out at 14 and joined a gang.

Now, however, he yearns for 'a decent job' and a home for his girlfriend and baby daughter.

Unsurprisingly, his lack of education has left him qualified only for menial jobs, which are hard to come by.

'When the council advertised two dustmen jobs,' he said, 'there were 100 applications.'

The local job agencies warned him he had no chance because he was English. 'Poles do all the jobs around here,' he told me.

When Dave did finally manage to secure a job for the minimum wage, he encountered the other major problem facing young men - benefits.

In fact, the financial adviser at the Job Centre - whose wages are paid by the taxpayer - gave him a staggering piece of advice. He told him to turn down the job.

'I'd have had to pay my rent, council tax and utility bills and lost my benefits,' Dave explains.

'At the end of the day, I would have been £30 worse off.'

Far from being 'work-shy', most of the young men I met were still eager to find jobs - but all were well aware that the welfare system hands out more than they can legitimately earn.

Meanwhile, the recession has increased competition for low-paid jobs.

Dave could clearly foresee his future.

'I know men of 40 doing nothing but drink and drugs all day. I don't blame them - but it's too early for me,' he said, shaking his head angrily. 'I don't want to be like that.'

All over Britain, men like Dave are disengaging from society for a reason: they see nothing in it for them. And they are quite right.

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco's chief executive and a member of Gordon Brown's Business Council For Britain, put it bluntly: 'Too many children have been leaving school after 11 or 13 years of compulsory education without the basic skills to get on in life and hold down a job.'

On-the-job training could not act as a 'bandage or a sticking plaster' for the failures of our education system, he said.

So what is the Government doing to break this vicious circle?

A new report - by an all-party panel chaired by former minister Alan Milburn - spelled out: 'The problem is not a shortage of parental aspiration. It is a shortage of good schools.'

It contained a raft of proposals for helping disadvantaged-children, including a payment-by-results scheme for schools.

Whether these proposals will ever be taken further is doubtful. Labour has a track record of talking about reforms - and then doing nothing.

In January, Gordon Brown called for a 'national crusade' to break down class barriers; he was even contemplating making it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of class.

This is to miss the point. Class inequalities are not going to be fixed by a national crusade or legislation.

The problem lies in our schools, over which Labour has had complete control for the past 12 years.

In any case, most boys from disadvantaged backgrounds don't aspire to move to a different class; they rarely aspire to go beyond a few streets.

One young man I met in South London, for example, had never crossed the Thames because he couldn't read the bus timetables.

The head of careers at a school in Dagenham described his pupils as 'very estate-centric and reluctant to travel far'.

He added: ' Trying to get them onto a bus to travel a couple of miles for work experience is difficult enough.'

When boys are isolated, confined and ignorant, is a lack of aspiration really so surprising?

That opportunity exists in this country is clear from the experience of many recent Eastern European immigrants.

Four years ago, I met a young Pole who was then sharing a room in Ealing, West London.

He could barely speak English and was working for the minimum wage. He has now opened a beauty salon in St John's Wood, a smart area of North London.

But then, as Dave pointed out bitterly, 'the Poles have not been through our education system'.

When their children do, they will no doubt face similar problems to those of the indigenous workingclass.

'Working-class', of course, is an optimistic description. The point is that these young men - black and white - are not working, and probably never will.

The Government cannot do much about the loss of manufacturing jobs or the breakdown of families.

It can, however, tackle the problems in our schools and the perverse influence of our benefit system.

In a world recession and with unparalleled levels of debt, we simply cannot continue to waste so many lives, or to pay the escalating bill for these young men's benefits and crimes.

Instead, we should be concentrating on making them as skilled and motivated as the immigrants who are now taking their place.

Even Tuggy Tug longs for a better life - though his methods are more likely to land him in a cell than on a golf course.

After saying goodbye to him, I learned that I'd almost become his latest victim. He'd taken my escort aside to suggest they 'bang' me together and steal my watch.

'Well,' shrugged my escort, himself a former armed robber, 'he wants £1,000 to buy a Smart car. He sees stealing your watch as a career move.'

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Feral youths: How a generation of violent, illiterate young men are living outside the boundaries of civilised society

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The first time I saw Tuggy Tug, he was standing on a street corner in Brixton with half-a-dozen other 15-year- old boys. They were scowling at anyone who walked past Every now and then, they shrugged up their hoodies to make themselves look more threatening. 'Everyone who bumps into us says sorry,' boasted Tuggy Tug.

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'Elastic Heart' is Striking, not Sexual.

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'Elastic Heart' is Striking, not Sexual.

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Article written in response to a divide in reception of Sia's song video for 'Elastic Heart', starring Shia LeBeouf and Maddie Ziegler. LeBeouf (28 yrs old) and Ziegler (12 yrs old) do a sort of interpretive dance in nude leotards. This raised uproar among many who viewed the video, who claimed that it was "disgusting"; with many raising concerns that it was verging on pedophilic or would entice those who are. Others defended the video for it's "real meaning", and argued that people's concerns with "sexualising a 12 year old girl" were wrong. Ludlum likens the situation to reactions to Shirley Temple's hula dance in Captain January which was viewed by some as "immoral"

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The "Elastic Heart" contemporary dance music video by Sia, featuring emotive storytelling through dance by actor Shia LaBeouf and dancer Maddie Ziegler, released Jan. 7 to immediate public dispute.

The quality of Sia's song, "Elastic Heart," is not in question, but the appropriateness of 12-year-old Ziegler wearing a nude leotard and 28-year-old LaBeouf in nude briefs dueling in a massive cage with raw emotion through gritty choreography by Ryan Heffington is.

The intensity between LaBeouf and Ziegler has been interpreted with "pedophilia overtones," prompting Sia to apologize via Twitter for any additional trauma inflicted by viewing her video.

Invalidating pain triggered by memories of abuse invalidate abuse incurred, inflicting additional harm. Discounting the value of an artistic expression due to simply misunderstanding the artist's concept is a mistake. Sia acknowledged the potential harm without abandoning her artistic integrity.

Douglas R. Nielsen, UA dance professor, remembered gasps from a Mexican audience caught off guard when his dancers appeared on stage in nude leotards. Nude leotards allow the audience to see each intricate movement of the dancer without analyzing meaning of colors in costumes.

Gymnastic floor routines require leotards to showcase athleticism for girls, but gymnasts aren't dragged into accusations of performing for the prurient interests of the public. The leotard worn in "Elastic Heart" by Ziegler produced qualms because she danced beside a man. The same leotard worn by Ziegler in Sia's "Chandelier" music video didn't raise qualms.

LaBeouf's wounded, lonely demeanor and full beard aren't intended to be symbolic of the cautionary fable of "Bluebeard" and his child bride. Throughout the video, LaBeouf is repeatedly tossed, bit, mocked, hit, choked and frightened by Ziegler's character. LaBeouf represents Sia's conflicting lyrics - unwilling to hurt another despite repeat abuse from Ziegler's mischievous and manipulative character.

The use of an older male opposite a young girl is nothing new in cinematic dance history, but the layers of emotion embedded in each frame of "Elastic Heart" is new.

Similar outrage occurred after the 1936 film "Captain January," in which Shirley Temple's hula dance was censored for "immorality" because she wore a grass skirt and lei. Temple danced in the film again in gray sailor-styled flare pants, leading film critic Graham Greene to insist 8-year-old Temple wasn't just aware of her sexuality, but purposely using her innocence to entice grown men through dance.

Ziegler's choreographed moves aren't sexually derived, as her choreography is expressions of immaturity and toxic incompatibility, a common theme throughout Sia's 1000 Forms of Fear album. "Elastic Heart" director Daniel Askill said the video represents Sia's conflicting internal emotions and the cage represents Sia's skull enduring the volatile strife.

Defenders of Sia's video have taken to Twitter to voice support for the primal and artistic video. Others suggested the controversy could have been avoided by casting an older woman in LaBeouf's role.

Sia's performance on "Saturday Night Live" last Saturday showcased Ziegler dancing onstage opposite a similarly costumed female dancer, but the experiment failed to invoke the visceral emotional response found in the video.

Sia, remaining relatively quiet on the subject, writes through Twitter, "All I can say is Maddie and Shia are two of the only actors I felt could play ... these two warring Sia self states."

_______________

Follow Anna Mae Ludlum on Twitter.

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The "Elastic Heart" contemporary dance music video by Sia, featuring emotive storytelling through dance by actor Shia LaBeouf and dancer Maddie Ziegler, released Jan. 7 to immediate public dispute. The quality of Sia's song, "Elastic Heart," is not in question, but the appropriateness of 12-year-old Ziegler wearing a nude leotard and 28-year-old LaBeouf in nude briefs dueling in a massive cage with raw emotion through gritty choreography by Ryan Heffington is.

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Another (more recent) example Miley Cyrus being talked about in relation to panics about the sexualisation of young women, and how this might affect other young women.

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But I think it's an incredibly savvy move on her part. Seeing Miley straddling various objects on breakfast telly is confusing. Learning that she has made a stylish video of her version of porn makes me think she's very sensible.

I've recently been introduced to the idea of 'matter in place', when it comes to pornography. If you stick a sexualised image on a bus stop, where passers by have no control or choice when it comes to viewing it, you're taking matter out of place, and it has no context.

When we're surrounded by pictures of women pouting and hooking their thumbs into their lacy pants, we start to surrender to the idea that women are available and for sale. But there's nothing wrong with seeing women - and men - revealing their bodies and behaving in a sexualised way in an expected, appropriate context.

If you consent to watch porn, either by going to the New York festival or firing up RedTube on your laptop, you are, in theory, entertaining the idea that consent is a two way street - or an eight way street if you're into group sex videos. To be frank, masturbating to a music video means that you're using a performer's image in a way that you have not been given permission to do.

But if you have a career in adult films - assuming you're there of your own free will, and haven't been coerced in any way - you know what you can expect from your viewer. By making her version of porn, Miley isn't destroying boundaries, she's making them clearer. As a fan, I think it's further proof that she's enjoying her body and her sexuality on her terms. For her, porn isn't a last resort, it's something she's very enthusiastic about.

I often fear that our society is getting increasingly bad at talking about sex and desire in a positive way. We're hyper sexualised, but not sex positive, and obsessed with scoring gender politics points, and assessing the harm that sexual images can cause. Just look at media reactions to hearing about young people sexting.

We're obsessed with protecting women, especially young ones, from exploring their own sexuality, and stressing the risks you're exposed to when you start exploring your body, and working out what turns you on.

There are precious few examples of sex being joyful, or fun. I think this is evidenced by the Fifty Shades backlash. I agree that the relationship between Christian and Anastasia is problematic, but I feel for the millions of women who keep being told that they are aroused by the 'wrong' thing.

Fifty Shades Of Grey is a perfect example of matter in place. When you read the book or go and see the film, you know exactly what you're letting yourself in for. In fact, Anastasia is the ultimate distillation of the sexualised women we see on our billboards, because she is so passive - maybe many women identified her because they have grown to believe that they don't have any autonomy in their sex lives. At least Miley is in charge in an inspiring, if unusual way.

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Miley Cyrus' S&M film is just what porn needs

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But I think it's an incredibly savvy move on her part. Seeing Miley straddling various objects on breakfast telly is confusing. Learning that she has made a stylish video of her version of porn makes me think she's very sensible. I've recently been introduced to the idea of 'matter in place', when it comes to pornography.

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"The Importance of Subcultural Identity (Essay)."

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"The Importance of Subcultural Identity (Essay)."

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Written by Sunny Stuart Winter - using Hipsters as main example.

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By writer and cartoonist JJ McCullough.

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Lecture by Andrew Bennett.

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Andy Bennett - Subcultures and post-subcultures: Researching contemporary youth

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This is "Andy Bennett - Subcultures and post-subcultures: Researching contemporary youth" by Tallinna Ülikool on Vimeo, the home for high quality...

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Mixed reviews about it and it's real/fiction crossovers and how honest the production was about it, but still illustrates points relevant to the course.

Key points: Skateboarding; break-dancing; music; group; place and space; underground subculture in 1980s Germany; East/West Germany and the divide and differences between them (i.e. skateboarding seen as "more West", as offering "freedom" and "liberation" from strict Eastern living); GDR and "Westerners" (more globally, not just West Germany); moral panic; authority reactions; invisible to visible subculture; globalisation.

(Available on Netflix.)

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Directed by Marten Persiel. With David Nathan, Anneke Schwabe, Bill Clinton, Zaneta Fuchsová. This Ain't California is a celebration of the lust for life, a contemporary documentary trip into the world of roller boarding in the German Democratic Republic.

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Music, youth and culture.

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Jazzie B celebrates Public Enemy's hip hop masterpiece Fight the Power and explores the political nature of rap.

How important was the politics of "Fear of a Black Planet" in shaping the America of today? Where has the political rap message gone in 2010 and what is its legacy? Soul II Soul's Jazzie B looks back at a music Public Enemy frontman Chuck D has always described as "The Black CNN".

It's been twenty years since Public Enemy's Hip Hop masterpiece "Fight the Power" exploded onto the music scene. Controversial and political, it would later form part of their defining album "Fear of a Black Planet". It soon became the benchmark album of activist rap. Many would say it was the best the genre has ever produced.

Combining the lyrics of Chuck D and sidekick Flavor Flav, backed by a series of the finest East Coast producers (including The Shocklee brothers), Fear of a Black Planet was a rallying cry against African-American communities for their political indifference.

With help from Spike Lee (who would use the "Fight the Power" throughout his film Do the Right Thing), Public Enemy and their message helped scare the hell out of white middle America, insulting a few Elvis and John Wayne fans along the way.

Now, two decades later, "Fight the Power" is seen as one of the best Rap tracks ever made, while so significant is "Fear of a Black Planet" to American popular culture, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. To date it is the only Hip Hop album in the collection.

Producer: Rob Alexander
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

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BBC Radio 4 - 'The Black CNN': When Hip Hop Took Control

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Jazzie B celebrates Public Enemy's hip hop masterpiece Fight the Power and explores the political nature of rap. How important was the politics of "Fear of a Black Planet" in shaping the America of today? Where has the political rap message gone in 2010 and what is its legacy?

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Relationship between authority and subcultures.

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Relationship between authority and subcultures.

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Discusses varies subcultures and their relationship/experience with the police. Mentions "detachment" from societal norms and values, as well as the perceived "moral decline of an entire generation".

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(Photo by Henry Langston)

Nobody - bar maybe Charles Bronson - likes being set upon by police. As we recently discovered, people like it even less when their only crime is listening to a relatively unpopular form of hip hop and occasionally wearing clown make-up.

The worrying thing is that the FBI crackdown on juggalos isn't anything new; authorities have been targeting subcultures for decades, presumably under the premise that anyone intentionally dressing like an idiot and putting themselves through, say, an entire Phish concert must be completely detached from all societal norms and values. That, of course, translates to an increased propensity for robbing chicken shops and throwing cats in rivers, leading to the eventual moral decline of an entire generation.

Take the former Tory MP Jocelyn Cadbury, for example, who blamed punk and rock music for a rise in crime in the early 1980s, arguing it created an "ethos of violence". Or the Tory government of the early-90s, which introduced new legislation to stop people from gathering in fields to spend the night listening to piano house and hugging each other.

To get a better idea of the history of police clamping down on British youth subcultures I spoke to Dr Chris A Williams, Professor of Urban History and a specialist in policing and crime, and Dr Andrew Wilson, Professor of Sociology and a specialist in drugs and subcultures.

SCUTTLERS

Emerging in Manchester's slums during the late 19th century, scuttlers were maybe the first British youth subculture - if beating the shit out one another with belts wrapped around your fists can constitute a "culture". Storming around in brass-tipped pointed clogs, bell-bottomed trousers and neckerchiefs, the scuttlers belonged to various local youth gangs and would challenge each other to fights - or "scuttling", as you'd call it if you were around in 1873 - in an attempt to prove their neighbourhood was the toughest in the city.

For whatever reason, police didn't like this increase of children bludgeoning each other in the street, so cracked down hard on anyone with even a vague level of involvement. "The response was based on fear and a high level of violence that wouldn't be allowed today," explained Dr Williams. "Police didn't need to know much about them, or make sure they were scuttlers - they could look the same as any other working-class youth."

Thanks to the police aggression, harsh sentencing and the rise of youth clubs and association football - which allowed them to refocus their energies on screaming at players and each other - scuttlers had all but disappeared by the turn of the century.

(Photos by Derek Ridgers)

SKINHEADS

Before the skinhead look had been co-opted by racists and Dutch fashion designers, authorities targeted the relatively peaceful, apolitical subculture under the banner of public safety - because shaving your head and holding your trousers up with braces is clearly a sign that you want to bottle strangers. However, as Dr Williams noted, much of that initial violence was manufactured by the police themselves. "You had a very working-class police force at the time," he explained, "and creating problems was one of the things they enjoyed."

Dr Wilson added that skinheads were singled out from very early on, and were made to remove their shoelaces at football games so they couldn't run away or kick out at people. "One element of the skinhead fashion was a piece of material in your top pocket," he said. "At clubs and bars, if you had this they'd not let you in. At one point, a lot of them were wearing red ties, and this was a warning signal. This policing based on your clothing was relentless."

SOULIES

The early northern soul scene basically subsisted on teenagers in tank tops and baggy trousers stealing speed from chemists. Dr Wilson - a soulie himself at the time - remembered that "burglaries took place mid-week" in preparation for the weekend, before dodgy backstreet pills took off as a slightly less brazen alternative from the mid-70s onwards.

Police gradually began to clock on to the fact that all these basement rooms playing imported Motown records were also full of sweaty speed freaks, and in 1971 Manchester's Twisted Wheel club - the epicentre of the scene - was closed down after pressure from cops and the council. "It was a constant cat and mouse chase," said Wilson. "Police would take you to one side and shine a torch in your eyes to look at your pupil dilation. If you failed you went to one side, and if you passed they kicked you out. It was a real ritual."

A bunch of hippies in 1974, one wearing an "Arrive Stoned" number plate (Photo via)

HIPPIES

The hippie movement was the first non-working class subculture that police paid real attention to. Because even though establishing world peace and sharing herpes wasn't illegal, the mass production, supply and ingestion of LSD definitely was. This led to hippies being subjected to the first systematic policing of subcultures; instead of cops just wantonly bashing teenagers, they actually started putting some effort into their work. "A lot of drug squads decided to go undercover," said Dr Williams. "The officers grew their hair long and disguised themselves as hippies for months at a time in order to nick people."

All this dressing up came to a head during Operation Julie in the mid-70s. Targeting two major LSD rings, bosses had dozens of cops trained in the ways of the hippie - paving the way for the future Mark Kennedys of British policing - and dispatched them to a farmhouse in Wales that overlooked a cottage belonging to one of the suspects. After 13 months of surveillance, 87 homes in England and Wales were raided, leading to the arrests of 120 suspects and the seizure of 1.1 million tabs of acid.

PUNK

Punks weren't directly targeted by police in the way other subcultures had been, though all their spitting and pre-watershed swearing was picked up on by the media and spun to create a widespread moral panic (despite the fact the culture was formulated by art school students who just wanted to sell more bondage wear and swastika T-shirts). That said, the police did keep an eye on them, thanks to - as Dr Williams put it - "the fact that punk and post-punk communities were strongly aligned with left politics; they were sympathetic towards the miners, for example".

Predictably, punk shows were made difficult to host. In December of 1976, the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Johnny and the Heartbreakers united for the Anarchy Tour, a series of concerts throughout the UK. Many of these gigs were cancelled by venue owners after local police hyped up minor incidents involving punks and the national media jumped in, claiming the bands and their fans weren't really the kind of people you'd want getting drunk in a building you own.

(Photo by Gavin Watson)

RAVERS

Neither the police or the government of the late-80s really knew how to deal with ravers at first - something Dr Williams told me was due to their elusiveness compared to other more recognisable subcultures. "People going to these acid house raves didn't necessarily look like they were going to one," he said. "You didn't have to dress ridiculously to be a part of the subculture."

Of course, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was eventually passed in 1994, which tightened up the laws around throwing illegal parties in fields. Raves were then moved indoors, meaning the government could tax the hell out of everything and police could raid clubs for drug dealers and users.

THE PEACE CONVOY

It's hard to think of anything more menacing than a bunch of mild-mannered hippies sloping around the country, smoking weed, stewing lentils and washing in rivers. Which is probably why Tory MPs at the time compared these New Age travellers to "medieval brigands" - gang members who ambushed and robbed people in forests - and police raided the 1985 Stonehenge Free Festival, in an attack that would later be dubbed the "Battle of the Beanfield".

The ambush was mayhem, and journalists at the time reported vicious scenes of police brutality; ITN reporter Kim Sabido said what he'd seen had been "some of the most brutal police treatment [she'd] witnessed in [his] entire career". Vehicles were contained, windows were smashed and people were beaten with truncheons, which cops naturally claimed was a response to the hippies pelting them with wood, stones and even petrol bombs. Claims that, weirdly, were dropped and never mentioned again in the following court cases.

According to Dr Williams, "That was the first time in British history where you had a subculture that wasn't necessarily being overtly political, but every element of it was being treated as criminal."

Tempa T with a baseball bat (Photo by James Pearson-Howes)

GRIME AND GARAGE

According to Dr Williams, grime and garage are the first two subcultures that the police have found unsettling in a long time. While cops can't force a venue to shut down a grime show, "they can threaten to revoke licenses", said Williams. "They can also make it very difficult for a venue to hold an artist they see as problematic." A recent example was Just Jam at London's Barbican, set to feature artists like JME and Big Narstie. The night was cancelled the day before on the grounds of "public safety", AKA venue owners bowing to police pressure.

All of this control revolves around Form 696, a risk assessment sheet that judges the supposed danger of violent crime at an event (Noisey released a great documentary about it earlier this year). There used to be a section asking whether there would be any ethnic minorities in attendance, but despite that blatant red flag of racism now being removed, the question is still implied. It's a worryingly effective way of policing an entire musical subculture.

THE FUTURE

"Police have become a lot more powerful with regards to public order in the last 20 years," said Dr Williams. "They're on top of nearly every gathering that happens." And he's right - it's a lot harder to keep things quiet than it was when outdoor raves meant driving to a spot and hoping there'd be a rig there. Nowadays, police generally have a good idea when the next warehouse party or unscheduled gathering at an English Heritage site might be happening.

But what's all the surveillance even for? Occupy - if you can class that as a subculture - fizzled out as quick as it started. The last real musical subculture we had in the UK was emo - or maybe new rave, if you grew up somewhere with a metro system - and the only impact that had was a couple of misguided Daily Mail headlines and a proliferation of young adults with dangly earlobes. "The music industry is blocking genuine crazes," Williams suggested to me. "I can't see anyone on a major label releasing a single about all the scary crime going on at the moment."

@hannahrosewens

This article was amended at 2.13PM on Monday, the 4th of August 2014 to reflect the fact that Kim Sabido is actually a man.

More stuff about this kind of stuff:

The UK's Teenage Moped Gangs Have a New Subculture

I Tried to Sell Cybergoth and Steampunk Clothes to 'Wavey' Streetwear Kids

What Does It Mean to Be a 'Teenager' Today?

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How the Police Have Obliterated British Youth Cultures

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(Photo by Henry Langston) Nobody - bar maybe Charles Bronson - likes being set upon by police. As we recently discovered, people like it even less when their only crime is listening to a relatively unpopular form of hip hop and occasionally wearing clown make-up.

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Dr David Nutt (previous government advisor) likens the situation to bans on alcohol and smoking opium: "reducing MDMA production is just one of many examples of how prohibition of one drug leads to greater harm from an alternative that is developed to overcome the block". Moral panics, particularly those involving youth (although drug-use is not limited to young people, a large amount of media attention is focused on them - link to lecture on moral panics), can result in actions being taken that arguably do more harm than the original "issue" that has caused panic in the first place.

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The past week has seen a number of drug disasters in the UK, one of which is the unexpected deaths of three men, two from Ipswich and one from Telford. They all appear to have taken a drug called PMA (para-Methoxyamphetamine). We presume that they did not know this was what was in the pills bearing the Superman logo that they bought - it seems likely they thought it was ecstasy (MDMA). PMA and its close relative PMMA are not new drugs; they were made in the 1950s and tested for beneficial mood effects then. However, they didn't provide a clear positive effect so were discarded, though were made illegal under the UN conventions.

They have in the past few years re-emerged as a toxic surrogate for ecstasy. In this period they have been responsible for more than 100 deaths in the UK, and now the majority of deaths that the media report as being due to "ecstasy" are, in fact, caused by PMA and PMMA.

Their re-emergence is directly due to the international community's attempts, via UN conventions, to stop the use of MDMA by prohibiting its production and sale. As the earlier UN drug control conventions were clearly not working, in 1988 a further attempt to limit drug use by impairing production was made by banning a number of precursor chemicals. One of these is safrole, the precursor of MDMA. In 2010 there was a massive seizure of 50 tonnes of safrole in Thailand. This did significantly dent availability for MDMA production, so chemists looked for an alternative source of a suitable precursor. Aniseed oil seemed the ideal alternative, as it is chemically very similar to safrole, so this was used. Unfortunately the product that results from using the MDMA production process with aniseed oil is PMA or PMMA. Hence these substances only exist because of the blockade of MDMA production. That in itself wouldn't particularly matter if they were not more toxic than MDMA.

PMA/PMMA are significantly more toxic than MDMA for three reasons. First they are more potent, up to 10 times so. This means that a user who is typically safely using MDMA at a dose of 80mg per session will be taking the equivalent of 800mg of MDMA if they take 80mg of PMA. Secondly, PMA works more slowly than MDMA so when users don't get the expected effects of MDMA about 30 minutes after taking the drug they think they have been sold a weak lot and may take another dose to make up for this. Then, when the effects of PMA kick in at around two hours, they have taken far too much. Thirdly PMA and PMMA are not pharmacological equivalents of MDMA. They have very different actions, which is why they were discarded after first testing. Their major problem is that they block the actions of the brain enzymes that offset the desired effects of serotonin and dopamine release that PMA/PMMA produce. This then massively accentuates their toxicity as the brain can't compensate for the increase in serotonin so users can develop serotonin syndrome. This is a toxic reaction that elevates body temperature to a dangerous, and in some cases lethal, level.

The emergence of the more toxic PMA following the so-called "success" in reducing MDMA production is just one of many examples of how prohibition of one drug leads to greater harm from an alternative that is developed to overcome the block. This first became obvious when the US pursued alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and many switched to hootch, which was illicitly distilled ethanol, and some even to methanol, both of which are more poisonous than regulated alcohol. The banning of smoking opium led to the increased production and injecting of a more potent and dangerous opiate, heroin.

There are several proven ways we can we stop this rising tide of PMA/PMMA deaths. One, well established in the Netherlands, is to make testing facilities available to the public without fear of prosecution. This serves not only to warn the users when they have purchased something that wasn't what they were expecting but also allows the state to monitor the emergence of new, possibly more toxic recreational drugs and put out warnings. A more radical approach as explained by Transform would be to make safe doses of pure MDMA (eg 80mg/day) available to registered users in a regulated fashion, for example, via pharmacists.

In the meantime we should accelerate the testing of seized tablets and make public their contents and strengths on internet databases, so that all users can check what they might be taking. This kind of testing to provide knowledge of drugs in use locally has been pioneered at some clubs and festivals by Professor Fiona Measham of Durham University, and should now be rolled out nationally. Visible public information about tablets, their contents and dosage is used to reduce harm in Ibiza. Finally, let's stop pretending that these PMA deaths are unexpected effects of rogue "ecstasy" and tell the truth: they are a consequence of our current illogical and punitive drug policy.

* This article was amended at 13:05 GMT. All references to PMAA have been corrected to PMMA.

* This article was amended on 21 January to correct the full name of PMA to para-Methoxyamphetamine.

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The Superman pill deaths are the result of our illogical drugs policy | David Nutt

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The past week has seen a number of drug disasters in the UK, one of which is the unexpected deaths of three men, two from Ipswich and one from Telford. They all appear to have taken a drug called PMA (para-Methoxyamphetamine).

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Examples of subcultures

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Teenage dreams: quiffs, kisses and the cults of youth - in pictures

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Full of joy and rebellion, world-famous photographers capture a century of youth culture, from punks in garters to football fanatics