Drugs?

Gerry's session on drugs, in tune with the intellectual aims of this module, wasn't primarily about legislation, social policy, or prohibition. People use drugs for all sorts of different (or similar) reasons; the banning of commercial trade in these drugs tends, however, to be driven by only a handful of motivations. And the main one of these is, it seems, moral outrage.

And so we come to mephedrone. Or m-cat. Or miaow miaow. Miaow. Miaow. You have got to be kidding me... No one would sidle up to someone in a club and ask "Need any miaow miaow?" And, yes, I know that as a 'legal high' there was probably fairly minimal street selling of the drug - so why does it supposedly have a (crap) 'street name' anyway?

The processes whereby drugs develop their slang names is somewhat murky. The etymology of slang generally is barely understood, and when it comes to terms related to criminal behaviour it's even harder to investigate or trace. But my feeling on this (and this is an uniformed view) is that drugs develop names that describe their appearance (weed), are reflective of their effects (speed), refer to an element in production or use (crack), or describe the appearance of the user (smack, dope). I can't see how miaow miaow could arise as a drug term that anyone could use without pissing themselves. And that isn't - as far as I know - one of the alleged side-effects of mephedrone.

As this seems to me a non-story, more related to newspaper sales than public safety, I'm illustrating it with pictures of the two cats that have lived in my house, both of which must have said miaow at some point.

The one of the top was called Charlie - which is a name that kinda screws up my theory of the derivations of drug terms.

For commentary on mephedrone which is somewhat better informed than tabloid scare stories, check out this week's New Scientist.

If you're on campus, or can be bothered to log-in to Athens, you can discover more about one type of drug slang formation in this article -

Antonio Lillo, 'The rhyming slang of the junkie', English Today, 17, 2, April 2001, pp.39-45
Among other nuggets of etymological information is the citing of 'Lou Reed' as rhyming slang for speed. I'd have thought Lou's name  would have been better used for weed, but I suppose that depends on whether you see The Velvet Underground as deviant hippies or proto-punks. I would have thought that might have been a factor in the development of the term, but what do I know?

This is my second post today, because I don't have to conform to the module's assessment criteria. Neither of these posts have any relationship to April Fool's day. Unless, of course, the whole mephedrone press panic is actually being orchestrated by Chris Morris. Cake was a more convincing drug name, though.