George Michael -  Butterfly Upon a Wheel?

Artrockers,
The first mistake George Michael made was not employing Pete Doherty's legal team. After all, serial court attender Doherty has spent a total of four days in Pentonville Prison, George Michael however has been sentenced to eight weeks in Pentonville for harming nobody but himself. Sure, he crashed his car into Happy Snaps and was a bit wasted when he did it - but eight months? Is this a case of breaking a butterfly upon a wheel? Forty odd years ago Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were sentenced to jail in the Redlands drug case. At the time William Rees Mogg, hardly a bastion of the counter-culture wrote in The Times: "If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man."
And here we are in the 21st Century doing it all over again. If anything drug laws have gone backwards, the enlightenment has not happened. A naturally occurring weed is still the harbinger of destruction. And this time there's no Rees Mogg to talk sense. Optimists might have seen the Jagger-Richards case as a break-through, a precursor to a new found weed liberality - how wrong can you be? The laws, and their enforcement by the police are more aggressively enforced than they were in 1968 - as George Michael's case proves.
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? We do.

Tom Artrocker