TTIP resistance and Henry Miller

Hi everyone

As I'm sure many of my readers will know, at the moment the door is open for something called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will allow corporations to sue elected Governments for decisions which affect their profits. This is obviously an appalling idea, and I have talked about it in the past. There is currently consultation available about this, but it closes within the next day or so. On the off-chance that anyone sees this who has not yet responded, please do immediately.

http://action.sumofus.org/a/ttip-comments/3/2/?akid=6025.1153623.ar134p&rd=1&sub=fwd&t=1

Just click on the link, enter your details and your comment. All of the text on the left will explain more about it. I won't go into it here, because I have discussed it in the past and the website explains it all anyway. But please be assured that this could be a terrible onslaught on British democracy, and I strongly urge anyone to do whatever they can to prevent it.

Now that that is out of the way, I want to move on to Henry Miller. Now, two months ago Henry Miller made international headlines - he was a 19-year-old gap year student who took a substance called ayahuasca whilst holidaying in Colombia, had a very severe reaction and tragically died as a result. This was a very big news story and many people know that I went to sixth form with Henry. I knew him, not especially well, but I spoke to him a few times and he was always pleasant and friendly, we were friends on Facebook and we have quite a lot of close friends in common with one another, so despite the fact that I did not know him especially well, I was deeply saddened by his death and this has been on my mind for a while.

I had considered writing a blog about Henry's death, but I never have until now because I don't feel that there is anything really that I can say that has not already been said. I didn't know him well enough to comment on him personally save for saying that he was always polite to me, and anything else I think has already been said on other media. I am writing this blog to clarify something about Henry's death that has not been reported in the news at all. I obtained this information from a personal source, and I feel that it should have been reported, but by the time it came to light, Henry was yesterday's news.

I was recently informed that Henry Miller died purely because of an allergic reaction to the ingredient in the ayahuasca that he took. This is something that the post-mortem revealed. I think it's important for this to be recognised, because a lot of the comments on various forums suggest that Henry was foolish and stupid, and that whilst it's a sad occurrence he got what was coming to him. The fact is that ayahuasca has very spiritual properties and prior to Henry, there was very little information on it causing harm to anyone, so I feel that these comments are very unfair. Not that I can blame the people who made them, because the news media suggested that it was something that could have been predicted, and the results of the post-mortem were not reported. I am writing this blog because I feel strongly that in these situations, the full story needs to be told so that people do not misinterpret what happened. I don't expect this blog to change very much because I don't get a huge readership (although hopefully it is increasing) but if it changes the opinion of one person, it is in my opinion worth it.

I will just say one more thing. Another thing that I found out is that the news media have been very intrusive towards Henry's family, and have employed tactics which involve secretly approaching his house and hiding in the area watching and listening to things that people are saying. Personally, I think that this is an absolute disgrace. No one should employ tactics like that, and especially not on people who are grieving for their loved one. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is a way to legally prevent this from happening without it being abused - freedom of the press is very important, and I think that any attempt to regulate them will ultimately lead to the truth not being told in a political context. On the whole, I think it is best to allow the press to do what they like. But I would hope that journalists would use their professional integrity and personal sense of human empathy not to do that sort of thing. It is absolutely disgraceful, it hurts people and I think it is generally very unfair.

Anyway, that's all for now. I haven't written as much as I usually do, but then I didn't really intend to. I just had a few subjects that I wished to speak about. I will write more soon.