The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  If — when — tech’s bright, shiny future goes wrong, there will certainly be recriminations directed at one of the, by then, newly infamous entrepreneurs, but it will be too late. The taxpayer will look in the first instance to government to co-ordinate an emergency response, to strengthen national defences and to make tech giants live by the same set of rules that the rest of us are expected to follow.

  So why wait for the emergency before we act? In the United States of the late 19th and early 20th century there were similar fears about the cynical concentration of power. A generation of leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, set about “trust-busting” to break up the oil and financial cartels. Not all of it was a success. But in seeking to cut monopolies down to size, Roosevelt defended vigorously the important idea of the public good. Quite simply, large corporations should live under the rule of law and follow fair rules, like all good citizens.

  What would a similar effort in Britain look like now? No one is better placed to be more robust on this than Theresa May. She seems hard-headed about security and power.

  What is needed is a simple and uncluttered approach over several years, working through each component of the problem: making sure the online mega-corps are taxed on a level playing field; establishing that we own our own digital data; where necessary updating competition law; and going to town on the security of the digital infrastructure on which modern life depends.

  It is difficult to work out whether the tech giants see the danger. They certainly spend vast sums on lobbyists in London, Washington and Brussels, which suggests that they can feel fear. On the other hand they hide behind the notion that all is fine because we the consumers ticked the terms and conditions box (without reading it). They should ask the bankers how that turned out. The T&C defence did not save the UK’s financial industry in the case of the payment protection insurance racket and £26 billion so far has been paid out on that scandal alone.

  Something similarly robust on an even bigger scale will need to be done to big tech, and soon.

  OUR ADDICTS TURN BLUE, THEN THEY DIE: THE TOWN AT THE CENTRE OF NEW US DRUGS EPIDEMIC

  Rhys Blakely, Huntington, West Virginia

  APRIL 1 2017

  PEOPLE WERE TURNING blue, their muscles contracting, their pupils shrinking to pinheads. The voice of a police officer crackled over the radio. He sounded confused. Seven people had collapsed on a single street. “They’re just … dying,” he said.

  It was a Monday afternoon in Huntington, West Virginia, a small coal town in the foothills of the Appalachians where most of the mines have shut. This community is at the sharp end of a nationwide heroin and opioid epidemic. A bad batch of drugs had just hit the streets.

  One victim collapsed in a Burger King car park. Minutes later three more were found — as blue as their denim jeans, said the man who found them — passed out in a flat. The police radio kept crackling. “I’ve just got another one … And we just got another one … I’ve got two additional overdoses.”

  A man in his fifties was found, not breathing, in the bath. Another was slumped behind the wheel of his car, in traffic. One woman tried to resuscitate a friend but could see her own fingers turning blue. Even as she pumped her friend’s chest, she herself was overdosing.

  In all, 28 people overdosed in four hours, in a town of fewer than 50,000 people. Two died and 26 were revived with an antidote. The incident made national headlines but local children took it in their stride. “It was a normal day, but worse,” said Jenelle Anders-Lee, 15, who lives just up the street from where the first overdoses were reported. “It’s kind of sad for a teenager to be saying that, isn’t it?” she conceded.

  The US is in the grip of a drug problem unlike any that has gone before — a product of economic hopelessness, aggressive marketing campaigns by pharmaceutical companies and a new wave of deadly, synthetic painkillers concocted in China and Mexico.

  Few places have been harder hit than Huntington. About one in five people here lives in poverty. At least one in ten is believed to be an addict. Only pawnbrokers and fast-food restaurants seem to be thriving. An Amazon distribution centre, perched on a hill, is the one sign of economic vibrancy. People walk the streets glassy-eyed. A pejorative was coined to describe them: pillbillies.

  In the 1970s, when Richard Nixon announced a “war against heroin addiction”, overdoses accounted for about 1.5 out of every 100,000 deaths in the US. During the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, it rose to two per 100,000.

  Today overdoses account for ten out of 100,000 deaths nationwide. In West Virginia in 2015 the figure was 41.5. In Huntington it is twice that.

  Firefighters spend far more time administering Narcan — an opiate antidote injection — than putting out fires. There are at least five calls a day. Jan Rader, the fire chief, said that 70 per cent of them involve children being at the scene. Watching someone being dragged back from the edge of death can be a jarring experience. They will often wake up belligerent, angry that their high has been disrupted.

  “Sometimes the kids are just playing video games, like it’s no big deal,” Ms Rader said. “It’s very scary that this is their normal.”

  She worries about the mental health of her firefighters. She has been in the force for 23 years. She was a decade into the job before she had seen “a significant number” of dead people.

  Today a young firefighter in Huntington can see 20 dead young people in a year — and perhaps twice as many. “These are people they know. This is a small town. In the past five years the job has changed entirely,” Ms Rader said.

  One commentator wrote that in communities across the US, pain pills and heroin have “joined shuttered factories and Donald Trump as a symbol of white working-class desperation”. A rising mortality rate among poor, white, middle-aged Americans has drawn comparisons with the sickly final days of the Soviet Union.

  In Huntington about one in five children born in the local Cabell Huntington Hospital suffers withdrawal symptoms because their mothers have used opiates. These babies have tremors and unnaturally high-pitched cries. The local police talk about compassion fatigue, and worry that it will become post-traumatic stress disorder. Tales of small children being prostituted to feed their parents’ habits are not uncommon.

  The drugs are so dangerous that workers in funeral homes in some communities have been advised to keep opioid antidote injections ready. There is the danger of encountering minute amounts of the drug on an overdose victim’s corpse. There has also been a rise in the number of grieving relatives who overdose at funerals.

  The path to hell, according to Will Lockwood, a former opioid addict who lives in Huntington and who has been brought back from the brink of death four times after overdosing, begins with a sensation of delicious warmth. Opioids and heroin induce numbness, both physical and emotional. Life becomes simpler. Many addicts were first prescribed medication for pain for workplace injuries before graduating to heroin. Mr Lockwood was prescribed pain pills after having his wisdom teeth out at 15. By the time he was 16 he had a $300-a-day habit.

  At first the drugs induced euphoria. Over time, however, his objective shifted. He took them not to get high, but to stave off symptoms of withdrawal: nausea, sweats, diarrhoea. What you must understand, Mr Lockwood said, is that when an addict hears about a cluster of overdoses, he or she does not think that they must avoid the batch of drugs responsible. “The first thought is — how do I get some of that?”

  It is sometimes argued that working-class towns such as Huntington, which voted overwhelmingly for Mr Trump, are guilty of casting themselves as victims. “The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin,” David Fresh, a conservative pundit, wrote.

  Those who have emerged alive from the pit of addiction give more nuanced answers. Mr Lockwood points to the role played by OxyContin, which was released in 1996.

  Purdue Pharma, its inventor, marketed it as a slow-rele
ase, and therefore theoretically safer, form of the powerful and highly addictive painkiller oxycodone, a synthetic form of morphine. But initially it was easy to release the whole dose at once; smash or dissolve the OxyContin pill and snort or inject it.

  The marketing push was unprecedented. In the 1990s doctors were urged, by advocates funded by the drugs industry, to recognise “pain” as a fifth vital sign alongside pulse, respiration, blood pressure and temperature.

  Doctors who prescribed the most pain pills were taken on all-expenses-paid retreats. Purdue gave away samples. Sales of OxyContin grew from $48 million in 1996 to more than $1 billion in 2000.

  A study published in the American Journal of Public Health called the marketing strategy a commercial triumph and a public health tragedy. A vast appetite for opioids was created. In Kermit, West Virginia, a town of 392, one chemist distributed about nine million pills in two years.

  Then in 2010 the government began a regulatory crackdown on opioid pills. Addicts were forced to look elsewhere to get high. “We sent them to heroin,” Jim Johnson, the director of drug control policy in Huntington, said.

  The years that followed brought sharp increases in hepatitis C and property crime.

  Now the big killer is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times more powerful than heroin that is produced in China and Mexico. This is the drug thought to have been behind those 28 overdoses. “This is public enemy No 1,” Mr Lockwood said. “It will turn you into a shell of a human being.”

  THIS IS THE END OF DEMOCRACY, CRY PROTESTERS AS NATION SPLITS IN TWO

  Hannah Lucinda Smith, Istanbul

  APRIL 18 2017

  NEVER HAS ISTANBUL, the metropolis that straddles Europe and Asia, felt more like a city divided. The day after a referendum that gave President Erdogan the mandate to grasp almost total power over Turkey, the joy of his supporters, who said that this was “democracy in action”, contrasted with the growing acrimony of his opponents, who claimed that the vote was skewed.

  Despite the insistence of Turkey’s electoral board that the poll was legitimate, international election monitors said that there were irregularities in the campaign and expressed concerns that they had been denied access to some voting booths.

  The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe questioned why the Turkish authorities had made last-minute changes to the rules governing vote-counting.

  The president rejected the criticism outright, telling the organisation to “know your place” and said that the country did not “see, hear or acknowledge” criticism that the vote did not live up to international standards. Shortly afterwards Turkey said it would extend its state of emergency by three months: the third extension since a failed coup attempt in July.

  Mr Erdogan’s “yes” campaign won on Sunday night with 51.49 per cent of the vote, according to the latest unofficial count, with a victory margin of 1.4 million over the “no” camp.

  “They stole this,” said one man, dazed and depressed and unwilling to give his name in fear of a possible crackdown on critics. “The end of democracy, and for what? A couple of percentage points?” Claims that the referendum had been manipulated helped to fuel a second night of protests. In Kadikoy, the middle-class, bohemian district of Istanbul, about 3,000 people — young and old — took to the streets in anger over the “yes” victory. Kadikoy voted 81 per cent against.

  Protesters, some chanting “Thief, Erdogan”, “No to the presidency” and “This is just the beginning”, stuck to the narrow streets of the district because most roads are too small to accommodate a water-cannon truck. Such demonstrations have not been seen in Turkey for four years and protesters were scrutinised by hordes of undercover police and the riot squad.

  “We can’t accept this result,” said one young woman. “We know the vote wasn’t fair.”

  As the crowd passed through the streets, chanting “We will not bow”, elderly men and women hung out of their windows, cheering and banging cutlery, pots and pans. One old lady blew kisses to the demonstrators.

  As night fell, the protests spread across the city.

  “I don’t believe the result, and I believe the protests will grow,” said a graduate, 22, in the Besiktas borough, which voted 83 per cent “no” and was also the scene of large protests on Sunday night. More have been called.

  In the divided metropolis — President Erdogan’s home city, where he started his political career as mayor in the 1990s — the ballot varied wildly. Erdogan supporters crammed the streets and squares all night in some areas, ecstatic at how the result had played out.

  The overall vote in Istanbul was split almost down the middle, with 259,000 more people voting “yes” than “no”. Turkey’s next two biggest cities, Ankara, the capital, and Izmir, on the coast, voted “no”.

  The People’s Republican Party (CHP), the main opposition party, called for the result to be annulled and said that it would bring a case against President Erdogan to the constitutional court and the European Court of Human Rights. Baris Yarkadas, a senior CHP MP, said: “What kind of a victory is this? They can’t govern this country without a state of emergency. They have become a government addicted to the state of emergency.

  “The result they declared didn’t gain acceptance by the public. Fifty per cent of the public opposed the new regime. No one believes that the government won this referendum fair and square. The ‘no’ voters proved a point to the government: they are not going to be allowed to change the regime. They have to accept this fact. We are ready for a difficult period full of struggle.”

  Bulent Tezcan, the CHP deputy chairman, said: “It will take its place in the dark pages of history with its open voting but secret counting. The [board] did not and cannot stage a safe election.”

  Meanwhile, a jubilant President Erdogan was already hinting at how he might use his new mandate yesterday. He is expected officially to resume his position at the head of the ruling AK Party at the end of this month. In his victory speech, he said that the reintroduction of the death penalty would be considered — a move that would herald the end of Turkey’s relationship with the EU.

  Amid the mounting calls for a recount, there are signs that Turkey could face a summer of violent protests as it did in 2013, the last time that there was a mass opposition movement against the president. That would pit the two sides of Istanbul’s population of 15 million people — put crudely, the conservatives and the secularists — against each other.

  DROUGHT CASTS THE SHADOW OF DEATH

  Catherine Philp, Sool, Somaliland

  APRIL 21 2017

  YUSUF, ALMOST TWO years old, has never felt rain. Droughts have devastated his birthplace in eastern Somaliland for decades, but none that anyone can remember has been as crippling as this.

  Elders remember the Dabader, or long drought, of 1974. This one they call Lagamalito: the worst.

  Exacerbated by climate change, it stretches across a swathe of east Africa, threatening famine, mass migration and an end to the traditional way of life for millions of people forced to leave their homes in search of water. Sool, the worst-affected district, has been waiting for rain since before Yusuf was born. This breakaway region of northern Somalia may have avoided the conflicts tearing through its chaotic southern neighbour but the drought here is the worst in a hundred years.

  The roads that cut through the desiccated landscape are littered with the skeletal carcasses of goats and camels, once the livelihood of its semi-nomadic people. Now human lives are imperilled, the youngest most of all.

  A mobile clinic run by the Somali Red Crescent and funded by the British Red Cross was bouncing along these pitted roads last week when an emergency call came in: cholera had broken out in a makeshift camp of displaced herders forced to abandon their homes and go in search of water when their shallow wells dried up and their livestock died.

  The water source they had trekked two hours to find was tainted. In 24 hours ten women and children had died. Other lives hung in the balance. />
  Yusuf lay on a soaked grass mat on the floor of the village school, the still centre of a chaotic whirl of medical staff and vomiting, crying children.

  Nuah Mohammed, the village elder, had ordered the school to be opened as a makeshift hospital for the visitors encamped near by. The village name, Goljanno, means mountain of heaven. “It doesn’t feel like that any more,” Mr Mohammed, whose children left years ago for London, said.

  Abdul Kareem Mohammed, Yusuf’s father, hovered near by, grief-stricken. He had brought his son to the school that morning, along with his pregnant wife, Zahara. She died before rehydration treatment could take effect. The couple had already lost two children shortly after birth. Yusuf was the only remaining son.

  “I don’t know if he will live,” Mr Mohammed said, his eyes brimming. “I have lost everything else: first my livestock, then my wife. I loved my wife, she was my life. She was everything.”

  More than 25,000 people have contracted cholera across Greater Somalia since the start of the year, a figure set to double by the summer. The United Nations is racing to prevent a repeat of the 2011 famine that killed more than 260,000 Somalis, but funding falls far short of what is needed.

  That much is apparent outside Goljanno, where cholera took only hours to tear through the huddle of dwellings fashioned from branches, cloth and tarpaulin. Similar encampments dot the bleak landscape, housing those who once considered themselves wealthy thanks to their herds of livestock. At Sihawele, 300 families have gathered from different areas along the Ethiopian border, close to the nearest well from which they can still draw water.

  Amina Mohammed Abdi, 70, walked for a week to reach Sihawele with her family after they lost their 300 sheep and all but two of their 15 camels. “We were rich before, we had milk and meat to eat and sell,” she said. “But the land dried out and there is no longer anything for the animals to eat or drink.”

  They now rely on the generosity of relatives in other areas and food distributed by aid organisations. “But that is not how we want to live,” Mrs Abdi said. “We want our independence back.”