drugs

Online defamation cases double as I make unfounded accusations of international narcotics smuggling

The number of defamation cases involving libellous remarks made in blogs has doubled year on year, according to a London law firm. This gave me pause for thought as I was about to post a blog facetiously implying that one of my ancestors was an international drugs runner.

However, he’s been dead for nearly a century and it’s very difficult – though apparently not impossible – for the dead to sue for defamation, so I’ll press on with the story.

I’ve been looking for my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather for years (in a genealogical sense). The family surname appears to have been changed at some point, which has made it impossible to locate the right records.

However, I’ve now stumbled by chance across a character who I suspect of being GGF.

Here’s what I know (based mainly on family legend)

First name Myer or similar

Surname not Fenton, but possibly something similar

Probably foreign, was an immigrant

Probably Jewish

Had some connection with Manchester

Had a son born in 1885, called Richard

Here’s how my new chap fits the bill (based on documentary evidence from ancestry.com)

First name Meyer

Surname Feinstein

Born in either Russia or Palestine, emigrated to the US but visited the UK several times.

Jewish

Lived in Manchester for a while

Had a son born in 1885, called Louis

Could be coincidence but you can see how it starts to get exciting. Meyer was a druggist or chemist by trade, and though he became a US citizen, he seems to have spent most of his time popping hither and thither across the Atlantic. The archives are bulging with applications from Mr F, asking for visas and emergency passports so he could nip to and fro between New York, Boston or Philadelphia and Turkey, Austria or England. The captains of the Mauretania and the other transatlantic steamships must have felt quite lonely and distressed if Meyer wasn’t on the passenger list.

Quite often he travelled alone, leaving the wife and kids home alone in Brooklyn. What, I want to know, was a middle-aged, married chemist doing gallivanting all over the world when he should have been at home dispensing headache remedies? And how could he afford all that transatlantic travel?

Meyer the narcotics runner wouldn’t be the first skeleton I’ve uncovered in the family closet. I’ve discovered an illegitimate baby and three generations of alcoholics (not that either were especially unusual in so-called repressed Victorian Britain, but they make the family stop and think a bit).

It’s all circumstantial of course – I can’t yet prove either M’s alleged criminal tendencies or his blood relationship to me. I’ve seen some shocking examples of amateur family historians making wild assumptions and taking them as truths. “My family came over with William the Conqueror” – that kind of nonsense but on a smaller scale. I’ve even heard one person making that very claim. It’s ludicrous – even if it were true, there would be no way of proving it, and no reason to even assume it, given the erratic availability of documentary sources prior to the early 1800s, when registration of births, marriages and deaths became compulsory in the UK.

It’s going to be hard enough to prove a link with a 19^th century Russian-Jewish-American drugs baron, let alone proving descent from 11^th century French invaders.

Pic credit: Grant Cochrane, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2365

The tragedy of drugs and the creative personality

A bloke I was chatting to at a house party last weekend, at which most of the guests were musicians, told me he used to be a prolific songwriter, but had barely written a word since giving up marijuana two years ago. His skill for creative expression had disappeared, along with the drugs in his body.

The link between creativity and addiction is a common one. The Romantic poets of the 19^th century are a case in point, with their penchant for laudanum. Samuel Taylor Coleridge apparently dreamt 100 or so lines of his epic poem Kubla Khan while in a laudanum-induced sleep, but most of the words never made it to paper, because while trying to scribble down what he remembered from the dream he was interrupted by a knock at the door. The “person from Porlock” who disturbed his work subsequently became a byword for anyone who interrupts important work, in particular of a creative nature.

Coleridge’s death in 1834 is believed to have been connected with his opium addiction and there have been many more cases since then of creative types meeting their ends as the result of drugs and alcohol.

Today’s tragic death of Amy Winehouse is just the latest, with many of the zillions of Tweets flying about this afternoon commenting on the connection between her creative success and her addiction problems.

My house party bloke – albeit with a drug of choice that was not likely to prove fatal – is one of those who has opted for health over the tempting attractions of a creative lifestyle.

I wondered, is there a choice? Can creativity come without the presence of artificial stimulants? A friend of mine who’s in Alcoholics Anonymous says there are some well-known names in the music industry who attend meetings locally. Maybe they’ve got to that place where they can produce good material while staying clean. As another friend, who’s himself a musician, pointed out, the prodigious work churned out by creative types while under the influence might, actually, be not as good as what they might have done had they taken the giant leap of faith to do it sober.