Mark Speight: Society's Crime.

I was a little upset to hear on TV last night what I suspected would be the end of the Mark Speight story. They found his dead body hanging from a building in London. I have been trying to put my finger on what it is about this story that upsets and even angers me. Something's not right and I think the reason goes deeper than poor Mark and Natasha.

Here we have two bright up and coming TV personalities, a couple who have both wound up dead within the space of months. I don't know the exact circumstances surrounding the lead up to events which resulted in the death of Natasha other than she had been drinking and taking cocaine before she scalded herself to death in a boiling bath. All we know about Mark so far is that he disappeared days ago and was found dead yesterday.

The first thing that worries me is how he managed to loose himself in London in the first place. We live in a society where we can track terrorists and murdered children all over London. Human rights groups are constantly telling us how many CCTV cameras are watching our every move and there is an abundance of programs on TV in which CCTV cameras follow drunken yobs all over cities as they assault each other or vandalise property. This being the reality, how comes the police couldn't trace him quicker. This is also a guy who was a popular children's TV presenter, has been in and out of the news since his girlfriend died and more so since he himself disappeared.

I am astonished that nobody has seen him or had the sense to keep an eye on him if they did long enough to call the police and report his whereabouts. This was a man that needed help. We've all see the pictures of him on TV and in the papers looking crushed and devastated by events that have overtaken him. The problem is that in London, we walk past people like Mark every day and do nothing. We are used to doing it and we have become quite good at it. People who need help are ignored and trampled over in case we miss the next tube or we're late for work. I wonder if things would be different if there had been a financial reward offered for finding him. Of course they would....remember scenes in the news of people trampling over each other so they could save a fiver on a pair of knickers at the sales on Boxing Day?

In the long run, I am not sure if anything could've been done to save Natasha. Mark on the other hand fell through the safety net after the net should've been there. The problem with Mark was that there were probably several nets that should've been there for him but the question was which one to use. I'll take the liberty of pointing out the obvious place to start. The couple were cocaine users and cocaine is a class A classified drug for a reason. It wrecks peoples minds, bodies, finances, families and lives. Going further it also wrecks communities. It is a killer and is against the law. However as a society we seem to have come to accept cocaine as part of every day life and those who haven't ignore it or pretend the problem doesn't exist.

There isn't a class, race or age that isn't affected by the drug. Go to any City or West End bar on a Friday night and watch as men go to the toilet in pairs and re-emerge wiping their noses. Look at the loudest groups and watch as their members involuntarily twitch, both facially and bodily between paranoid glances about them to make sure nobody has been watching them or that everybody has. Go to the Pub in the suburbs and watch exactly the same behaviour it replicates on what I think is an epidemic scale.

We also seem to accept cocaine use from our celebrities. Kate moss is going from strength to strength after being pictured snorting a white powdery substance. Amy Winehouse is almost as famous for her addiction to hard drugs as she is for her music career. These people are used to sell products to our children and young people ruthlessly because legitimate brands and big business can see the benefits of aligning themselves with the commercial popularity of illegal cocaine as they would with any other successful product. The prevalence of these people in popular media is used commercially to sell legitimate products but their presence also works just as well to sell the illegitimate products they are associated with too. As a society, we seem to overlook this.

As another example, ask anyone about Keith Richards and they will glaze over with affection for a man who in their eyes has stuck two fingers up at society, lived and succeeded. What is conveniently ignored is the fact that he has committed crime on a regular if not daily basis and at society's expense. He even sniffed his fathers ashes for Christ's sake and I don't thing there is anything god to say about that.

The sad thing here is that both Mark and Natasha appeared to have everything going for them and nobody is talking about the reasons why this story is upsetting. The waste of life and potential is bad enough but what's worse is that as a society, we probably all know people in a similar boat whether we realise it or not and either way we don't seem to be prepared to face the issues so I don't think we're going to learn anything from it and that's just awful.

Good luck Mark & Natasha, hope you find peace in the next life.