Please send us bailiff stories

Very encouraging meeting of the London Motorists Action Group - LMAG - yesterday. If you've had a brush with a bailiff, log on to www.lmag.org.uk and tell us about it - evidence is piling up, and the police, OFT and the courts all showing strong interest.

More importantly, if you're about to have a brush with a bailiff, log on and gather one of LMAG's garlic necklaces - abuses by bailiffs (often just uncertified people claimimg to be bailiffs) are so widespread that, if you know the rules, you may well be able to catch them out and send them packing (or at least take a chunk off the bill).

apomorphine and alcoholism

Picking up another forgotten therapy, John Yerbury Dent's use of apomorphine to cure alcoholism.

Well described in Alan Maclean's autobiography "No, I Tell a Lie, it was the Tuesday…", pages 138 to 150, and much misdecribed in Alan's obituaries, which kept calling it an "aversion therapy" when it says quite clearly on page 141 "it's not an aversion treatment".

Apomorphine, discovered in the 1860s (so no nice patents for pharmaceutical companies to make a mint from) has a range of interesting effects. No-one seems to have bothered to try Dent's therapy again, can't imagine why. Various papers (paid-for access, sadly) describe the use of apomorphine with alcoholics - but none of them using it (as far as I can see) in Dent's fashion (to the extent he is discussed, it is to dismiss him as a magician).