Just Google it...

It sounds so simple. Everything’s on the internet, so just stick in what you want, and up it comes. Well, not quite. I’m currently revising a set of plays for school pupils, that I wrote a year ago. One of them concerns Dr. John Marks, a doctor in Widnes who ran a revolutionary scheme back in the 80s, supplying heroin as a prescription for addicts. He almost stumbled into it by accident, and was thinking of closing it down - but the local police argued strongly for him to keep it going, because supplying good quality drugs, for free, was having a beneficial effect on the local crime rate. It sounds too good to be true, but it was a brilliant success, and was only closed down after American pressure, because it made a nonsense of their “Just say no” war on drugs. So much so radical.

My source for this was a long Spectator article from 1995. I’d found it on the net, kept the link reference and - as is required these days - included it in the school pack. The publishers wrote to say that the link didn’t work. They’re right - it’s gone. Between 2020 when I wrote the play, and 2021 when I revised it, this crucial piece of evidence has gone walkabout. I have my own printout of the article, and the precise date when it was published, but if your only criterion for evidence is “can I click on it now?” neither of those are any use.