[Apologies for the length and seriousness of today's entry. Tomorrow I'll post something silly about Marmite on tulips or something instead.]

Well, waddya know. You wait ages for some interesting telly, spending days on end with CBeebies on because it's still more intellectually stimulating than 99% of television, then three things turn up on successive evenings.

Tonight [Tuesday]: BBC2, 9pm: Horizon – Cannabis: The Evil Weed? The write-up says this "challenges assumptions about cannabis, such as the link between it and schizophrenia".

Long-term readers of Custardsurgery will know my personal history here, as a heavy user in my late teens before a period of intense anxiety-depression-agoraphobia forced me to kick it [mainly because I couldn't get out the door to score any]. That looks to someone who wasn't in my head at the time like a pretty clear cause-and-effect, but I think that'd be a very simplistic explanation.

The argument is basically this: is it that cannabis causes "mental illness"? Or is it that people who are very prone to mental illness, as I was in my late teens [education/career underachiever, struggling with official disinformation about sexuality, comparatively socially isolated, already prone to substances after starting with alcohol] are much more likely to use cannabis?

My conclusion, for what it's worth, is that the socio-environmental culture of cannabis use is what makes it dangerous. Put it like this: with alcohol our society makes clear cultural distinctions: we don't put the guy who has a quick pint after work in the same category as the tramp sipping Windolene out of a brown paper bag.

Similarly, a teenager who has a quick smoke with his mates, enjoys the experience, and thinks nothing of it the next day is very different to the young Fish who tried to use it to escape from the shit running around inside his head, so smoked it from morning to evening in a damp, dingy and depressing bedsit in Dagenham.

This is one of the reasons I applaud the Amsterdam "coffee shop" idea: it ritualized the dope experience, it socialized it. I've no doubt that it brought its own set of problems [and personally I would go further than the Dutch and nationalize the whole illegal drugs trade rather than just tolerate it], but I can certainly say that I would have very much appreciated being part of a community of ancient potheads with a culture and a set of social norms to go by, rather than just stuck in a small room with Pink Floyd – The Wall.

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Then, Wednesday night: BBC2 9pm – Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer's.

I'm not a great Pratchett fan – I love his footnotes, but they're often better than the actual stories themselves – but I'm very much looking forward to this: like "schizophrenia", dementia is a term which is much misused and criminally under-understood.

There's been occasional glimpses in the news of what this show might contain. Apparently one of the new treatments he's been trying out is a "light helmet" – but not without controversy already. As that link points out, the idea of a "light helmet" is an untested, speculative one that's been picked up and ran with by businessmen, not dementia specialists.

One of the things I'm specifically looking for in this show is for Pratchett to, yes, explore possible treatments for dementia, but also to bring some rationality to the subject, and I hope that it's objective about these treatments rather than just a celebrity piece with a subtext of "ooh, look at this funny thing on his head".

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Finally: Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm: Killer In A Small Town looks at the Ipswich murders of five women in 2006.

Outside of the strictly criminological and forensic-psychological – what were Steve Wright's motives? – there's three ways to look at these murders.

The first is its direct impact on families and friends, which will happen in the film [and also in the article linked above].

The second is in its indirect impact on a local community. I blogged at the time about some of this, which also included the fear it generated in people who'd never been sex workers, who'd never been near the red-light district of Ipswich, and who actually only ever went in the town about once a year, but who still felt threatened by the way this happened in one of the most quiet, non-descript towns in England, surrounded by mile upon mile of rather nice rural living.

The third, and most germane to my thinking, is the way it has changed how our local authorities deal with prostitution, drugs, vulnerable women and the other social issues involved here.

West End Road and Portman's Walk [now Sir Alf Ramsey Way - well done Ipswich Borough Council for wanting to name a street after one of our most famous sons, and then choosing the road containing a bus depot, a rubbish tip and a red-light district] have been the centre of the sex and drugs trade for as long as I've lived around the town.

For some years I lived fairly nearby, and often drove through at night on my way home; the trade was very visible, although occasionally the police would come by, round the girls up whilst their pimps disappeared into the shadows, fine them £50 and let them go. [And how would they earn back that £50?] Treatment for major drug addiction was almost unknown here, and even if one of the women would have turned up to the authorities, they'd probably have been passed over as too difficult a case to handle.

The murders changed all that. A lot of funding was put into projects which didn't criminalize the women, but gave them escape routes if they wanted them. Suffolk Police adopted a new policy of actively intervening [not arresting] with street workers, whilst leaving non-drug using sex workers in parlours to their own business if no coercion was involved.

Today the street trade in Ipswich has almost entirely disappeared. West End Road is part of a new "Village Ipswich" regeneration area [not a very good one, but that debate will have to wait for another blog]. Projects like Iceni are reporting excellent success rates in treating addicts and moving them away from the cycle of criminality.

[Yep, you heard right, your tax pounds [and Euros] are going directly to making a real difference to some very vulnerable people, and along the way crime goes down, the town looks better and is happier. Everybody wins. Libertarians please note.]

The future funding of such projects is [at best] uncertain, and there's a big fight on to keep them running. [As usual, projects get to be victims of their own success - if there's no street sex workers in West End Road, the crappy middle managers start to think "why spend money on them?"]

It may seem a long way from the teenage prog-rock-fan pothead I used to be, but after twenty years it's still all about the same political struggle…