Johann Hari

This week, in one of the glittering courthouses of the New India, a judge will continue to weigh a case that, at first glance, looks dry and technical, but is in fact wet with blood. The verdict will determine whether millions of human beings - from the tip of South America to the top of Africa - live or die.

India today is the developing world's branch of Boots, the place where the poorest people on earth get their medicines. This is because it is, along with Brazil, the only country willing to manufacture cheap copies of corporate-owned drug treatments for cancer, AIDS and other killers, and big enough to do it. Their policy has brought the cost of treating a woman with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa crashing down from an impossible $10,000 a year in 2000 to a still-tough-but-possible $130 a year today. They can only save so much money - and so many lives - because the Indian government insist they will only pay money to the multi-billion-dollar corporations who own the drug patents if they can show they have really created something genuinely new. Most of the time, they can't - so the Indians sell them to the poor at cost-price.

The court case currently wending through the Indian justice system, launched by the Swiss phramaceutical company Novartis, is an attempt to close down the poor's world pharmacy. Novartis have created a very slightly different version of their leukemia drug Gleevec, and they are trying to force the Indian government to allow them to patent it. The Indian government says the drug isn't really new. It's just a tweak, enabling Novartis to keep the patent "evergreen", continue raking in the profits, and stop the Indians from making a cheap copy at less than a tenth of the price.

If Novartis succeed, the developing world will hit a Pharmageddon, with drug supplies drying up to dying people. AIDS drugs will be particularly vulnerable to this "evergreen" patenting, since they have to be regularly tweaked to deal with an evolving virus. The panicking aid agency Medicin Sans Frontiers (MSF) - who treat 80,000 people in Africa with cheap Indian generics - warn it could mean "the end of affordable medicines in developing countries." In sub-Sharan Africa last year, I held a little lesion-covered six year old girl who lived in an orphanage with two buildings: one for the kids to live in, and the other a morgue. In a typical week, three children move from the first building to the second. This case would put a concrete wall between those kids and the current slow progress in rolling out AIDS treatments.

Of course, Novartis and the other druggernauts say simply: if you don't respect our patents, we can't invent more drugs to save more lives. We are only launching this case out of humanitarian concern. There are several flaws with this. In reality, the pharmaceutical companies don't actually do the vast majority of the research heavy-lifting. As Professor Carlos Maria Correa, the Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies of Industrial and Economic Law, explains: "In most cases, the discovery of important new drugs is made by public institutions, which later license their development and exploitation to private firms. Basic research that lead to the discovery of 'drug leads' has almost always been publicly funded at universities, in-house government facilities, or research institutes."

This life-saving research will continue whatever happens to Big Pharma's attempted profit-sucking from the developing world. The billions of pounds of profit pharmaceutical companies can make here, in the rich world, is more than enough incentive for the extra (and worthwhile) development work they do on top. Some defenders of the pharmaceutical companies call India's actions "theft". But you don't respect property rights in an imminent public emergency. During the Second World War, the government requistitioned great swathes of public property. In the AIDS crisis, in countries that are facing the death of a whole generation of people, isn't it legitimate to requisition a life-saving idea?

Watching passively while Novartis attacks the poor would be repulsive. Twenty years ago this week, a group was formed to show what we can do to stop them. The American gay activist Larry Kramer founded ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) with the motto "Silence Equals Death". His supporters lay down at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, holding up cardboard tombstones. They threw the ashes of their loved ones onto the lawn of the indifferent Reaganite White House. They raided the New York Stock Exchnage to shame pharmaceutical companies failing to act. Today, Kramer says: "There are treatments that can be made available [to the poor] for a pittance, and for the pharmaceutical companies to stop that out of greed is just evil."

We should be following his example. The ashes of African AIDS victims should be thrown onto the Novartis corporate headquarters' lawn. Pensions funds should be lobbied to disinvest. This kind of pressure works: Novartis was one of the 39 companies trying to force South Africa to limit drugs to the poor, until a mass campaign forced them to quit the case in 2001. In the long-term, focusing on one corporation isn't enough: we need to force our governments to change the over-arching international structure - the World Trade Organisation - that coerces poor countries to obey the will of Big Pharma rather than their own dying citizens. Countries like Britain and the US didn't respect international patents until the early twentieth century, when we were far wealthier than Africa today.

But we still have four weeks to force Novartis to pull out of the legal action before the verdict . Go to http://www.msf.org/petition_india/international.html to sign the petition. There is a month - just a month - to save millions of lives.

During the Cold War, every person on earth knew what the worst end-game would look like: the three-minute warning, the futile scrambling under desks, and universal incineration. With the just-as-real, just-as-dangerous threat of global warming, there is a vague sense of doom, but no clear mental picture of what meltdown would look like – until now.

Mark Lynas is, along with George Monbiot and Bill McKibben, the best writer about global warming working today. In Six Degrees, he does something so obvious and so necessary it is hard to believe nobody has done it before. He pores through the peer-reviewed scientific literature and describes, calmly and plainly, what scientists say will happen on earth as each degree of global warming occurs.

One of the last jeers of the dwindling band of climate change “sceptics” is that a world that is six degrees warmer sounds rather nice, thank you very much. John Redwood, a leading figure in David Cameron’s fake-green New Tories, wheeled this canard out only last month. At, at first glance, they’re right: 1-6 degrees Celcius – the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions – doesn’t sound like much.

It is. Lynas talks us through the six degrees of separation between us and a planet we do not recognize and cannot survive on. Some 18,000 years ago, the world was six degrees cooler. It was an ice age. Most of England was a freezing polar desert with winter temperatures of –40 degrees Celsius. There were almost no animals, and the only plants were a few species of lichen and mosses. It was possible to walk to France across a dried channel. No agriculture was possible, because the climate fluctuated wildly. So what happens as we move in the opposite direction, up to six degrees warmer?

With just one degree of warming, here’s what happens (deep breath): the Great Barrier Reef bleaches and dies, the Greenland ice sheet melts, the Maldives and many islands in the South Pacific disappear beneath the waves, rockfalls from the Alps multiply as the mountains melt, the seasonal rainfalls in sub-Saharan Africa change leaving millions at risk of drought and famine, and hurricanes start to hit Brazil for the first time in millennia. One degree.

At three degrees, the Amazon rainforest – the planet’s lungs - will die. Lynas explains: “The trees in the Amazon are used to constant humidity, and have no resistance to fire.” Once the humidity dries out, so does the forest. They will burn and turn to ash. The destruction of whole countries accelerates. Most people who are wised up to global warming know about the drowning of Bangladesh and the islands of the South Pacific – but how many know about, say, Botswana? With three degrees of warming, Lynas explains, “little else will remain on the Kalahari but violently blowing sand. With soaring temperatures and howling winds, colossal storms will shift immense quantities of sand and dust across the region… The entire country is covered by ‘active’ dunes after 2070. Botswana as we know it will drown – not under water, but sand.”

And at six degrees – the IPCC’s higher-end predictions for this century - humanity enters its endgame. “An entirely new planet comes into being – one unrecognisable from the Earth we know today,” Lynas writes. The rainforests are gone, the world’s ice supplies are only a memory, the seas are encroaching, and inland cities see temperatures 10 degrees higher than today. In the world’s major crop-growing areas – India, Australia, the inland United States – most crops are dying, and mass starvation is a perennial risk.

It becomes likely that the vast stores of methane lodged on sub sea ocean shelves will bubble to the surface. Since methane is highly flammable, these could quickly be sparked – by lightning, or human ignition - into vast fireballs tearing across the sky. The chemical engineer Gregory Ryskin calculates that this methane “could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely,” with a major oceanic methane eruption having a force 10,000 times greater than the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

The planet has been here before. Geologists have discovered that at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago, the world warmed rapidly by six degrees. It was the worst crisis ever endured by life on earth, “the closest this planet has come to losing its wonderful living biosphere entirely and ending up a dead and desolate rock in space.” The earth was racked by “hypercanes”- hurricanes so strong they even left their mark on the ocean floor. Oxygen levels in the atmosphere plunged to fifteen percent – low enough to leave any fast-moving animal gasping for breath. The only survivors were a few shelled creatures in the oceans, and a pig-like creature that had the land to itself for millions of years. (Whoever thought geological findings could give you nightmares?)

Of course, it’s easy to hear the sceptics’ howls. This is alarmism! They will cry. But remember: every claim Lynas makes is backed with footnotes to respected, solid scientific papers, something conspicuously lacking from the denier’s accounts. (I have a vision of Melanie Phillips, Nigel Lawson and the other global warming deniers sitting in the charred wreckage of a methane fireball, demanding to know as the flesh falls from their bones why everyone is so “alarmist” about global warming). ‘Six Degrees’ punctures the claims of Bjorn Lomborg and Spiked Online that “we’ll adapt” to global warming. How precisely do we adapt to global crop failure and methane fireballs? You might as well say there’s no problem with a nuclear war because “we’ll adapt” to a nuclear winter.

‘Six degrees’ will make some readers want to sink into survivalism, but Lynas wisely warns: “Getting depressed about the situation now is like sitting inert in your living room and watching the kitchen catch fire, and then getting more and more miserable as the fire spreads throughout the house – rather than grabbing an extinguisher and dousing the flames.” Buy this book for everyone you know: if it makes them fight to stop the seemingly inexorable rise to six degrees of warming and mass death, it might just save their lives.

POSTSCRIPT: You can buy this book at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/0007209045/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/202-2540432-5295033?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175218002&sr=8-1

You can send letters for publication in the New Statesman on this article to letters@newstatesman.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

After a year of free PR, the hazy clouds of green gas and pinkish vapour are dispersing and the real David Cameron is coming into view. This week, a superb, impeccably balanced biography by James Hanning and Francis Elliott and a more ranty Channel Four film by Peter Hitchens have acted as extractor fans, finally blowing away some of the smoke. It is now clear the David Cameron we have been sold is an ad man's hologram, created in focus group laboratories to send us the message that The Tories Have Changed. (Chant with us, now: The Tories Have Changed. The Tories Have...) Underneath the advertising, what's there?

The speed of Cameron's reinvention is an indicator of its inauthenticity. In 2005, he called wind-farms "giant bird-blenders"; in 2006, he built one onto the side of his house. In 2005 he called for "a massive road-building programme" and was involved in slapping down Tim Yeo for speaking out on green issues; in 2006 he was pulled across the Arctic by huskies to inspect melting glaciers. The list of Damscene transformations goes on: he damned Blair for "the promotion of homosexuality in schools" and backed Section 28, then started cheering gay marriage three years later. He called Thatcher "Mother", then announced "There is such a thing as society." He called the minimum wage "a disaster", then supported it. And on, and on. One genuine transformation is plausible - but dozens, in such a short time?

This extreme make-over is designed to disguise a product of extreme privilege who remains loyal to his aristo-tribe. Cameron has claimed he had "a normal childhood" and "a normal university experience", but the facts are rather different. He was born to a millionaire stockbroker and a debutantte, with a blood-line runing back to Elizabeth Windsor. As a child he had a swimming pool, a tennis pitch and nannies. His biographers note that at his prep school, the eighty other parents included "eight honourables, four sirs, two captains, two doctors, two majors, two princesses, two marchionesses, one viscount, one brigadier, one commodore, one earl, one lord, and one queen (the Queen)."

This childhood is captured in one neat image: an eleven year old David Cameron on a plane, raising a glass of Dom Perrignon '69 to an Eton schoolmaster and braying, "Good health, Sir!"

Of course, it is as foolish to dismiss a person because he comes from a landed estate as it is to dismiss somebody from a council estate. Franklin Roosevelt was a child of riches but went on to be the greatest left-wing President in US history. The problem isn't with Cameron's background per se; it is that he has not at any point in his life imaginatively seen beyond it. He has denied he is rich because he doesn't "own a private jet." He describes the richest six percent of Brits who have to pay inheritance tax as "ordinary tax-payers". It's not surprising Cameron has this view: his first flatmate, Pete Czernin, was the heir to a £1.5bn (that's billion) fortune. This is the world he knows.

This blinding wealth informs and malforms Cameron's policies. Look at, say, Educational Maintenance Allowances (EMAs), introduced by Gordon Brown. If you are between 16 and 19 and your parents earn less than £25,000 a year, the government now gives you £40 a week to stay on at school. It makes the difference for tens of thousands of poor kids between getting an education and not, and it's had a fantastic effect on staying-on rates - but Cameron's Old Etonian-stuffed frontbench have dismissed EMAs as "a bribe".

Or look at other pro-poor policies the Cameroons cannot understand and would wipe away. The European Social Chapter gives part-time workers - who are often on the minimum wage - the right to parental leave and other basic protections. Cameron says it is one of his "top priorities" to pull out. He even voted against giving flexitime to the parents of disabled children, a fact which should give those who sympathise with him because of his disabled son a jolt.

So even when Cameron talks the talk about helping the poor, his policies would do exactly the opposite. He claims he wants to enhance social mobility and the chances of poor kids getting on - but he benefitted from precisely the nepotistic networks that prevent this happening. He got his first job as an intern by calling his godfather, a Tory MP. He got his first job in business because Daddy was the CEO's stockbroker. He got his first paid job because an uncle - the Queen's equerry - called up and demanded to know why he'd been turned down. He surrounds himself with the products of these networks now, in his own office.

His biographers note of the super-rich, "This is Cameron's tribe, and it is clear he feels its call." You can see this in the areas where he is hinting he would like to see tax cuts. When Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne (heir to a baronetcy and a wallpaper fortune, in case you hadn't guessed) talks about the need for "flatter taxes", this is not-so-subtle code. Flat taxes are the opposite of progressive taxes. The people who created the idea - academics Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka - explain, "It is an obvious mathematical law that [flatter] lower taxes on the successful will have to be made up for by higher taxes on average people".

Cameron's pledge to reintroduce the Married Couple's Tax Allowance and his aspiration to cut inheritance tax are screechy renditions of the same tune. They would mark a huge shift of cash to the rich from the poor and the middle.

At a time when the biggest issue facing Britain domestically is soaring inequality, do we want to put somebody from the richest 0.01 percent - with no understanding of ordinary life - in charge? Being Prime Minister exposes you to a thousand needling pressures; any shallow rhetorical commitments quickly get burned away and your gut instincts - who you are, what you believe - become primary. This suggests Cameron's Tory core will come to the fore. Alice Thompson - a friend of his - said in one of the first profiles of Cameron's set, "There is no question of real spiritual commitment; they are impelled by an attraction to power."

She's right: he is saying what he must to decontaminate the Tory brand. His core instincts and his life experiences, however, draw him to the hard-right. The journalist Anne McElvoy remembers Cameron not so long ago at a dinner in honour of John Redwood "flushed with excitement, shirt hanging out and waving a large cigar while talking very tough about free markets." Even now, after Redwood has obscenely suggested that drastically destabilising the planet's climate will be a good thing, he is still in charge of Cameron's competitiveness policies.

The Tebbitite right-wingers who are fretting about Cameron being insufficiently conservative should chill out; it's the rest of us who should be worried. If we do not want to be ruled by a Brideshead Regurgitated clique, we need to get to work now to ensure Cameron's rising star ends up as merely a shooting star. Then he can return to his true vocation - as a shooting-hunting-and-fishing star.

POSTSCRIPT: There's a critical response to this article at http://partyreptile.blogspot.com/2007/03/hari-on-cameron.html

and another at http://ewanwatt.blogspot.com/2007/03/will-real-david-cameron-please-stand-up.html

and a link to a contrasting piece by Mary-Ann Sieghart at http://clivedavis.blogs.com/clive/2007/03/the_eton_effect.html

This weekend, Tony Blair has pulled off his last great act of political seduction. After a decade of whispering sweet nothings to seductees as varied as Bill Clinton, George Bush, Paddy Ashdown, Rupert Murdoch and, oh yes, the British electorate, he has sealed his career as a Westminster Cassanova with his most frigid bedding yet: the Reverend Ian Paisley.

It appears that Doctor No, the Biblical prophet of Not-an-Inch Protestant Unionism, has agreed to be First Minister in a devolved Northern Ireland cabinet where he will have a Sinn Fein deputy (Martin McGuiness!) and a slew of Catholic ministers. Of course, he is holding out for another six-week delay and yet more billions from Gordon Brown, but - in principle - he's in. Yes, you can check the Weather Channel: Hell has indeed frozen over.

To understand how improbable all this seems, you have to go back to the smoggy segregated streets of Ballymena in the 1930s, where a young Ian Paisley was learning his values from his father. Kyle Paisley was a fanatical preacher who wanted to recreate the shaking, hallucinating raptures of the "Great Revival" that had rocked Protestant Ulster a generation before, but he was constantly frustrated by the weakness and apostasy he saw all around him. One day, he was so enraged he stood up in his church and denounced two members of his flock, one for leasing some of his land to sell "Satan's buttermilk" (alcohol), the other for unspecified "sexual immorality." When the Church leaders asked him to withdraw the libellous accusations, Kyle marched out and formed his own Church across the road.

This story set the template for his son's life: claim you are being persecuted, seperate from the sinful majority, and self-righteously proclaim your own purity. It is a message exemplified by Paisley's favourite passage from the Bible, the message to the early Christians of Corinth: "Come out from among them and be ye seperate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing."

And the most unclean thing of all, to Paisley, has always been been the Catholics of Northern Ireland. His is a bitter-tasting Orange: in 1959, he spoke to an enraged mob and cried: "You people of the Shankhill Road, what's wrong with you? Number 425 Shanhill Road - do you know who lives there? Pope's men, that's who!... How about 56 Aden Street? For 97 years a Protestant lived in that house and now there's a Papisher in it!" The crowd marched straight to suspected Catholic homes and trashed them.

The idea that Paisley would ever compromise on his raw Protestant supremacism - so similar to the Jim Crow howlings of the Deep South - seemed surreal only a few years ago. In 1979, he proclaimed, "If you compromise, God will curse you." In 1981, he announced, "There's no such thing as reconcilliation. When you marry Christ to Beelzebub, then we'll be ready for talks." It seems Tony Blair has officiated over that sulphorous civil partnership.

Why has Paisley now, in his ninth decade, transcended at least some of the bigotries of his past? The answer is not yet clear. Perhaps he has seen that this deal does, after all, cement Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom (with the support of both Sinn Fein and the Irish government), and concluded the future's bright, the future's Orange. Perhaps somewhere within that roaring chest there is a whisper of conscience after all.

So it's only right that, if this deal sticks this week, we will all feel a moment of joy and relief, and pay tribute to a victory for slow, patient democratic politics. Watching Ian Paisley's journey from insurgent to politician, where he is suddenly forced to take responsibility for drains and pavements and doctor's surgeries, will be the best comedy of the next decade.

But there is a structural problem with the Good Friday process that will only now become clear. It has tried to heal the sectarian divide at the top, pressing politicians into sweaty Stormont rooms and getting them to concede. But at the bottom - on the streets beyond Stormont - the divisions have been growing wider than ever.

Dr Peter Shirlow of the University of Ulster has conducted the most detailed survey of inter-communal relations in Northern Ireland - and he found an almost completely segregated society. Only 3 percent go to mixed schools. Only 5 percent of the workforce in Catholic areas are Protestants, and vice versa. Some 68 percent of 18 to 25 year olds had never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from "the other side." A hefty majority believe the divisions have grown since 1994 when the peace process began, and the young are more sectarian than the old.

When you visit Northern Ireland today, it's like entering an alternate universe that is very similar but wholly alien. The shops could belong in any Clone Zone British town, and the people can talk Corrie or Snoop Dogg as fluently as anyone else. But then the Battle of the Boigne crops up in conversation with hard street kids. You see a hunger-striker painted onto the side of a KFC, and realise that in a podcasting age, people still communicate here by mural. You are told the taxis have orange or green stickers, indicating which 'side' they will take you to.

And you notice that Protestant and Catholic streets are sealed off with 'peace walls', vast 30-foot corrugated steel and barbed wire fences that can be closed by remote control by the police when there are "tensions". The peace walls have been closed more in the past five years than at any other time.

While our politicians have been patiently mending Northern Ireland's ceiling, the foundations have been cracking even further. The classic liberal assumptions - which I shared - that the sectarian divide would slowly close up with rising prosperity and on-going peace have turned out to be false. Things are getting worse.

Sectarianism can only be killed where it is born: in childhood. Kids raised in segregated schools, as more than 90 percent are, will inevitably fear each other. But when Protestant and Catholic kids learn together, they will - over time - make friends, fall in love, have mixed children. (The best decommissioning agent in any sectarian conflict is semen). So Gordon Brown should tie his billions to integrated schools as Stage Two of the Good Friday Agreement. Some neo-Paisley may cry - like Governor George Wallace when Alabama's schools were integrated - "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Let them. It is the only long-term hope.

Tony Blair is not able to seduce every man, woman and child in Northern Ireland. He cannot flatter and coo at each of them as he has so patiently with Paisley. In the end, the solution to the province's problems will not lie in Stormont castle, however startling the conversions that occur there. It will unfold in playgrounds where Catholic and Protestant children finally play together.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

I have always thought of Robbie Williams as a whiny flat-voiced narcissist, but when I watched him strolling out of rehab last week - hoping he has left behind his antidepressant addiction - I felt an involuntary shudder of sympathy. For the past six months, I have been in the slow process of draining Seroxat, the pushy little sister of Prozac, from my bloodstream, one milligram at a time. I have had judders and jolts. I have had moments when I think I can't quit, that I am twinned till the tomb with my little blue pills. So - I thought I'd never say this - Robbie, I know how you feel.

For the past month, a small batallion of sweet-faced therapists has been helping Robbie to trace The Origins of His Pain. But how do you trace a depression back to its birth-place? When I look back over my seemingly standard-issue suburban childhood, I realise the depression was always there, hanging in the air like black smoke. I don't mean unhappiness, the fleeting low moods that everyone endures. I mean long, hard, daily sobbing. I mean the inability to take pleasure in anything for weeks on end. I mean a pining for death. This is not what you mean when you say "I feel a bit depressed today"; it's a blank, flavourless life, laced only with rootless and inexplicable pain.

There was no obvious explanation, for me or for him. Robbie has said in interviews, mystified: "I was really loved by my mum, I was totally loved by my grandmas, I wasn't molested." It was only much later - as an adult - I discovered that both my parents have had depressive nervous breakdowns, in their own style and in their own time. Last year I found out my mother was taking anti-depressants and tranquillisers when she was pregnant with me, so maybe my depression was born with me in the womb, an invisible Siamese twin.

As a teenager, Robbie's main anti-depressant was, he has said, fantasy. "I would always imagine I was an actor or a rock star," he has said. Me too. My depression was buried beneath plush cushions of lies. I pretended I had a millionaire father - rather than a depressive bus-driving dad - and that I would one day be a film star. But as you get older and the world refuses to confirm your fantasies, that anti-depressant melts into air.

This dissolution of my dream-life coincided, when I was seventeen, with the end of my first intense teenage love affair - and so my four-hours-a-day depression morphed into a twenty-four-hours-a-day depression. I remember a long, blank summer inter-railing across Europe with my friends in almost ceaseless tears, weeping in Barcelona and Venice and Prague over nothing and everything, rousing myself only to read a few bleak pages of Albert Camus. (I was even less fun than I sound).

There were dabs of self-medication with ecstasy and other Class A modd-brighteners, but they were only followed by an even harder thud to the ground. On a beach in Madrid during an ecstasy come-down, anti-depressants suddenly appeared on my mental landscape like a blazing chariot across the sky. Was it possible that all the daily agonies I took forgranted were not an inevitable part of Being Me? After touch-down in Heathrow I hurried to my G.P., hungrily swallowed my pills and waited for change. And it came. Within a fortnight the tears ducts dried - they stayed dry for a decade - and my mind cleared. My life became a manic whirr of happy, happy, happy acts. I was constantly making friends and working hard and swirling through the world with a serene glee.

And so it continued for ten years. I glided through University, into journalism, into a great group of friends and through some sweet boyfriends. Then last year I began to realise that ever since I became anti-depressed, some strange characteristics had sunk into my personality. I would rack up huge amounts of debt and not feel any anxiety about it. I would take wild risks - like getting into fights in public - and not feel any sense of fear. On the rare occassions I felt bad, I would just pop an extra pill and it would
disappear. At times, I began to think I was locked in a new human state I called 'anti-depression': manic, resillient, impermeable. I realised I could spot other anti-depressed people at parties or in the office in a matter of minutes. But I had been taking Seroxat all my adult life, so it was hard to tell where the Seroxat ended and I began. Was this just my personality?

Once, about four years after I started taking the tablets, I made the mad impulsive decision to stop one day, just to see what would happen. Within a week I was sweating and shaking and crying all the time and pledging never to try it again. But last autumn I decided to discover what would happen now if I stopped slowly, under the supervision of a therapist, because I was forced to see that the boons of Seroxat were finally being outweighed by the banes. The debt was
becoming unmanagable, the fights were becoming more dangerous, the imperviousness was more striking. Freedom from anxiety and despair is not only a liberation, I learned, but also a hobbling limitation.

And I had also started to notice something odd: the years of my life immediately prior to anti-depressants seemed more vivid to me than anything that had happened since. University, journalism - it was all passing in an upbeat blur, while the life before - with all its painful details - still seemed real and immediate. I found myself still intensely daydreaming about a boy I had loved back then, as a teenager. Robbie did the same. He developed an obsession was the first girl he was ever in love with, back in Stoke, before fame and anti-depressants, when he was 17; he even tried to rekindle his relationship with her, shipping her out to Los Angeles and trying - futiley - to rediscover his lost self via her.

My life prior to anti-depressants had been razor-pain; my life since had been a soapy, speedy slide. Was it possible - now my life was going better than I could ever have imagined - to find a third way beyond these two impostors? I wanted at least to know, so I have been slowly cutting back my 30mg a day dosage, five milligrams at a time, every few months. I am on 10mg a day and falling.

Letting anti-depressants out of your system is a slow process of becoming permeable to the world once again. When you are anti-depressed, you have a thick suit of mental armour. People can attack you, insult you, leave you, and you feel little. It's exactly what you need when you have been so depressed you can't function. The trite cliche about becoming a zombie isn't true. You are very clear headed; you just don't let much in. So as I cut back I have been feeling subtle mental sensations I had almost forgotten: romantic longing, pique, irritation, anxiety about the small essential things in life like whether I'm
running over my overdraft or my fridge is full of
moudly crap.

I've been realising over the past six months how essential these niggling sensations are. Without them, I have been crashing through life chaotically. If you lost sensation in your arms, your hands would quickly get burned or broken because there would be no pain-signal to pull your hand off the cooker or out of the car door. In the same way, I realise that by losing some of my mental sensations, I had been allowing things that hurt me to drag on because I couldn't feel pain keenly enough. Since I cut back I have been sorting out my finances. I ended a close friendship with another Seroxat-addict, a woman who lived in a Seroxat-rut where she leeched off other people and refused to see any problems with this life, or this drug. In the same way alchoholics have to give up their drinking buddies when they put down the bottle, I had to leave behind a handful of Seroxat-buddies with whom I had shared a sweet holiday from real emotion. I was starting to put my life in order, for the first time.

Feeling pain and fear and anxiety is - however strange it might sound - a relief after years of mania. Most people think of mania as the opposite of depression, but actually they are twins, both states where you fend off the world with an impervious mental state that cannot be penetrated by reality. Robbie downing Red Bulls with his antidepressants is cruelly logical.

Is it easy to stop? Is it easy to be an undepressed adult? No. There are days when these unfamiliar new feelings jut too deeply into my gut, and I am tempted to swallow an extra tablet to jab them away. (I don't.) My greatest fear - that I will regress to the helpless depressed state of my seventeen year old self - hasn't come to pass, at least not yet. Perhaps I will collapse into a heap in a few months as I near the zero-option, and have to go back into Seroxat's frenemy embrace.

But for today, I am saying goodbye to Seroxat - the drug that saved me - with the first real tear I have shed in a decade.

This week, a summit will take place in Berlin that not so long ago would have looked like a piece of utopian sci fi. The leaders of a unified Europe - free, democratic and at peace, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Ural mountains - will gather to celebrate the 50th birthday of the European Union. They will truck and barter over a hundred issues, but it would not occur to them to pick up arms against each other, and it never will again.

There's so much poison pumped into the British psyche about the EU that it's worth stopping for a second to realise how incredible this is. When my grandparents were born, the face of Europe was scarred with mud-trenches where one group of gangreous young European men massacred and gassed another group of gangreous young European men in a meaningless parade of nationalism. When my parents were born, Europe was a rubble-strewn wreck recovering from a genocide and the death of more than 40 million fighters. The historian Mark Mazower wrote a book called 'The Dark Continent' - and he meant us.

So wipe the angry flecks of Euroscepticism off the pictures you'll see from Berlin and celebrate. Whatever happens in Europe in the next fifty years, it will not be war - and that is, to a significant degree, thanks to the EU. But it is not enough to build the Union on a negative. We have to ask: what is the EU for now? Some honourable supporters of the Union believe there is no need to offer a new agenda. They argue that - to borrow a phrase form the Northern Ireland peace process - there should be "strategic ambiguity" about the EU's role, so each member can project onto the Union whatever they want to see. I don't agree. The rejection of the European Constitution by a string of European electorates in 2005, and the ongoing dire poll ratings of the EU, shows that if the Union doesn't have a clear purpose, it will sag and sunder. If it is going to last, the EU has to be able to say to its citizens: this is what we do for you.

Flourishing across Europe, it's possible to glimpse three missions on which the Europe's next fifty years - and a shared sense of purpose - can be built.

Mission One: Beating global warming. Only Europe is taking this, the greatest threat to the future of the human species, seriously. The commitment last week to ensure the EU derives 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 is on this issue the boldest move by any government, anywhere. It will have a marked physical effect on the planet, but more importantly, it will strip other CO2-pumpers of excuses. We know we will only deal with this catastrophe if we all act together. Europe is showing the world how.

Mission Two: Saving social democracy. Since the 1980s, the US government has been promoting an economic model that funds and fosters corporations and the rich, but largely leaves the middle class and the poor to fend for themselves. Europe believes in a very different model. We know that markets are an essential tool for generating wealth, but we also know that the state must act to compensate for the failings and toxic side-effects of the market. Although there are certainly examples - like France - where this can go wrong, it can also work brilliantly. The Swedes do everything the Americans say you shouldn't: they have a 55 percent top rate of tax, more than a year of paid parental leave, a very high minimum wage, and more. The result? They have 6 percent unemployment, negligible crime rates, and the highest quality of life and the best social mobility in the world. Europe should stand for preserving and spreading this model.

Mission Three: A different kind of foreign policy. If you compare how the US and Europe have dealt with their immediate neighbours, you discover two different ways of approaching the world. The US has attacked Colombia, sprayed it from the air with poisons, and funded one side in a civil war - and the country is a mess. By contrast, Europe has coaxed and cajoled Turkey, holding out the prospect of EU membership on the condition that Turkey becomes more democratic and free. The result is that Turkey is now the most liberal majority-Muslim country in the world. The Europhile writer Mark Leonard calls this "the power of passive aggression". Where the US too often impatiently bludgeons the world while waving the flag, Europe should stand for a softer, smarter post-nationalist approach. Yes, there are instances in which Europe should have been tougher - like the disgraceful failure to act in the Balkans - but Europe's Venusian disposition is something to be proud of.

Of course, we mustn't be unrealistically unbeat; I'm not opening a new branch of Europol called Europollyanna here. To achieve these missions, Europe will have to overcome a slew of serious challenges, from stopping the increasingly dictatorial Vladimir Putin from buying up all our gas supplies, to finding a much better way to integrate the immigrants who are necessary to keep our social democracy afloat.

The most urgent challenge is to dismantle the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Does anyone think it is sensible that in 2007, more than half of the EU's budget is spent on agriculture, when fewer than 3 percent of EU citizens rank it as one of their top priorities? This policy is one of the biggest factors in the starvation of Africa, smothering Africa's agricultural industries in their cot by making it impossible for poor farmers to sell competitively in the most enticing markets. For every one euro we give to Africa, the EU takes away seven euros in thwarted trade.

To end this kind of dysfunction, the EU has to make an institutional shift from being a top-down, people-fearing monolith to being a more responsive, democratic body with clear purposes. Ah, sceptics might ask, but responsive to what? At the moment, the EU largely holds the ring between competing national interests. A shared European consciousness is only slender and confined to elites. Yet it is worth bearing in mind how recently other identities we now take forgranted were invented. According to the historian Dennis Mack Smith, in 1871 - the year Italy was fully unified - only 5 percent of its citizens had heard the word "Italy".

The first Italian Prime Minister, Massimo D'Azeglio, said, "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." The EU has made Europe, now it must make Europeans. We can only do this with clear misisons that mark us out from the rest of the world. So when our leaders gather in the once-broken, now-brilliant city of Berlin, they should not only mark the past fifty years of peace. They should launch new missions that can make the next fifty years a period of real, lasting European unity this time.

POSTSCRIPT: You can e-mail comments on this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

There's a critical response to this article at http://ewanwatt.blogspot.com/2007/03/europe-europa.html