People you know who've kicked the bucket

[faceless]

David Shewan

Reader in psychology and director of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence; Born February 28, 1964; Died December 8, 2007.

David Shewan, who has died aged 43, was an academic who will be remembered best for his work showing people use heroin without major harm. Controversial, this view proposed that "hidden populations" of drug users were common, but the politics of research led to a focus on people in prison or the health system, excluding the individuals who were able to control their behaviour.

Shewan's death was no surprise. He had been struggling to manage his epilepsy; he was having both the well-known grand mal seizures and the less-known complex partial seizures, during which he became disoriented, mute and frozen for about 20 minutes, with no recollection of events.

The many who cared for him feared Shewan would have one of these turns crossing a road, home alone smoking or cooking (he was an unrepentant smoker who relished good food). Instead, he died during his daily swim.

Born on the Black Isle, Shewan spent a year before university working as an operating theatre assistant at Raigmore Hospital. As a colleague and academic, he was an anarchist who had refreshingly little time for quality, assessment, standards or visions.

He was proud of his first-class honours from Glasgow in 1987, prouder of getting it after barely attending the curriculum and allegedly spending most of four years "wasted", although this may have been bravado, and almost certainly was not the case for his final three months of revision. Later, he had to be almost blackmailed into getting his PhD. Although he did not suffer fools gladly, he was never mean-spirited and many colleagues and students have been grateful for his intelligence, wit and compassion.

Shewan's final-year dissertation set a precedent for what would be his main academic area: the study of addiction. He chose to take psychology out of the sometimes arcane and abstract laboratory and instead examine whether gamblers followed an addictive pattern, or whether they showed learned responses to cues given by the environment. Shewan produced 23 reviewed research papers, nine books or published reports, three book chapters and a number of documents informing the Scottish Drugs Forum. He received more than £350,000 in research grants to help health boards and prisons understand the magnitude and nature of injection drug use, and this work led him to be a respected consultant to the Scottish Prison Service, Strathclyde Police and the Scottish Executive.

Shewan will be remembered for his work with Phil Dalgarno on unobtrusive heroin use. His most significant paper was a study of non-prison, non-medically-distressed heroin users whom he followed up 10 years after their recruitment in the 1980s.

Shewan was a contributor to the MSc in forensic psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University and supervised many post-graduate students, not uncommonly at his "city centre office" (the former Lang's Hotel), or at his "west end offices" at the Liquid Ship or Stravaigin. His undergraduate module on forensic psychology was always fully signed-up, and received high ratings from the students, who found his lectures inspiring, for they were spontaneous, idiosyncratic, well-informed and punctuated by the voice of the street.

While having a free and frank relationship with grape, grain and herb, Shewan was generally early to rise, early to work, scrupulous in ensuring he met his academic and professional responsibilities, and rarely took his full complement of annual leave. In recent years he became co-director with Roger Houchin (introduced as "my friend, ex-governor of Barlinnie") of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence; Shewan headed his staff with robust leadership, and a whole new area of research was opening up to him.

Shewan was a loyal friend, a drinking buddy and, for some, a caring ex-lover. He was a devoted "father" and "grandfather" to the daughters and grand-daughters of one of his longest partners, and learned sign language so he could communicate with one of the children. His heroes included Iggy Pop, James Kelman, John Coltrane, the forensic psychologist Ronald Blackburn and Ronnie Barker. He is survived by his father and sister.

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I was just looking for some info about Dave and was sad to find this... I had no idea he'd died. I helped him in a small way with his 10 year research into heroin use. He was a cracking bloke. Sad news indeed.

Anyway, if you want to post a remembrance story about someone you know, feel free to add it in here.

[eefanincan]

My cousin Peter passed away on March 12, 2009 after a long battle with cancer. Peter was about 17 years older than me and born in Germany. Before his parents were able to move to Canada, he came to stay with mum and dad for a bit in the late sixties. I remember the story she told me about how she came home from work one afternoon to find a horse tied to the lamp post on the front lawn --- which in the middle of a city is kind of a shock So, she goes inside to find Pete and a friend having a snack in the kitchen. Pete says "It's ok Aunt Janet, we're just going to take him for a ride after we have something to eat." I'm not sure that mum ever found out where the horse had come from, but then again, maybe it's better to just not know some of the things a teenager does!