Aside from getting rubbish tattoos and befriending injured birds to act as symbolic allusions to your lost freedom, there’s not actually a lot to do in prison.

So it’s weird that, since Pete Doherty went to prison a couple of weeks ago, we’ve heard far more about him than when he was a free man. Namely, we’ve heard an awful lot about how Pete Doherty has somehow managed to track down a load of heroin in prison and stick it all up his bum, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do with heroin.

But it turns out that these heroin stories were all giant lies, because Pete Doherty is completely free of drugs. We know this because Pete Doherty said so himself in a barely-legible note to a woman we’ve never heard of. And, as we’ve always said, you can put scrawled notes by convicted drug addicts in the bank.

Having seen several episodes of Porridge, we think we’ve got a pretty decent idea of what Pete Doherty’s life is like in prison. We’d imagine that hardly a day passes without an amusing scrape with the sergeant-majorish wardens or a hilarious investigative search into which lag nicked his tin of pineapple chunks. Either that or he’s got himself addicted to heroin again to try and numb the fear that a violent institutionalised prisoner will corner him in the yard and stab him in the kidneys. One or the other.

But wait! Just because Pete Doherty is perhaps the country’s most notorious heroin addict and he’s constantly getting arrested with drugs in his possession and he’s gone to prison because countless efforts to get him off drugs – including stints at British rehabs and Thai rehabs and having painful implants inserted into his stomach – have failed and most of his songs are about how delicious he thinks all drugs are and we get the impression that he’d lick a monkey’s bumhole if someone told him it was addictive and illegal enough, it doesn’t mean that Pete Doherty is actually taking heroin.

However, according to newspaper reports last week, Pete Doherty is indeed back on the heroin. The irony that Pete Doherty has become addicted to heroin again in the exact place where he’s supposed to be punished for being addicted to heroin isn’t lost on us, and if we had any feelings about Pete Doherty at all we’re sure this news would make us quite sad.

Actually, no it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t make us sad because Pete Doherty isn’t on heroin at all. He says so himself, as the NME reports:

A British tabloid newspaper had claimed that Pete Doherty was taking the drug in jail. However, Doherty has since sent a letter to a fan disputing the reports. Replying to a letter from a fan and NME reader, Jenny, Doherty wrote: “Watcha Jenny! All the best from The Scrubs. Tell ‘em I’m clean [i.e. not on drugs], countin’ the days until the next freedom gig! Yours, Pete D.”

Oh god, it’s worse than we thought – Pete Doherty appears to have replaced his addiction to heroin with an addiction to a zany over-reliance on exclamation marks. We’re not sure which one is worse, but the exclamation mark thing historically leads to harder misuses of language. Sure, at first you think you can control the exclamation marks, but then not even ending sentences with multiple exclamation marks gives you the thrill of that first hit. So you start peppering your writing with the term ‘lol’. And then, as we all know, you’re effed.

Anyway, the point is that Pete Doherty says he isn’t on heroin, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t believe him. Well, no reason other than all the other times he’s pretended to have kicked drugs, but what’s a little thing like that between friends?

Read more:

Pete Doherty in jail: ‘I’m not on drugs’ – NME