The witty one

Mea culpa. I'm just not that good at Latin, apparently.

I enjoyed this article immensely. Not the main bit, which is some guff about kids being drug-tested at school, but the statistics at the end.

I like the sentence about kids being "offered drugs....most commonly cannabis" - it sounds like a public information film from 1952. "Children. Beware! Cannabis may lead to death, or even worse, to self-abuse!"

I was first, ah, "offered cannabis" when I was 15, and I accepted the offer enthusiastically. It was at the house of a now B-list Hollywood actress. She was there with her boyfriend who was a straight A student, member of the rugby team and keen pot-head. Surprisingly enough, we did not think of ourselves as illegally consuming cannabis. We were just having a joint. Or smoking a spliff, as we used to call it.

I remember watching the boyfriend roll the joint. In those days we smoked something called "black", which is cannabis resin. It came in hard little black lumps which you used to burn and then crumble into some tobacco before rolling the joint. In the absence of a bong, it's quite hard to smoke black without using tobacco. That's why Brits tend to use tobacco in joints, even when they use grass. It's habit.

So we got stoned, and we sat around and giggled for a couple of hours and then made 20 grilled cheese sandwhiches and then we went home. I didn't get a sense of having crossed some life-changing boundary. Because I hadn't. When I later tried rolling my own joints, I was crap at it, so I acquired a dinky little contraption called a 'rolling machine', that did it for me. Thank god for science.

I smoked dope almost every weekend of my teenage years, and managed to avoid sliding into heroin use and prostitution. I passed all my exams with flying colours (except that dodgy grade for Latin, but I'm reasonably sure that had nothing to do with having been offered cannabis, and everything to do with an examiner with a grudge....), got a degree, got my postgraduate degree and entered the workforce. Still no hint of prostitution here, unless you subscribe to some pretty severe feminist theory.

As a reporter, I worked for some time as health correspondent on local newspapers, thundering furiously about the drug menace in 'our' community, from Monday to Friday. Then on the weekends I'd kick back with a selection of illegal drugs and have a jolly nice time, thank you very much.

I'm too bored to trot out the old cliche about preferring to be stuck in a stadium full of stoned people, as opposed to drunk people, but it's true, nonetheless. I've witnessed the effects of legal drug abuse up close and very personally. My mother drank herself to death in an extremely messy way. Thousands of people do the same thing every year. Hospitals are full of people who had accidents or got into fights because of alcohol - just ask your ER doctor which they would ban, booze or dope. I don't see many people seriously arguing for the reintroduction of prohibition, despite the fact that alcohol is a major factor in a lot of crime from assaults to murder. I just wish that everyone who thinks cannabis is evil, just try it. Once.

And then, chill out, dude. Peace. In other news, Maccers has gone a whole week without alcohol. "I've got SO much done!" she chirped merrily at me today, like a born-again Stepford slut. It's a terrible thing when your friends go over to the dark side. It's only a matter of time before she finds Jesus.

And tries to snog him.

Posted by eurotrash at 1:23 pm 79 comments were posted (add / view)