CANNABIS CAMPAIGN RUNS OUT OF PUFF

24-10-2006

A new ad campaign startedon the telly last nightwarning that cannabis can cause you brain damage. Now there's an ironyreckons Pete Millington.

How many times have we heard this old lipstick stained reefer of a debate raising it's beautiful hazy lazy summer Sunday afternoon head?

I didn't actually smoke the stuff until the late 70s… and the debate had already been going on for twenty years at that point, so I can't even claim to be a spaced out radical

How weird then (yes “weird” - now that's a word they didn't expect to be in common usage back in 1969) that we are still churning out the same old arguments about the much maligned weed in 2006, the arguments that the likes of Kerouac, Kesey and Leary convincingly dismissed back in the halcyon days of the 1950s and 60s when the nearest thing I was getting to a natural high was spinning round and round on the swing in Queens Park

Stop press: latest media controversy - Paul McCartney allegedly takes drugs… in his own home

Pardon?

Did I slip into a cannabis induced time warp sometime in the past twenty years and I've just emerged to discover that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds did actually stand for pounds, shillings and pence?

Somewhere down the smoky fog rings of my mind I thought we'd actually been through all this?

I thought we'd been through the well-rehearsed debates about tobacco and alcohol (the legal drugs) killing billions of people every year whilst pot killed, well, no one, ever?

Debates about the criminalisation of the scientifically proven less harmful substances bolstering an underground drug culture where gangsters from Eastern Europe and Jamaican Yardies get their evil paws on young impressionable British kids and fill their veins with far more potent and destructive substances?

The same young kids who tried a spliff at the college party and suddenly discovered that their teachers, parents, MPs, police drug Tzars and populist tabloid media have been feeding them complete misinformed bullshit for years…

Choice to weigh up the pros and cons for ourselves without Nanny Effing State peddling it's corrupt, patronising vitriol to us at every corner in regards to an innocuous and very sweet smelling herb that most of the world has been happily and harmlessly using for all sorts of useful purposes for thousands of years…

Apparently the American Constitution was written on hemp paper …now there's an irony if ever I heard one…

And now, they are wheeling out the psychiatrists to relate at great length the odd and obscure case of ganja psychosis they came up against in surgery last year

They just neglect to tell us about the patient's long history of growing up in a dysfunctional, poverty ridden single parent family where they were subjected to daily violence from the psychotic step father and turned to dope as a beacon of sanity in a life otherwise devoid of inspiration and love

Have you ever noticed how, psychiatrists telling us all about the latent dangers of ganja psychosis never give us statistics, factual research, it's always anecdote from surgery. The story of the crazy old dope smoker who never washes and wanders around talking total nonsense about Babylon and what it was like to lie in the grass listening to Jefferson Airplane at the Isle of Wright festival in nineteen sixty whatever it was?

Yeah, yeah, yeah… meanwhile the rational, sane, intelligent, compus mentus people are bombing the hell out of small children in Lebanon.

Yet another old cliché I guess. Who is really sane anyway?

Just hold on while I pause to listen to a riff from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, sadly destined to repeat itself in my brain over and over again until the day I die… such personal tragedy!!

In my opinion, like a lot of things in life, people should only be allowed to offer an opinion on cannabis if they've actually tried the bloody stuff.

A bit like the headmaster at school back in 1977 giving us his annual lecture about the drug pusher in the black limo - first thing we did at lunch break was headed down the school fields and lit up … not a black limo in sight… just a small square of oily resin some spotty long-haired sixth former had scored at Bogarts last weekend…

Aha! Does this mean the headmaster is actually talking about things he doesn't have the slightest idea about? You don't say!

Q.E.D. Just like they kept drumming into us in physics lessons. We have done the experiment and proved their theory wrong, the assholes! Grammar school education for the upper working classes was not in vain after all!

And just in case you're wondering, I haven't had any for the past 15 years and could still take it or leave it… in fact, yes the latter now I come to think about it

Muddled brain - maybe - but then again dementia runs in the family - so is anyone out there really going to argue the toss?

Let them smoke dope. Educate don't legislate!

Now where's my beer?