It's been a while since I fired up a choice fatty. Sadly, life on Planet Parenthood and a serious dope habit are totally incompatible, in spite of what this hippy once told me about the benefits of hash oil for teething infants. Or maybe because of that. Hmm, I forget.

 

 

Anyway, I had reason dwell on my green days - some gentle flashback action if you will - when I heard a report on the radio the other day about some drunken pinhead allegedly stabbing some dude in the head.

Whoa, I thought to myself, no way did that guy pull a cone before deciding to get all Terminator 2 on somebody's noggin. In my experience, most dope-related violence can be summed up in three words. Tim Tam Wrestlemania. A couple of potheads bitch-slapping each other in slo-mo over who gets the last chocolate biscuit.

Sure, it's not unknown for your dope-trafficking outlaw biker gangs to settle disputes over plantation rip offs or market share with sawn off shotties and the odd stick of gelignite. But really, who cares? Long as they're not blowing me away, I'm cool with that.

Alcohol on the other hand, now there's a serial killer. Same report said there's been five deaths in the south-east in the last year which can be directly attributed to alcohol-related violence, and that'd just be the headline news. Add to those five killings the hundreds of thousands of punch-ups, domestics, pub brawls, taxi fights, and street muggings and you got yourself quite an orgy of violence. Throw in the carnage caused by drink drivers, the lives befouled by alcoholism, and the inexplicable popularity of sauvignon blanc, and the picture's kinda Hogarthian isn't it.

I wonder sometimes what it'd be like if the accident of history - and that's all it was - that gave us legal booze but illegal dope had been reversed. Stoners and hipies would probably imagine an ideal world where nobody ever got really worked up over anything, 'cept the last Tim Tam, and everyone was, like, cool about stuff, because, well, uhm... uh... is it my turn on the bucket now?

But of course they'd be wrong. You'd just be swapping out one set of problems for another, including massive pandemics of dry mouth and idiotic giggling. Stoned drivers are just as dangerous as drunks, although they do tend to travel a lot more slowly, because the traffic lights are so pretty. And lung cancer rates would be much higher.

But I don't imagine for a second you'd have anything like the levels of violence you get now, because of alcohol. Where's all this leading me? I dunno. But the bone numbing stupidity and hypocrisy of so much anti-drug rhetoric and politics seems really stark right now.

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