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Hey ho hippyfans! Da hippy is in da house!

Well, technically it is a house, but I do prefer to refer to it as my north London lair. I’m in a good mood because I’ve only got to work three more nights between now and the end of the month! Yipppeee to that, fuckers!

Don’t worry, I won’t be spending all my free time wasted on drugs, I do have to sleep you know! Actually, that’s a lie; no not the sleeping part, the wasted all the time part. That just won’t be possible.

Why?

Well, mainly because I’ve got heaps of work to do. I’m still helping that guy promote his book, I’m working on a couple of other projects of my own and if you add to that my usual list of responsibilities, then you will see that I won’t have much time to party.

But none of that is the real reason I won’t be on drugs.

The biggest reason I won’t be on drugs is simple; drugs, at least my beloved skunkweed, has been remarkably scarce recently. And by recently, I mean since August.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the great cannabis draught of 2006!

As a serious, regular, habitual consumer of the wacky-backy, this is a tragedy for me of biblical proportions! I haven’t seen a decent quality of weed in ages; everything I’ve been getting is via 3rd parties, underweight and expensive! That sucks, man. And I’ve yet to see more than like a quarter at any one time.

It’s been hand-to-mouth with marijuana and that’s never a good thing.

I’ve done, what any dedicated smoker would do; ask everyone and anyone if they know anyone helpful. Guess what? They’re all pretty much sailing in the same boat as me.

Things are dire; things are desperate! If any of you out there in internetland can lay your hands on a quantity of quality herbal cannabis, I would love to be your newest, bestest friend! I’d certainly invite you to visit my north London lair, as my guest, where I would exchange a reasonable amount of British pounds sterling in return for said cannabis. And if you have to travel a long way, I might even be willing to contribute to your expenses and throw in a hot meal from my favourite north London Malaysian takeaway! Yum! And naturally, if you’re female, the usual offer of prolonged oral sex applies, though you will have to be willing to let Mrs. H take some photos – artistic ones of course, for our personal enjoyment only! I swear I won’t post them online!

Think I am joking? Think again! Yes, I am that desperate! And xmas is not too far off, which is traditionally a stressful time for scoring weed, because all the amateurs who only smoke around the holidays are buying all the good weed meant for hardcore smokers like me!

But all of this raises a simple question, why is there a draught?

I’ve heard several theories, which I will attempt to weave into a coherent explanation.

In July, we had a lengthy, sustained heat wave. Most weed you get in London, is grown locally, indoors. If the growers don’t have adequate cooling for their grow room, which I expect is the case almost universally, then the higher temperature will kill all the plants. In August, the draught started, which timewise, would jive with this event.

We lost a whole generation of THC goodness in July. Please pause for a moment to reflect on this loss of life. Awwwww.

Not long after that, the police announced they were going to start cracking down on suburban commercial gardens. From what I’ve read, Vietnamese criminal gangs run this end of the trade. What happens is that they rent a house on a quiet street, gut the place, install everything they need to start turning crops around and then they just sit back and watch the dosh roll in.

Except it isn’t always that simple. Because they do half-assed jobs of building their grow-rooms, fires are not unknown and because no one is living there, the entire place goes up in flames. Or the electric company notices an increase in usage, thanks to the high power draws of many sodium lights. Or they fiddle with the metre and don’t use any power, which is equally suspicious.

And the cops are on to all of this, using thermal imaging to see if a building is running hotter than it should. Or the neighbours tip them off to usual activity or the curtains being constantly drawn.

It’s a risky business and there’s a lot of “cut and run” involved. My guess is not so much that the cops have shut them all down, but that they have spooked them into shutting down their operations for a while, until the situation cools off.

A colleague of Mrs. H rented her house out a couple of years ago and one day while at work, she got a call from the local police. You guessed it, the people she rented to turned her house into a commercial garden. She wasn’t in any trouble, as she could show them the signed lease and reference provided by her tenants, but the real problem was the cost of returning the house to a habitable state.

You would probably think that as a big dope head, I would be all for these commercial growers. In part, I am, in Holland, where weed is legal and of course, your non-commerical home gardener. Even my friends, who have done it commercially, have done it in properties that they have a legal right to use, in a safe and responsible way. No, my problem is with the criminals.

Criminals don’t grow weed to share with their mates, or to perfect some rare sticky, skunky strain; they do it to make profits, at the expense of decent, honest, hard working people.

Who pays for all the electricity they steal? We do through higher bills. Who pays to fix the houses they rent and trash; landlords like Mrs. H’s friend.

The weed produced in these gardens is never the best you’ve ever had, it’s passable, but never finished properly. To my shame, I am certain that I have purchased weed growing under these conditions but in my defence, I don’t really have a choice.

The legal status of cannabis is at the root of it all. If weed were legal, then these criminal gangs wouldn’t have any reason to grow dope and it would be done professionally, and with care, producing some amazing results.

How can a plant be illegal? Let’s ban oak trees next because sometimes they get blown over and people get hurt, maimed or killed. Let’s end this oak tree menace today!

My oak tree ban is no sillier than the prohibition on cannabis!

But back to the draught, because I haven’t given you the last piece of the complex puzzle.

Price. Cost. Dosh. Moolah!

Whenever something is in short supply, the price goes up. This is simple economics, you know, supply and demand? I think part of what’s going on is that the supply chain is holding some back to drive the price up. I’m seeing prices rising by about a third – 33%, so the ounce you used to pay £150 for will be going for £200. Talk about a high rate of inflation!

It’s simple, you hold back the supply for a while and when you restore it, people are so desperate they’ll pay anything. Anything, becomes the new price! By doing this, the dealers and suppliers will still sell all their weed, just at a higher price than a month ago, so they are the real winners and we are the real losers.

As I don’t see weed being legalised anytime soon, I think the real answer is for everyone to become self sufficient! It’s time we all start growing our own!

I’ve wanted to do that for years, but I don’t have a suitable space in my lair to dedicate to it. I really wish I did and it is a serious requirement for my next house, should Mrs. H and I ever get our acts together and flee our north London ghetto!

Oh and I was serious about the weed. If you can get your hands on an ounce (or 3) of high grade, quality skunky bud, I’d really like to meet you, soon!