The northlondonhippy

Check out my lat­est and dare I say great­est con­test yet! You won’t want to miss this!

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!