The northlondonhippy

Archive for March 27th, 2007

My blog is not a spot you would nor­mally visit when look­ing for major net­work tele­vi­sion spoil­ers, so if you’re wor­ried I’m about to reveal some­thing HUGE about one of my favourite pro­grammes and pos­si­bly yours, please look away NOW!

Still here? Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

The TV show in ques­tion is ABC’s “Lost”, which airs here in the UK on SKY One, or on your PC cour­tesy of BitTorrent!

The route of this bit of spoilage is rather cir­cuitous, but it comes from a myth­i­cal friend of a friend of a friend and it ties in with a cast­ing notice I read on a proper spoiler site.

Yes, I read spoil­ers. For me, it’s part of the fun!

Any­way, the char­ac­ters I’m talk­ing about are in an upcom­ing episode; a hippy cou­ple, and their char­ac­ter names have been pur­pose­fully left off the cast­ing notice.

I can con­firm, accord­ing to my source, that the hippy cou­ple, are the Deg­roots. They were part of the group that founded the Dharma Ini­tia­tive, accord­ing to Lost-lore.

But that’s not my big, juicy, bit of spoilage. Oh no, this is even big­ger than that!

No, what I found out is the iden­tity of their off­spring. It’s a reg­u­lar char­ac­ter and I’ll give you a lit­tle hint. This char­ac­ter has men­tioned on sev­eral occa­sions that HE was BORN on the island.

That’s right Lost-fans, Ben is none other than the son of the Degroots!

Expect this shocker to drop dur­ing the sea­son finale!

If this turns out to be wrong, please don’t shoot the mes­sen­ger. I think the orig­i­nal source is reli­able and it fits in with other known info.

Apolo­gies to non-Lost fans as well, but this is a big deal. Nor­mal hippy ser­vice will resume in my next post.

I’m pissed off today.

I’m pissed off most days, if I’m really hon­est, so to be more pre­cise I’m par­tic­u­larly pissed off at a cer­tain news­pa­per for their embar­rass­ing and point­less pol­icy shift against cannabis.

Yes, “The Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day” news­pa­per, I’m talk­ing about you!

For two suc­ces­sive Sun­days, the IoS ran scare-mongering, anti-cannabis sto­ries on their front page, which were filled with mind­less hys­te­ria rather than actual, fac­tual report­ing. I expected so much more from this news­pa­per and I am so dis­ap­pointed by the col­lec­tive weak will of their senior edi­to­r­ial staff that I could cry 96 tears. Cry, cry, cry, cry, 96 tears!

Ten years ago, the Indy called for the legal­i­sa­tion of weed, which is a wise and informed posi­tion to take but that all changed when they apol­o­gised for doing this, a cou­ple of weeks ago on the front page. They say that they have revised their pol­icy fol­low­ing all the recent “evi­dence” sur­round­ing the dan­gers of dope.

The Indy then goes on to recount the story of a young man who killed him­self, accord­ing to his griev­ing mother, as a result of his abuse of the demon weed.

I won’t be pro­vid­ing a link here, as I do not want to pro­mote this news­pa­per in any shape, man­ner or form, but I am sure with a lit­tle clever surf­ing you could find it yourself.

It is quite a har­row­ing read and while I am sym­pa­thetic to the woman for her loss, I can’t help think­ing that they left quite a few impor­tant details out of the story.

The mother says her son had suf­fered from men­tal prob­lems, which would imply that more than likely that he received psy­chi­atric care and treat­ment. In real­ity, treat­ment would be a big, fat pre­scrip­tion for anti-depressants.

Anti-depressants have a doc­u­mented his­tory of caus­ing teenage sui­cides. Was her son tak­ing them? Did he sud­denly stop tak­ing them, cold turkey? It would be good to know!

Per­haps he had emo­tional trou­bles before he started puff­ing on spliffs and he only sought out cannabis as a means to self-medicate and lessen his men­tal anguish. He wouldn’t be the first.

Maybe his psy­cho­log­i­cal woes were so bad, that no amount of treat­ment could have pre­vented him from tak­ing his own life. It happens.

And, gasp, you’re not sup­posed to say this, but what if his mother was just a lousy parent?

I’m not say­ing she was and by all indi­ca­tions, it doesn’t seem like it, but we’ll never, ever know. I’m sure her son would have had an inter­est­ing take on the ques­tion and it is a fair one to pose.

It’s so much eas­ier to blame the weed, rather than any­thing else! It’s the lazy, coward’s excuse.

Let’s go back in time, to my own trou­bled teenage years. My par­ents were ill equipped to deal with me, they were older than most, by a gen­er­a­tion and out of touch with mod­ern life. My fam­ily was dys­func­tion, espe­cially my extended fam­ily, on both sides. I was way too smart for my own good and prob­a­bly too sen­si­tive as well. I suf­fered from deep, teenage depres­sion of the fairly nor­mal, morose variety.

My par­ents did what any self-respecting, slightly afflu­ent, upper-middle-class fam­ily with health insur­ance was expected to do; they packed me off to a shrink.

I didn’t need a shrink, but I thought, what the fuck! Maybe some­one would lis­ten to me for a change! I went, every week, for a cou­ple of years.

Around half way through my stint with the Dr. Head­shrinker, my par­ents dis­cov­ered I was smok­ing weed in my bed­room. It was as if they found out I was secretly a mem­ber of the Man­son fam­ily and had been out butcher­ing new­borns with a rusty knife. Their son was “on drugs”! Oh, the hor­ror, the shock, the shame!

In real­ity, I was just like most peo­ple my age, in the late 70s or early 80s; I sim­ply liked “to party”.

The ben­e­fit to my par­ents for all of this was sim­ple, they had an excuse for my moods and behav­iour; they had some­thing exter­nal to blame for any­thing and every­thing they thought was wrong with me.

And even bet­ter than that, it meant they could dis­miss and lin­ger­ing doubts they had about their par­ent­ing skills, because it couldn’t be their fault if I was messed up on drugs!

I should add that dur­ing this time period, I was a full time stu­dent and worked a full time job. That’s a 40-hour work­week, plus a full course load and asso­ci­ated home­work. Go me!

My par­ents were absolved of any guilt for how I turned out. If I talked back to my mother, it was because I was “on drugs”. If I stayed in my room when rel­a­tives vis­ited, it was because I was “on drugs”. If I came home too late and ate all the choco­late cook­ies, it was because I was “on drugs”.

Alright, I will give in to that last one, but the oth­ers are total bullshit!

I’ve smoked weed every day since I was 18, includ­ing and espe­cially skunk. And speak­ing of bull­shit, skunk is not new and call­ing it a brand new type of super-weed is patently false.

I had been smok­ing for around a year when I was first intro­duced to what we all now call “skunk”. I was 19 and the year was 1982, which if my drug-addled brain can still do math is 25 years ago!

The guy I was pur­chas­ing from had what every­one had back then, nor­mal Colom­bian which was brown and tasted of dirt. Bleuch!

Then, one day I called ‘round to see him and he asked me if I ever had “Indica” before. It was a new one on me.

He brought out three large bags, each graded accord­ing to strength and explained that the strongest was the top bud, and the other two grades were lower down on the plant. The buds were just that, proper buds, and the first I had ever seen. It looked like green cau­li­flower the size of infant’s fists. And the smell, wow, it was overpowering!

It smoked like a dream, with a full rich flavour and potency beyond any­thing I had before. It was love at first puff and that love affair con­tin­ues to this day!

Was it 20 times stronger than “nor­mal weed”? Of course not! It was notice­ably stronger, though and I bought as much as I could afford. I still do, though it remains fairly scarce here in London.

The strains, which are known col­lec­tively as “skunk” were actu­ally pio­neered in the Nether­lands in the 60s, so there is around 40 years of col­lec­tive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to draw from on the sub­ject, right here in Europe. I would love to see some data from the Dutch men­tal health sys­tem on their rates of teenage mad­ness as a result of dope! I would ven­ture a guess that they do not see any link.

In Hol­land, where weed is openly tol­er­ated, and sold under con­trolled rules, it’s harder for under­age kid­dies to score. Also, because respon­si­ble adults openly con­sume it, teenagers are less likely to chase after it for it’s illicit nature. In the Nether­lands, reported rates of cannabis use among teens are much lower than it is in the UK. Why can’t we fol­low the Dutch example?

The rea­son why skunk is more preva­lent in the UK now is sim­ple; because more weed is grown domes­ti­cally. It’s grow domes­ti­cally because it is cheaper and eas­ier to do that than to risk import­ing it into the coun­try in quan­tity from coun­tries where it grows well out­side. If you want weaker weed on the streets, then let the smug­glers bring some in! THC lev­els would be lower, and peo­ple could choose what they wanted to smoke.

Think of nor­mal weed as beer and skunk as the equiv­a­lent of spir­its. Peo­ple don’t drink pints of whiskey, do they? Ok, some peo­ple do, but most are able to exer­cise a degree of mod­er­a­tion. If weed were legal, the strength could be printed on the pack, the same way alco­hol con­tent is with booze. I’ll stop now, I’m mak­ing way too much sense!

In the sec­ond anti-cannabis hys­te­ria front-page arti­cle of the IoS, they had a very funny and unchal­lenged quote from Sir Richard Bran­son, which should not have been printed. In his apol­ogy for endors­ing the Independent’s legalise-weed cam­paign, Bran­son said that he would never had sup­ported the cause if he knew about these “new, genet­i­cally mod­i­fied” types of dope. What the fuck?

Does he really think that there are sci­en­tists in lab­o­ra­to­ries re-sequencing cannabis DNA to yield increased potency? Look, if it is true, I really want to meet these intre­pid geneti­cists, who’ve given up on cur­ing can­cer or the com­mon cold in favour of get­ting me higher! Bring on the Nobel Prize!

Seri­ously, does he really believe that research grants are back­ing GM mar­i­juana? I thought Bran­son was a bright guy, but this is really dumb.

Cannabis, like any plant, is bred for cer­tain qual­i­ties, nat­u­rally, by using one plant to pol­li­nate another, the same way they fig­ured out how to get rid of potato blight. Say you find a plant that yields well, or tastes espe­cially nice and another that flow­ers quicker than oth­ers. By cross breed­ing the two plants, you should even­tu­ally end up with a sib­ling plant that has a com­bi­na­tion of the pos­i­tive ele­ments of both par­ents. That does NOT qual­ify as genet­i­cally mod­i­fied in my book. Mak­ing toma­toes glow in the dark by adding jel­ly­fish genes, now that’s GM!

Rather than con­tinue to debunk the fac­tu­ally and emo­tion­ally inac­cu­rate report­ing in the IoS, I would pre­fer to let my favourite news­pa­per, do it for me, with the fol­low­ing very inter­est­ing arti­cle that you can read RIGHT HERE. The Guardian is the voice of sense and rea­son! Rock on!

Don’t let the ever-increasing media hys­te­ria get to you. They are 100% wrong. Stick with this hippy for the truth about dope, first hand and with­out a neg­a­tive bias!

(NB: In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, the northlon­don­hippy was under the influ­ence of “skunk cannabis” dur­ing the writ­ing of this blog entry and he is still a sane, well-balanced, tax-paying mem­ber of soci­ety.)