The northlondonhippy

I get con­fused, some­times, by all the dif­fer­ent, con­flict­ing bits of infor­ma­tion offered to me on any given day.

I try to dis­re­gard as much of it as I can, but when it comes to the bat­tle over cannabis, my ears prick up, which is markedly bet­ter than a prick up your ear.

The cur­rent lies being ped­dled about weed must be con­fus­ing to a lot of folks out there. The pow­ers that be are not-so-subtly work­ing hard to shift pub­lic per­cep­tion. They want you to think mar­i­juana is the devil’s weed; that it will turn your chil­dren in psy­chotic killers who are only con­cerned with where their next fix of dope is com­ing from.

This por­trayal couldn’t be any fur­ther from the truth if they tried. Oh wait, they are try­ing and they are not in remote prox­im­ity of even a reflec­tion in a pud­dle of piss of truth.

Yet, the news­pa­per head­lines scream with out­ra­geous anger and hyper­bole over the dan­gers of cannabis.

Head­lines can be wrong. Fre­quently, they are. It’s eas­ier to par­rot some make believe fact, if that fic­ti­tious fact cre­ates fear and moral indignation.

Here’s some­thing you won’t be read­ing in any respectable news­pa­per, any time soon. A recent study car­ried out by a respected Dutch uni­ver­sity, com­pared the teenage brains via MRI scans of two groups of teenagers; group A were reg­u­lar weed smok­ers, group B never touched the stuff.

Guess what? There was no dis­cernible dif­fer­ence in the results, between the two groups. Or as it says in the head­line of the arti­cle I’m quot­ing, “Cannabis not dan­ger­ous for young people”.

Could you imag­ine the front page of the Daily Mail or the Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day splash­ing the same head­line across their front page? Nei­ther can I, but a hippy can dream and this hippy does. Far too much.

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