The northlondonhippy

Archive for October 5th, 2008

I realised this morn­ing, I have a real prob­lem with drugs…

No, not that kind of prob­lem, you won’t see me going into rehab, no, no, no!

My prob­lem with drugs is this: my drug of choice, weed, is not legal and I’m unduly made a crim­i­nal as a result. That’s a big problem.

Its silly, its unfair, and its unjus­ti­fied. It’s also the law.

Laws can be changed and when a law is unjust, it should be changed. Crim­i­nal­is­ing peo­ple because they want to indulge in the con­sump­tion of a plant is stu­pid, no mat­ter how you look at it.

Cannabis is com­par­a­tively safe, if you’re com­par­ing it to the two legally obtain­able drugs, tobacco and alco­hol. You can’t over­dose on weed and accord­ing to the post just below this one, there are only 2 recorded deaths attrib­uted to cannabis in the his­tory of recording!

How is soci­ety served by crim­i­nal­is­ing me? I am a respectable, oth­er­wise law-abiding, tax pay­ing cit­i­zen of this fine planet. Send me to prison for a few years and not only do you lose my pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tions to soci­ety and the queen’s purse, but I end up cost­ing you money! You think those orange boiler suits and mys­tery meat sur­prise for lunch every day is free? You pay for it! Isn’t it bet­ter that I stay on the out­side and con­tinue to pur­chase my own meals and clothing?

The truth is, the like­li­hood of me ever serv­ing time for sim­ple pos­ses­sion is min­i­mal. I’m care­ful, I don’t take risks and I pretty much only ever smoke in the pri­vacy and secu­rity of my own home. The only place I flaunt my cannabis use is here on the inter­net, but I do that for a rea­son. My agenda.…

My agenda here has always been sim­ple and hope­fully obvi­ous; I wish to remove any remain­ing stigma attached to smok­ing cannabis. I am a pro­fes­sional, I work full time (and then some), I take care of myself and the peo­ple I love, I’m kind to strangers and ani­mals. Espe­cially animals.

I’ve per­son­ally known loads of peo­ple who smoke dope, from the casual “I’ll have a cou­ple of puffs on that spliff” types, to peo­ple “who can smoke me under the table”, I’ve smoked with them all. I’ve prob­a­bly directly encoun­tered over one-thousand peo­ple in the last nearly three decades of my daily dope smok­ing who have all enjoyed a bit of weed. None of them were home­less, clin­i­cally insane or went on to harder drugs. If any­thing, most of them mel­lowed as they got older, which is not some­thing I can say for myself. Ninety-nine per­cent of them were gain­fully employed and if I am hon­est worked in my pro­fes­sion. The media is full of hyp­ocrites and the same peo­ple putting out anti-drug pro­pa­ganda bull­shit in the news­pa­pers, enjoy a toot or a pill or a puff at the weekend.

When­ever I’ve had to deal with drug issues pro­fes­sion­ally, I’ve tried to be bal­anced and I’ve aimed to find voices on my side of the argu­ment. Trust me, its more than most would do, for to be seen as sym­pa­thetic to drug use could land you in hot water. I’ve never kept my drug use a secret and if asked point blank by a boss, I wouldn’t deny where my inter­ests lie. As I’ve aged, I’ve become more vocal in mak­ing sure the pro­pa­ganda is not unchal­lenged. It’s about all I can do and I know its not much.

I want to do more.

I want us all to do more.

For the drug laws to change, every sin­gle one of us who smokes weed has to come out of the green closet and declare with pride our love of weed. If I do it on my own, if I out­ted myself here and now, there’s a very good chance I would lose my job or worse.

Atti­tudes are chang­ing, more so than one might think. Espe­cially if one is in the cur­rent, out of step with the elec­torate, gov­ern­ment of this coun­try. Remem­ber, our Prime Min­is­ter, old what­shis­face, the really unpop­u­lar one that EVERYONE hates, said that cannabis is lethal. What fuck­ing planet is he from and can we send him back, please?

Check out this sur­vey which was pub­lished today. Really, click here and read it, it won’t take you long.

Did you read it? Don’t lie, this hippy sees all. A bit like Santa Claus, or god, only I’m not fictional.

The “rave gen­er­a­tion” has begat another gen­er­a­tion of “junior ravers” and both gen­er­a­tions think the other gen­er­a­tion is on drugs. Cool.

The times, they are a’changin’ and our politi­cians have to wake up to this, espe­cially on my pet sub­ject. Cli­mate change, finan­cial melt­down, pos­si­ble flu pan­demics, a McCain pres­i­dency, the future is look­ing decid­edly bleak. The least those idiots in power could do is let us all soften the blow with a lit­tle sweet smoke!

I really need help with my drug prob­lem. I’m will­ing to help myself, if you’ll help me too, but its a big ask…

I want you all to con­sider out­ting your­selves along side me as a life long dope smoker. More than con­sider, I want you to make a pledge to do it and I want you to email it to me. If I get, oh I don’t know, a mil­lion emailed pledges, I will reveal myself to the world.

Ok, a mil­lion is prob­a­bly push­ing it.

Prob­a­bly? I’ve got more chance of sprout­ing wings, spit­ting fire and renam­ing myself the northlondondragon.

What’s a real­is­tic num­ber? If I’m seri­ous about this, and dammit I am, then I need to come up with a num­ber that strikes a bal­ance between being attain­able and yet still giv­ing me the con­fi­dence of know­ing I’ll be backed up by my legions of hippyfans.

How many in a legion?

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, around 5,200. Of course, Wikipedia says Neil Arm­strong was the first man to eat cheese. At least it does now.

Five thou­sand ain’t nearly enough.

I’ve nar­rowed it down then, I need some­where between 5,000 and one-million emails from you guys before I’ll tell the world who I am.

Clearly this plan requires more thought.

It’s not easy hav­ing a drug prob­lem, espe­cially when the solu­tion seems so elu­sive, but with your help, maybe our col­lec­tive drug prob­lem can be cured.

(Keep read­ing, the next post is about weed too. I know, two in a row, go me!)