The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘legal highs’ Category

No doubt you’ve caught the media frenzy sur­round­ing the most recent legal high of choice, mephedrone. Its the lat­est in a long line of legal highs, sold openly and pos­sessed with­out fear of arrest.

Who wouldn’t want a high that was legal? Isn’t that the ulti­mate goal? Sure, booze is legal and will get you absolutely blotto, but so what? Peo­ple want a choice of intoxicants.

I don’t like liquor and if asked, will declare that I no longer drink. Its true, I can’t remem­ber the last time I had even a sip of alco­hol. The hang­overs were just too much to bear. I’m too old for a self-inflicted sore head.

Where does that leave you if you don’t like booze, but you do enjoy alter­ing your state of con­scious­ness? Black mar­ket drugs like weed and coke and smack and MDMA and speed and LSD I guess.

But what if you don’t want to break the law? I’ve already sug­gested vot­ing for lead­ers who would change the laws, but we can’t seem to find any, except for the Lib Dems and if its going to be a hung par­lia­ment any­way, then we should all vote for the Lib Dems so they can have a big­ger share of the even­tual coali­tion government.

But I digress. If you want to get high with­out break­ing the law, you look for some­thing legal.

Until 2005, fresh magic mush­rooms were legal to pur­chase and pos­sess in the UK.

Finally, there was a legal high avail­able that was pro­foundly effec­tive and read­ily avail­able. I shroomed reg­u­larly for a cou­ple of years, every week or two. I was always care­ful, I stayed in a safe, com­fort­able envi­ron­ment (my own home) and had very pleas­ant, enjoy­able times. It was eas­ily one of the best drug expe­ri­ences of my life, I can’t begin to express how much I enjoyed it.

Well, I can and I did, if you read the first cou­ple of years of my out­put here, I rave about shrooms con­tin­u­ally. Taken respon­si­bly and with a rough knowl­edge of the appro­pri­ate dosage, shrooms are rel­a­tively harm­less. You would need to con­sume your own weight in mush­rooms for the dose to be fatally toxic and I haven’t heard about any­one who’s tried.

You could always pick fresh mush­rooms in the wild, pro­vided you knew what you were look­ing for, because the wrong type of mush­room could be fatally toxic at a much lower dosage. But if you were buy­ing them from some­one who could reli­ably tell you the strain, with knowl­edge of where they were farmed and advice on how many to take, you would be much bet­ter off.

And for a few years, we were much bet­ter off, with our safe, easy to buy fresh shrooms. It was bliss.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

The above para­graph will be repeated again, you will notice, I promise.

And so I did sadly lament the demise of my beloved shrooms because the gov­ern­ment man didn’t want me to have any more fun.

But it was too late, the mar­ket for legal highs had been estab­lished, a decent cus­tomer base still existed. All they needed was another prod­uct, some­thing legal that would fuck you up a bit.

The answer came from New Zealand:

BZP

BZP came as some­thing called party pills, which was a big change from fresh shrooms, it was a man made chem­i­cal of dubi­ous ori­gin. Rumour was it was used for worm­ing pets, but it gave peo­ple a buzz, so we tried it.

It worked. It was quite speedy and a bit spacey, pleas­ant but not over­whelm­ing. There were many brands, legal high forums were brim­ming with reviews to help you choose. Peo­ple were happy to have any­thing that was legal and had an effect.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

Right around the same time, the first legal mar­i­juana sub­sti­tutes that worked came along, the first was called Spice, which has become a generic term for these drugs. The ingre­di­ents were kept secret, so we didn’t know what the magic herbs we were smok­ing were, but we knew they got us high.

Turns out the herbs weren’t magic, but the JHW-081 they sprayed onto it was. JHW-081 is a syn­thetic cannabi­noid, made in a lab to mimic THC. Sneaky fuck­ers, no won­der it worked.

As if overnight, many dif­fer­ent brands of smok­ing mix­tures came on to the mar­ket, all with a very sim­i­lar weed-like effect. It was legal, but it was also expen­sive, and in some cases pricier than real weed.

Think about that, peo­ple were will­ing to pay more for a legal weed alter­na­tive, than actual weed. That says a lot.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

In the gloom of my post-legal-shrooms exis­tence, I tried many of these legal highs and a few years ago, I was get­ting these rather delight­ful lit­tle cap­sules shipped in legally from Israel.

They tried to keep the ingre­di­ents a secret, but with a bit of research, I dis­cov­ered it was a chem­i­cal related to cathi­none, which is the active ingre­di­ent in khat, the Africa plant that is used as a stim­u­lant when chewed.

At first, I only ordered a cou­ple and found them quite pleas­ant and quite strong, closer to real MDMA than BZP or the crap that fol­lowed. I ordered a few more, and then a few more.

And then I ordered a lot.

And then I lost a cou­ple of days. No lie, I think my ben­der lasted around 48 hours. Peo­ple were con­cerned, I just dis­ap­peared. It was the most mor­ish drug I’ve ever had and I used to do coke years ago. I kept going until I swal­lowed the last pill I had.

Then I crashed for a cou­ple of days and felt extremely depressed. I was angry with myself for los­ing con­trol, some­thing I rarely if ever do while under the influ­ence of any­thing. I didn’t con­trol this drug, this drug con­trolled me.

It didn’t, ever again. I didn’t touch any more after that. It seemed to tar­get my plea­sure cen­tre with laser-guided pre­ci­sion. No thanks.

Guess what I am 99.9% cer­tain that drug was?

Mephedrone.

Kids, lis­ten to your old uncle hippy, that shit’s not worth it. Its way too mor­ish. It feels absolutely won­der­ful when you’re tak­ing it and you will want to take it end­lessly. You can’t, even­tu­ally the money, or your body will give out and then you will crash. The crash sucks. Its not worth the pleasure.

As much as I don’t like mephedrone, I am merely sug­gest­ing (in strong, unam­bigu­ous terms) that you not take it, I am not sug­gest­ing some knee jerk reac­tionary ban. Actu­ally, I think it makes more sense to keep it legal and out in the open. at least until you have an alter­na­tive to offer.

If the gov­ern­ment can’t offer an alter­na­tive (I sug­gest weed, please), the mar­ket­place will find one. It always does, because we live in a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety and sup­ply will always try to meet demand.

Oh, and if you’re against sup­ply and demand, even in the illicit mar­ket­place, then you are against the very foun­da­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. So take that all you anti-drug com­mie pinko social­ists! Get on the free mar­ket band­wagon, don’t get in the way of trade!

Ban­ning mephedrone isn’t the answer, unless the ques­tion is: “how can we get another untested, cut­ting edge man-made intox­i­cant into the hands of our chil­dren in the quick­est pos­si­ble time?”

I’ve yet to see one con­clu­sive report of a death being caused directly by mephedrone. I’ve seen lots of bull­shit about it being “linked” to a few untimely deaths, but alco­hol and other drugs have also been in the mix, though that hasn’t been highlighted.

If I drank myself to death right now while eat­ing a banana, you could quite accu­rately state that, until the coroner’s report is issued, my death was linked to eat­ing a banana. I can see the head­lines now, “Ban the Yel­low Scourge”.

Booze kills and kills often, but the alco­hol indus­try spends a lot of money on image and rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment. When you think of liquor, you don’t think of corpses, do you? No, you think of good times, par­ties and women in tight dresses that you know will have sex with you.

Think about how many times you’ve got­ten pissed, puked your insides out and woke up the next day feel­ing like death, swear­ing you’d never ever do that to your­self again. Until next Saturday.

That’s either effec­tive mar­ket­ing or addic­tion. Or both.

The legal high indus­try isn’t organ­ised, they don’t have a cen­tralised body to speak on their behalf and be their pub­lic face. Its the same for ille­gal highs for that mat­ter. Who rep­re­sents them? Who does their spinning?

No one.

Maybe its time they did.

People’s need to get high, to be intox­i­cated, to alter their state, is not new and its not going away any time soon. There will always be a demand for sub­stances, legal or oth­er­wise, that change your mood.

Recent his­tory has shown that when given the choice, peo­ple pre­fer legal sub­stances, even if they cost more and have less pleas­ant effects than their ille­gal rivals.

If the gov­ern­ment left well enough alone with my old friends, magic mush­rooms, none of us would have ever heard of mephedrone and what­ever might follow.

Go on, if you let us all have legal weed, we can leave all is designer drug shit alone. Please?

The Econ­o­mist, a rather con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tion, has come out strongly in favour of the legal­i­sa­tion, tax­a­tion and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of drugs.

All drugs.

The arti­cle I am refer­ring to is RIGHT HERE and is well worth a few min­utes of your valu­able surf­ing time because it lays out a very ratio­nal, sen­si­ble and per­sua­sive argu­ment for this rad­i­cal suggestion.

As the UN meets in Vienna to decide the next decade’s drug pol­icy, why won’t they lis­ten to the experts?

There are so many intel­li­gent, edu­cated, thought­ful mem­bers of respectable soci­ety who believe legal­i­sa­tion is the only solu­tion. There are loads of senior police­men who believe this, many civil ser­vants and politi­cians do too, but they are too afraid to speak up because of the false hys­te­ria sur­round­ing the issue.

David Cameron, most likely the next Prime Min­is­ter of this coun­try is sym­pa­thetic to the idea of rad­i­cally chang­ing our approach on the sub­ject as men­tioned in this, another well writ­ten and thought­ful piece on the sub­ject from politics.co.uk

I’ve always thought we’ve had more of a chance of chang­ing the laws under a con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment, because it takes a strong party to take deci­sive action.

If David Cameron would take one key step in that direc­tion, he could have my support.

Mr. Cameron, I implore you to shift your pub­lic posi­tion based on facts and sci­ence. Please con­sider decrim­i­nal­is­ing or legal­is­ing cannabis as soon as you are in power.

Finally, a gov­ern­ment drug pol­icy I agree with completely…

Ille­gal factory-style cannabis farms should be closed down.

Check out THIS REPORT from the BBC.

Fac­tory cannabis-farms are often set-up in rented accom­mo­da­tion, with the land­lords none the wiser until they receive a phone call from the police telling them their income prop­erty has been trashed.

Ille­gal cannabis farm­ers steal elec­tric­ity from neigh­bours or from the an energy sup­plier; either way its theft and its wrong. Safety is ignored and fires are not uncom­mon. And sad­dest of all, they are fre­quently staffed by ille­gal aliens trapped in a type of hell­ish inden­tured servitude.

Where I split from the gov­ern­ment is their choice of solu­tion; police raids won’t make the prob­lem go away, it will only make it relo­cate to yet another unsus­pect­ing venue. The trade is far too lucra­tive for those involved to give it up. Raids are sim­ply a cal­cu­lated risk bal­anced against a very reward­ing return.

Its sup­ply and demand, the very cor­ner­stone of our cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. To ignore or deny this very sim­ple truth, is to be blink­ered and ostrich like.

There’s a bet­ter way.

There’s always a bet­ter way, but it would involve our lead­ers shift­ing their cur­rent posi­tion, which is one of dis­in­for­ma­tion and lies, towards a more open and hon­est approach.

Its time to legalise the indus­try and take it out of the hands of crim­i­nals. Its time to reg­u­late and tax cannabis, bring the mar­ket under some sort of control.

To be against a legal cannabis indus­try is to be against the very heart and soul of capitalism.

Don’t let the con­di­tion­ing the media has been force-feeding you colour your view on this. They’ve been sys­tem­at­i­cally try­ing to dis­credit cannabis and per­vert your per­cep­tion of it for quite some time now.

Why?

Its easy to score points with the pub­lic by appear­ing tough on drugs. Also, it diverts your atten­tion from more impor­tant issues, like Iraq, cli­mate change or the economy.

The time is now for this unadul­ter­ated bull­shit to end.

Back when Blair and Blun­kett were in charge, cannabis was down­graded and they even toyed with a police pol­icy of mak­ing arrests for pos­ses­sion of cannabis the low­est pos­si­ble pri­or­ity. Things were finally mov­ing in the right direc­tion, the gov­ern­ment was lis­ten­ing to advi­sors and sci­en­tis­tis and using a bit of com­mon sense.

Mean­while in Amer­ica, the “war on drugs” was still going strong, along with fed­eral raids on med­ical mar­i­juana clubs and impris­on­ment for pos­ses­sion. This wasn’t that long ago.

Under Obama, things have already changed with an end to fed­eral raids and an offi­cial pol­icy that secedes power to indi­vid­ual states with regards to cannabis.

Cal­i­for­nia is now con­sid­er­ing legal­i­sa­tion and tax­a­tion, because the state is nearly bank­rupt. Des­per­ate times clearly call for cre­ative mea­sures, this one will bring Cali an esti­mated annual tidy sum of $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) dollars.

Many other states have decrim­i­nalised pos­ses­sion and have made it the low­est pos­si­ble polic­ing priority.

Our out-of-touch, out-of-step gov­ern­ment is about as un-Obama as possible.

If peo­ple won­der why Obama didn’t make more time for Gor­don Brown, they’re not really look­ing closely enough. They couldn’t be more polar oppo­sites when it comes to gen­uine lib­eral thought and policy.

Legal­is­ing weed would cre­ate legit­i­mate jobs, for legit­i­mate farm­ers and dis­trib­u­tors; jobs that already exist in the black econ­omy, fuelling a rather size­able black mar­ket that exists out­side the tax and social secu­rity system.

A legal and con­trolled indus­try would insure that safety stan­dards were met at the point of pro­duc­tion, for the facil­i­ties, the staff and the prod­uct. You would know the weed you were get­ting was pure and unadul­ter­ated. You would know the per­son who grew it was paid a rea­son­able, tax­able wage.

As much as I wish to see these dan­ger­ous and ille­gal cannabis farms closed down, I’m smart enough to realise that police raids alone are not the answer. If you really want to end the ille­gal cannabis trade, there is only one prac­ti­cal, work­able solu­tion: Legalise!

Even the UN may come to this con­clu­sion as they pre­pare to finalise an agree­ment this week in Vienna, but as this report in today’s Guardian sug­gests, there are still deep divi­sions with some EU and Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries favour­ing a more ratio­nal approach, with the US pre­fer­ring to con­tinue the point­less “war on drugs”.

Oh Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama, are you lis­ten­ing? The “war on drugs” has been an abysmal fail­ure and many knowl­edge­able and respectable peo­ple believe its been worse than the actual harm caused by the drugs them­selves. Could you please call your min­ions in Vienna and sort this sorry mess out?

If you want to know more, please check out my Cannabis Truth Series

Promises, promises. Politi­cians make them all the time when they are cam­paign­ing, only to con­ve­niently for­get about them once in office, but not Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama.

This week, US Attor­ney Gen­eral, Eric Holder con­firmed that fed­eral raids on Med­ical Mar­i­juana facil­i­ties would end and indi­vid­ual states could deter­mine their own poli­cies regard­ing my favourite plant. He said this is “now Amer­i­can policy”.

How cool is that?

This is a huge shift in the way the law deals with weed in Amer­ica. I wish the UK could be equally enlight­ened, but the gov­ern­ment here works very hard to be as un-Obama-like as possible.

And they don’t want to stop there either. Leg­is­la­tors in Cal­i­for­nia are now con­sid­er­ing tak­ing it one step fur­ther, with a pos­si­ble plan to fully legalise and tax cannabis to help bale out the finan­cially des­ti­tute state. They say it could bring in $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) in tax rev­enue to the state annually.

That’s a lot of green­backs for a lot of green­ery! Its com­mon fuck­ing sense! Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work, never has, never will. If you can’t beat ‘em, tax ‘em.

Obama’s motto through­out his cam­paign was “Yes, we can.” Now that he’s in office, the new motto is: “Yes, we cannabis!”

Roseanne Barr, domes­tic god­dess, come­dian and now radio talk­show host is sell­ing some very cool tee-shirts in Amer­ica with that very slo­gan on them, Yes, we CANnabis.

We should all order our­selves one to show our sup­port for this long over­due change in pol­icy. Let’s hope that it spreads out from Amer­ica to the rest of the world.

A year ago, I spent far too much money on my cof­fee mak­ing set-up. I say that, sit­ting here a year later, sip­ping the finest cap­puc­cino I’ve ever had.

Since yes­ter­day.

Every day I drink the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted and I have absolutely no regrets on how much money I spent.

I have an Izzo Vivi espresso maker and a Macap M4D grinder as well as var­i­ous acces­sories that help me pur­sue the per­fect coffee.

The Izzo Vivi is on the low-end of the pro-sumer cof­fee maker scale, but is an excel­lent piece of kit. Its been reli­able, depend­able and rel­a­tively easy to use and main­tain. Most impor­tantly, it cranks out shot after shot of deli­cious espresso and has plenty of steam power to turn your milk into light and pour-able mirco-foam.

The espresso maker, as I quickly learned, is not the most impor­tant machine com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing, its the grinder. To really make good espresso, you need a grinder that is up to the task and what­ever you think you should spend on one, its prob­a­bly not enough. Any cof­fee web­site or forum will tell you exactly the same thing.

My espresso maker has no real con­trols on it, except for the lever that oper­ates the pump. You fill the portafil­ter with freshly ground cof­fee, lock it into place and then lift the lever to the pump. When you’re done, flip the lever down and the pump stops. That’s really it.

All of your con­trol comes from adjust­ing the fine­ness of the grind and once you find your espresso range, requires min­i­mal tweak­ing depend­ing on the type and fresh­ness of your cof­fee beans.

Which leads me to what I think is the sin­gle most impor­tant com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing: freshly roasted beans.

I’ve read of some­thing called the “rule of twelve’s” when it comes to cof­fee which goes like this:

unroasted, green cof­fee beans stay fresh for 12 months
roasted cof­fee beans stay fresh for around 12 days
ground cof­fee stays fresh for 12 minutes

I buy my cof­fee online, about every fort­night, to insure I have the fresh­est, tasti­est beans pos­si­ble. I grind my beans directly in the portafil­ter, only sec­onds before I brew my espresso. You can’t get any fresher than that.

Cof­fee oxi­dises quickly and releases gasses which break it down and the flavour suf­fers for this. If you’re buy­ing your cof­fee pre-ground, or you are buy­ing roasted beans with­out know­ing the roast­ing date, you are cheat­ing your­self out of the best cof­fee you can drink.

And if you are using those pre-filled cof­fee pods, you are trad­ing con­ve­nience for taste.

You don’t have to spend as much as I have, but you really owe it to your­self to grind your own cof­fee and there are plenty of more afford­able options for grinders than mine.

And freshly roasted beans aren’t that expen­sive, a quar­ter kilo of a decent sin­gle estate or blend costs about the same as a tall cap­puc­cino from one of the high street chains and you’ll get at least 8 dou­ble espres­sos from it.

And it doesn’t have to be espresso, a decent Bodum press-pot with freshly ground cof­fee will make an out­stand­ing cup and if you are only grind­ing for fil­ter cof­fee, you can find some real bar­gains on grinders. I promise you, you will taste the difference.

My grinder is used every day, but the same can’t be said for the espresso maker. When I don’t have the time to heat it up, or clean it down after use, instead I use an Aeropress.

The main fea­ture of the Aero­press is that it will work with the same fine­ness of grind as the espresso maker, so no need to read­just the grinder. The Aero­press is made of plas­tic, very sim­ple to use and clean and pro­duces a very con­vinc­ing espresso-like cof­fee. I heat up some milk in the microwave and use one of those battery-operated hand whisks to froth it and in less than 5 min­utes, have some­thing which approx­i­mates a cappuccino.

But when I have the time, I always make the extra effort to use the Vivi. It takes longer and requires more clean-up, but its worth it.

My daily cof­fee rou­tine is some­thing like this:

Switch on the Vivi
Wait 30–45 min­utes for it to warm up
When ready, brew a dou­ble espresso
do a 2 sec­ond flush to clear loose grounds from the shower screen
back­flush for 10–15 sec­onds to clear oils from the brew path
froth my milk
flush the steam wand to get any milk residue out
build my drink
enjoy

Most days, I have a sec­ond cup as well, after that, I switch the machine off to let it cool. Then I clean out the drip tray, wipe it down and every other day, I refill the water reservoir.

I also back­flush with deter­gent occa­sion­ally, I soak the bas­kets and portafil­ters in the same deter­gent, I soak the tip of the steam wand in milk deposit remover and every few months I descale the boiler. None of this is dif­fi­cult or time consuming.

My acces­sory col­lec­tion includes 2x lined shot glasses to check I am get­ting the cor­rect vol­ume of espresso in the cor­rect amount of time (2 ounces in around 30 sec­onds), a cou­ple of shot pots, a stain­less steam jug for milk froth­ing, a 58mm Reg Bar­ber tam­per, a portafil­ter holder for tamp­ing, and a shot timer. The tamp­ing stand and the shot timer are use­ful, but not essen­tial, every­thing else I couldn’t do without.

I also have 4 portafil­ters; one with 2 spouts and a dou­ble bas­ket, another with one spout and a dou­ble bas­ket, a third with a blank­ing disk for back­flush­ing and a fourth that’s bot­tom­less with a triple bas­ket. The bot­tom­less portafil­ter was use­ful when I was learn­ing how to pack a portafil­ter prop­erly, as it showed me where to look for my mistakes.

I spent a good part of the year sam­pling dif­fer­ent beans and blends, but for many months now, I’ve been stick­ing one par­tic­u­lar bean, called Yemen Mokha Matrar which is the rich­est, tasti­est of all I tried. It works par­tic­u­larly well in milk-based drinks, like my amaz­ing cappuccinos.

You can get Yemen Mokha Matrar from a vari­ety of sup­pli­ers, though the roaster I use, roasts to order. I place an order on his web­site and he roasts the beans for me and ships them out the same day. Its a great ser­vice and they arrive the fol­low­ing day.

If any­one wants the name of the roaster I use, please feel free to email me. I’d like to include a link to his site, but would you want to be known as my offi­cial cof­fee roaster? I’m not cer­tain he would either.

Since I started mak­ing my own proper cof­fee at home, I haven’t had a cof­fee any place else that even comes close, not from the high street chains, not from the cof­fee ven­dor in my office, nowhere!

Life is far too short to be drink­ing sludge and you owe it to your­self to pro­vide your­self with the finest cof­fee pos­si­ble. Put it this way, if I had to pay high street prices for every cap­puc­cino I’ve had at home in the last year, I could have bought three sets of cof­fee mak­ing gear.

And if you are won­der­ing why an old trippy hippy like me digs cof­fee so much, its sim­ple. Cof­fee is a drug, like any­thing else that has an effect on your mood and per­cep­tion. Don’t believe me, read this and learn if you drink too much, you can have proper hallucinations.

Do you need some cool gifts for some cool peo­ple? This hippy is here to help!

Xmas is less than 2 weeks away and if you haven’t fin­ished your hol­i­day gift shop­ping, then you are just like every­one else! But you’ve got some­thing they haven’t got…a cer­tain north London-based hippy with a ques­tion­able char­ac­ter. I’ve got a few sug­ges­tions to help you out.

I find xmas stress­ful, every­thing is busier, peo­ple are ruder and noth­ing pisses me off more than queue­ing up to spend my hard earned money.

Let me share a tale with you from last Saturday.…

Last Sat­ur­day after­noon, I made the rather unfor­tu­nate mis­take of vis­it­ing my local super­mar­ket in my car. It’s a large chain super­mar­ket, with a large car park. I needed to pick up a few things and didn’t have a choice.

When I arrived at the super­mar­ket, I noticed the queue of cars depart­ing, but didn’t really think too much of it. The car park was quite full, but I man­aged to find a space with­out any stress. I decided to abbre­vi­ate my shop­ping list, grabbed a hand bas­ket and swept through the shop quite quickly. I even found a till with no one wait­ing and was checked out in record time. And then the real fun began.

I returned to my car to dis­cover the car park had filled up even more and the queue of depart­ing cars stretched to the very end of the car park. It took me around 10 min­utes just to get out of my space, because of being blocked by other pass­ing cars, arriv­ing or departing.

After get­ting out of my space, I joined the queue of depart­ing cars, head­ing towards the exit and that’s when the real fun began. The line of traf­fic was barely mov­ing and after 15–20 min­utes, I phoned Mrs. H to warn her I would be a bit later than I expected.

After 30 min­utes of not mov­ing, other peo­ple were start­ing to get rest­less and I began to see exam­ples of road-rage, or rather, car-park rage. Cars, were try­ing to cut into the queue of cars head­ing for the exit, oth­ers were try­ing to merge from unex­pected direc­tions. Then cars arriv­ing, started queu­ing up for lim­ited park­ing spaces, cut­ting off depart­ing cars and allow­ing merg­ing cars to jump in front. It was total car-park chaos!

Being the resource sort and main­tain­ing my calm through the reg­u­lar inges­tion of cig­a­rettes and choco­lates from my shop­ping, I got the num­ber for the super­mar­ket and rang it from my mobile phone. I asked to speak to the man­ager, iden­ti­fy­ing myself as a cus­tomer trapped out­side in my car. After a few min­utes wait­ing, I was con­nected to the duty man­ager and I explained the predica­ment fac­ing his val­ued cus­tomers just out­side the doors of his shop. He was sym­pa­thetic, but blamed the local coun­cil for not allow­ing them to build more access to the car park. That was hardly going to help me out at 2pm on a Sat­ur­day after­noon, 2 weeks before xmas!

The man­ager sug­gested I phone the local police sta­tion, which I was only too happy to do. After get­ting passed the first oper­a­tor, I was con­nected to the despatch desk at the local nick and I again explained the sit­u­a­tion, point­ing out the it could eas­ily turn nasty and as well as near acci­dents with cars, I’d seen a cou­ple of dri­vers leap out of their vehi­cles and nearly trade blows. The despatcher took my details and said she would send some offi­cers as soon as pos­si­ble. I didn’t see any before I left, around AN HOUR LATER!

Yes, I spent 2 hours in the super­mar­ket car park, in my car, in the pour­ing rain. It was absolute hell and I wouldn’t wish an expe­ri­ence like this on any one, ever!

Which brings me to my main point, which is this…if you can, do all of your shop­ping online! Every­thing I’m going to sug­gest is avail­able on the inter­net, so grab your credit card and get­ting ready to shop!

My top rec­om­men­da­tion this year is an iPod Touch from Apple. I bought one for Mrs. Hippy and we’re both blown away by how good it is. The touch­screen is gor­geous, so user friendly and as I sus­pected, the killer app is def­i­nitely being able to surf the inter­net on it.

It’s actu­ally a very usable, read­able browser and its the first sat­is­fy­ing inter­net expe­ri­ence I’ve ever had on a hand-held device. To put this in per­spec­tive, I’ve surfed on var­i­ous mobile phones and a high-end Palm Pilot and none have come close to this. The iPod Touch found my home net­work, let me put in the pass­word and joined it instantly. The mobile ver­sion of Safari rocks, its fast, respon­sive and ren­ders pages beautifully.

Oh and did I men­tion it plays music? And the video daz­zling too, so is the photo browser. I haven’t hacked it yet, because it’s Mrs. H’s, not mine and I don’t want to end up brick­ing it on her. I’m hold­ing out for a 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPhone, hope­fully that will come in the next few months.

I bought the iPod Touch from Ama­zon, £243 for the 16gb model, which is a real sav­ings com­pared to other retail­ers, but your mileage may vary, so look out for the best deal. Also, don’t leave it too long as its con­sid­ered one of the hot gifts this hol­i­day season.

In gen­eral, I can rec­om­mend Ama­zon, they’re nor­mally very reli­able and they are good with deliv­ery too. I shop with them so much that I signed up for Ama­zon Prime, which costs 50 quid for a year, but in return you get upgraded to next day deliv­ery on every­thing you buy. I usu­ally pay for next day deliv­ery any­way, because of my erratic lifestyle, that way I never miss any­thing. I’ve already placed a few orders with it, so it will pay for itself in no time.

The other online retailer I can rec­om­mend is everyonedoesit.com or EDIT. The adverts you see on my site are from EDIT, as my endorse­ment of them is long­stand­ing. They are also the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of the NLH Deluxe, the bong I designed, made by RooR in Germany.

EDIT stock a wide vari­ety of good­ies, from pipes and bongs to a wide selec­tion of legal highs and one of the best stocks of cannabis seeds on the inter­net. If you like to party, or know some­one who does, they’re cer­tain to have some­thing desirable.

Of course, you can check out the entire shop for your­self RIGHT HERE, I do have a few rec­om­men­da­tions for you.

Check the Bush­mas­ter Dou­ble Bub­blers on this THIS PAGE. I’ve got the mid­night blue one and I can’t rec­om­mend this pipe enough. It’s only 20 quid and its a real bar­gain, pieces this good nor­mally cost lots more.

I cleaned mine out the other day and it reminded me what a use­ful piece of kit the SPACE CASE GRINDER is…I put all my bud through mine and around twice a year, I scrape out the crys­tals inside. You will be amazed how much you can col­lect, if you use it reg­u­larly to break up your weed. And if you think about it, every­thing you’re col­lect­ing, would prob­a­bly just have been lost. I can’t believe every­one doesn’t use one!

I’ve heard lots of peo­ple com­plain­ing about the cost of RooR glass­ware and I won’t deny that some of their pieces are pricey. That said, you get what you pay for and RooR qual­ity is the best you’ll ever find. But if you don’t want to spend a for­tune, here are a bunch of RooR pieces that all cost under 100 pounds, includ­ing one (that I own) that costs under a ten­ner! That means you can give some­one a piece of pure RooR qual­ity, no mat­ter what your bud­get may be!

I’ll start with the CLASSIC THREE PIECE WATER PIPE, which is a piece that I own. It’s a great look­ing water pipe, well con­structed and it smokes so sweetly, you will love every hit!

How about a RooR gift set, includ­ing a RooR bong for only 65 quid? Check out ROOR GIFT SET 5! And check out the rest of the RooR gift sets RIGHT HERE.

And if you want a full sized, proper RooR? No prob­lem, we can still do that for you and here’s 4 mod­els from the RooR red range, with 3.2mm glass, that cost between 85–100 quid! Go on, check ‘em out RIGHT HERE.

And remem­ber, I said there are RooR pieces under a ten­ner? Check out the MINI-STEAMROLLER, for only £5.95. I’ve got one of these too and its my favourite tiny pipe. It’s per­fect for a quick blast, when you need a lit­tle hit to take the edge off life.

But what RooR gift guide from me could ever be com­plete with­out a shame­less plug for my pretty lit­tle baby, the “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 — northlon­don­hippy deluxe” — the best bong in the world! Of course, I’m biased, because I designed it and it car­ries my name, but trust me I’ve smoked out of loads of pipes and noth­ing hits as well as my bong. It costs a bit more than other bongs, but trust some­one who’s smoked out of it a lot now, its worth every god­damn penny! Treat your­self, or treat some­one you love, you won’t be disapppointed!

The best news about all the good­ies I’ve men­tioned from EDIT is that they have it all in stock right now for imme­di­ate ship­ment and that includes the NLH Deluxe! I know the NLH Deluxes have been hard to come by, since the ini­tial ship­ment sold out, but they’ve got ‘em now!

Xmas doesn’t have to be stress­ful. If you can visit my site, then you can visit Ama­zon or EDIT, or any one of a num­ber of sites which will ship things to you quickly. If you can avoid the shops, the malls and the high street, you’ll make your life a lot eas­ier and isn’t that what we all want? Trust me, you don’t want to lose 2 hours of your life in a car park!

Yep, me again. And no, it’s not the threat­ened review of my brand new, shiny, lick­able and super­fast iMac. It’s com­ing. So is xmas. Xmas will not come first, because as we all know, com­ing first is rude.

As I was thread­ing my way through the rush hour traf­fic this morn­ing, strug­gling to get myself home, I started think­ing how much I could really do with get seri­ously out of my skull.

What I mean is, I could really do with a psy­che­delic trip that got me totally off my face. I need to see some pretty colours!

I’ve done acid a hand­ful of times, the last time around 10 years ago. I also used to enjoy magic mush­rooms, around every week or so. I’ve lost count of the num­ber of shroom trips I’ve had.

Magic mush­rooms grow wild all over the UK and a friend of mine would take an annual pil­grim­age to the West Coun­try every autumn to col­lect them. He was always very gen­er­ous with them and I ended up with a few trips yearly.

Then, in 2003 I dis­cov­ered that fresh magic mush­rooms were avail­able, legally to pur­chase and con­sume. I didn’t believe it at first, that you could really buy them that eas­ily. At first, I thought it was some sort of a scam. How wrong I was!

I first ordered them from EDIT my friends who are now the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of my NLH deluxe bong. They arrived the fol­low­ing day and were exactly as described. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I started research­ing shrooms, learn­ing about dif­fer­ent strains, poten­cies and dosages. With my friend’s West Coun­try shrooms, I never mea­sured them; they were dried and rel­a­tively easy to con­sume, if not totally disgusting.

Fresh shrooms are even nas­tier, slimy and cold, with the flavour of what I expect the insides of a rot­ting corpse might taste like. Gross!

I started out on 30 grams of Mex­i­can p-cubes, which is a rea­son­able, but not overly strong dose — for me any­way. Over the few years I did them reg­u­larly, I worked my way up to higher doses, peak­ing around 55 grams or so.

The trips were amaz­ing, I got to hang out with the mush­room god. Search for him on my site, if you want to know more. Basi­cally, if you eat enough shrooms, the mush­room god vis­its you and shows you the pretty colours!

Shrooms take a while to hit you. On an empty stom­ach, it would take 60–90 min­utes before feel­ing the first effects, with a peak reached any­where from 2–4 hours and last­ing for 4–6 hours. It pretty much wasted a whole day, but what way to waste it!

Psy­che­delic drugs enhance your per­cep­tion; the sim­ple way to under­stand it is they make the synap­tic nerves in your brain fire faster, giv­ing you more sen­sory input. Your vision sharp­ens, as does your hear­ing which makes music sound amaz­ing. As you get fur­ther into your trip, pat­terns in things swish and swirl, wood grain flows like a river.

On one par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant trip, on some Colom­bian p-cubes, right at the point where I peaked, I saw a burst of rain­bow colours in the air, in a sun-filled room. It was astound­ingly beau­ti­ful and com­pletely unex­pected. Colom­bians are appar­ently known for the colours they pro­duce, but try as I did, I was unable to repeat the experience.

No two trips are exactly alike, which is why I had no chance of repeat­ing my explo­sion of colour by pre­med­i­tat­ing it. Shrooms take you on the jour­ney, though I can’t say I really lost any con­trol. Except once…

For my birth­day a few years back, I had some Hawai­ian shrooms, which are very well known for their ultra-high potency. I had tried them before, elect­ing to exper­i­ment with the rec­om­mended starter dose of 10 grams. They didn’t do that much for me. Then, I did some­thing stu­pid, I dou­bled the dose.

Bad move! I had a seri­ously strong trip which ended with me hid­ing under my duvet with my eyes closed for sev­eral hours, still see­ing a multi-coloured geo­met­ric pat­tern stretched from right in front of me, all the way to infin­ity. I couldn’t see what my eyes were see­ing, I could only “see” what my brain was gen­er­at­ing. Kids, I seri­ously rec­om­mend you do NOT try this at home!

A few months after that, the gov­ern­ment put fresh magic mush­rooms into Class A, which is the same cat­e­gory as coke and smack.…the fuck­ers! In no way are shrooms any­where near as bad for you as heroin or crack. Used respon­si­bly, they are very safe, good fun!

Thanks to the actions of some stu­pid tourists, the Dutch have just banned shrooms as well. So much for tol­er­ant Hol­land! The tourists in ques­tion were all drink­ing as well, but booze had noth­ing to do with their unfor­tu­nate inci­dents. Sure thing! Booze never causes any­one any trou­ble, does it?

I think I read that shroom farm­ing is a 14 mil­lion pound a year busi­ness in Hol­land. That’s an awful lot of money to be just throw­ing away. And peo­ple will still want their shrooms, they will just have to go under­ground for them.

I haven’t had any shrooms since the gov­ern­ment out­lawed them. It’s not because I haven’t had the chance, one can still get them, if one knows where to look — like online! You can still get grow kits from Europe, if you really want some and they’re dead easy to grow. I haven’t had any shrooms because I don’t do Class A drugs and haven’t done since I gave up coke and E’s over 5 years ago.

I still love weed and con­tinue to sam­ple lots of dif­fer­ent legal highs, and as of today, I wouldn’t mind some­thing psy­che­delic. I don’t think I will actively seek any­thing elec­tric, but should I be offered some shrooms or even a blot­ter, I would be sorely tempted to accept the universe’s gen­eros­ity. I could really use a lit­tle break from real­ity right now, I think it would do my men­tal health a world of good.

It’s always inter­est­ing to see what words peo­ple stick into Google and other search engines, which lead them to my hum­ble, lit­tle website.

I receive a wide vari­ety of sta­tis­tics via my web­site hosts, but I always like check­ing out the search-terms sec­tion. It’s always good for a laugh.

This is the cur­rent list, for the month of July, to date, count­ing up from num­ber ten:

10) “north lon­don hip­pie” – my name, spelled wrong, with spaces. I’m glad it still leads to my site and I’m glad peo­ple search for me, even with the mistakes!

9) “billi bhatti” – him off Big Brother, evicted a cou­ple of weeks ago. As you will see, BB names are pop­u­lar on this list.

8) “pur­ple ohms expe­ri­ences” – a cou­ple of years ago, I had a bad time on these pills. I took too many, I had an unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence. They’re legal highs and I think they are still avail­able, now in non-BZP form.

7) “northlon­don­hippy” – now that’s more like it, spelled cor­rectly, with­out spaces. I fea­ture twice in my own top ten, which means my brand aware­ness is high and get­ting higher. Just like me, I’m get­ting higher too, right now…!

6) “RooR Pocket Friend” – a fine pipe from my friends at RooR. I’ve writ­ten about mine a few times. Usu­ally, there are sev­eral RooR-related search terms in the top ten, but when I write about Big Brother, that tends to over­take it. Go figure!

5) “charley uchea tits” – Thus begins the breast obses­sion at the top of the list, nearly all BB related.

4) “vic­to­ria beck­ham top­less” – see, more tits. As if I would post pic­tures of that bean­pole with fake boobs!

3) “chanelle hayes mas­tur­ba­tion” — BB related, but not so breast-centric. Does any­one know if these pic­tures do exist? I wouldn’t post them, but I might like to see them myself, purely for research purposes.

2) “shab­nam paryani top­less” – I don’t really get this one, espe­cially as it is so high up on the list. Do peo­ple really want to see her top­less? I don’t even want to see her clothed! She’s scary!! Peo­ple have very weird tastes and inter­ests, but this is the inter­net, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

1) “expand­ing the­ory” – A while ago, I wrote up a silly lit­tle the­ory about what I thought the effect of the uni­verse con­stantly expand­ing would have on us. I was very high at the time and it was total bollocks.

Google doesn’t seem to think so, for if you put “expand­ing the­ory” into the world’s largest and smartest search engine, this is what you get as your top hit: CLICK HERE

Go on, check it out. My site is the top hit! Read it!

Do you really think I am an expert on the sub­ject? Should I win a Nobel Prize for inno­va­tion in science?

I should very much think not!

I don’t know if you found that inter­est­ing, but as always, I am inter­ested in what you have to say. I’d like to take an infor­mal survey:

Please email me with how you found my site. Did you stum­ble upon me via a search engine? Do you remem­ber what you were search­ing for? Maybe you saw a link to my site? Where?

How­ever you found me, I’d like to know. Please email me at thehippy@northlondonhippy.com — I won’t spam you or give/sell your address to any­one. I don’t even keep a mail­ing list. I’m just nosy.

I know it’s the sum­mer and I do give a lot of space to Big Brother, but that’s not the only thing I do here on my web­site. I’m all about a whole lot more!

Pol­i­tics, soci­ety, drugs, phi­los­o­phy, and con­sumer elec­tron­ics are among the sub­jects I spew dri­vel on; there’s a lit­tle some­thing for every­one. Well, almost every­one. I’m sure there are some peo­ple who don’t find me to their par­tic­u­lar liking.

They can fuck right off. It’s the rest of you, I’m inter­ested in and more impor­tantly, that should be inter­ested in me!

This is going be one of those ram­bling, unfo­cused posts. I thought I should warn you right now, up front, so you’re not sur­prised when you work it out for yourself.

I’m start­ing a long run of nights at work this evening, so I thought I should pop around and do some­thing. Any­thing is bet­ter than noth­ing, or is that just with sex?

It’s actu­ally been a rough cou­ple of weeks around my place; we had to put one of my cats down. He had can­cer in a big, nasty way and there was noth­ing they could do for him. Well, they tried what they could, but when they opened up his lit­tle cat belly, it was filled to the brim with tumours. To spare him any fur­ther suf­fer­ing, we had the vet put the lit­tle guy to sleep. Mrs. H was there when they did it; I couldn’t face it.

My poor dead cat was one of the nicest, friend­liest, coolest cats I ever had the priv­i­lege to know and I am miss­ing him terribly.

He wasn’t that old, only around 13 or 14 years and his ill­ness was as sud­den as it was unex­pected. I rushed him to the vet’s on a Sat­ur­day after­noon and he was gone the fol­low­ing Tuesday.

Now, if he were a human, it wouldn’t have been as swift or mer­ci­ful because we don’t like to spare peo­ple from suf­fer­ing. Just ask my Dad, who from diag­no­sis to demise, had around a year of treat­ments and set­backs before expe­ri­enc­ing a rather drawn out and unpleas­ant death. Oh wait, you can’t ask him, can you?

We treat our pets with more dig­nity than we do each other. Where’s the sense in that? When my time comes, and I do hope it is later rather than sooner, per­haps we’ll have seen sense and legalised euthana­sia. If it’s good enough for the Swiss, why can’t it be OK for the rest of us? Oth­er­wise, I’m going to have to start a spe­cial con­tin­gency fund, for one final trip to Geneva or Zurich, for when my time does come…closer. It seems like the only sane response to an oth­er­wise insane world!

Have I brought you down with all this talk of death and such? Sorry, but now you know where my head’s been for the last cou­ple of weeks. Thank god for soft drugs. If there were a god, or soft drugs.

But hippy, there are soft drugs and you are puff­ing on them right now.

Oh, yeah.

So besides miss­ing my dead cat, watch­ing BB and work­ing, what else have I been up to?

Not too much. I had a drug-hell expe­ri­ence with some legal highs I’ve been get­ting online. I’m not going to tell you what they are or where you can get them, because I don’t want to see them banned. I’ve even debated men­tion­ing this at all, but as the expe­ri­ence swal­lowed sev­eral days of my life, I thought it would be a fun story to relate.

I dis­cov­ered a new range of legal highs a few months ago, though I’ve been aware of their exis­tence for ages. After read­ing many favourable reviews of this line of pills, I decided to take a chance and placed an order.

I tried them, I liked them and I ordered more. And then I ordered even more.

And then, I had my drug hell with them. I took around a dozen of the lit­tle suck­ers in a con­tin­u­ous 30-hour hedo­nis­tic binge and drug orgy, before col­laps­ing into sleep for around 6 hours.

That’s a day and a half.

When I woke up, I was down, aching and still exhausted and I was greeted with loads of text mes­sages, voice­mails, emails and other assorted forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, ask­ing if I was lying dead in a pud­dle of my own sick.

Thank­fully, on this occa­sion, I wasn’t.

I then had a few days of feel­ing quite low and run down. It was totally self-inflicted, so I’m not ask­ing for anyone’s sym­pa­thy or pity. This is who I am; this is what I do. Sometimes.

Rarely, actu­ally. I haven’t had a drug-hell in ages.

The thing with these par­tic­u­lar pills is they are very fuck­ing good. They are the clos­est I’ve had that approach an E-like high. Taken in mod­er­a­tion, there is no real come­down or other side effect. Taken in large quan­ti­ties, like a total twat, will not end well.

Yes, I was a total twat.

No one is cer­tain what the magic ingre­di­ents are in these pills, but those who have tried them, love them. Maybe a lit­tle too much as I think they are seri­ously addic­tive. Think cocaine-addictive!

I haven’t had any since my last expe­ri­ence and I can’t say I have any defin­i­tive plan to try them again any time soon, but never say never. I still have some and at some point, I might recon­sider, but I will not over do it. Mod­er­a­tion is indeed, the key.

Again, sorry I’m not telling you exactly what I took, but the less atten­tion these pills get, the longer peo­ple will be able to enjoy them. Just because I went a bit crazy with them, doesn’t mean oth­ers shouldn’t be able to have the choice to enjoy them too.

I finally broke down and ordered a new lap­top last week and guess what? It’s an Apple!

I hemmed and hawed for months on which model to get, and wait­ing for the next big update, and blah, blah, blah and quite frankly I just got tired of not hav­ing one. My writ­ing has been suf­fer­ing because of this gap in my com­puter arse­nal and I finally decided, fuck it, now is as good a time as any.

Both lines, the Mac­Book and the Mac­Book Pro were recently updated, and the myth­i­cal ultra portable doesn’t seem to be com­ing any­time soon (although now that I’ve bought one, it is prob­a­bly a week away), so I went for it and placed my order last Wednes­day and it already shipped on Friday.

I chose the black Mac­Book, with the only build to order option being extra RAM, I’ve dou­bled it to 2 gigs. I’ve gone with the stock 160gb 5400rpm hard drive, because I decided the extra speed was bet­ter than 40 extra gigs of stor­age – the 200gb model is only 4200rpm. It’s a Core2Duo, 2.16 and I topped it up with Apple Care.

I’m look­ing for­ward to its arrival, which should be in the next week, or less. They ship them from Shang­hai, which is a long way from north Lon­don, but it’s still fairly impressive.

Once I get it, I’m going to carry it with me every­where. If you invite me over, I’d bring it along, as long as you’ll let me access the inter­net on your wi-fi net­work! You see, it’s not just those lit­tle pills I’m addicted to, I’m hooked on the inter­net as well.

I did con­sider the Mac­Book Pro, but the sig­nif­i­cant addi­tional cost was not jus­ti­fied by the “pro” fea­tures, in terms of my rather mod­est needs. Also, the 15.4 inch model is fairly big, in my opin­ion, to be lug­ging around, where the MacBook’s 13.3 size adds to it’s portability.

So that’s the last fort­night or so this hippy’s life. Wow, what a whirl­wind of drama, emo­tion and big ticket pur­chases! I bet you can’t wait to see what hap­pens to me next!

I’ll be back later in the week, with more BB bull­shit, plus I’m going to start deal­ing with some of the requests you’ve all sent me. One sub­ject has been most pop­u­lar with all of you and…I’ll let you all know what is in my next entry!

Another day, another drug report; but as always with the same, sen­si­ble conclusions.

This time, the authors of the report, the “The Royal Soci­ety for the encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures and Com­merce” — com­monly known as the RSA, spent two years study­ing the sit­u­a­tion. Rather than me explain­ing it to you, why don’t you read about it here, in my favourite broad­sheet news­pa­per, The Guardian.

It’s an informed and con­sid­ered opin­ion that the RSA is offer­ing, one that has been around in one form or another, endorsed by other objec­tive stud­ies and com­pletely ignored by politicians.

Politi­cians are ter­ri­fied of reports like this because they are ter­ri­fied of change. “Change” is a vote-loser, espe­cially when that change, no mat­ter how ben­e­fi­cial to soci­ety is mis­un­der­stood by a mis­in­formed public.

Politi­cians have a vested inter­est in keep­ing peo­ple mis­in­formed, espe­cially about drugs. How can they be seen to be com­bat­ing this ter­ri­ble prob­lem, if they haven’t pointed out it’s a prob­lem in the first place?

The sim­ple fact is that count­less num­bers of peo­ple in the UK take drugs every week, some every day, with no notice­able effect on their nor­mal, pro­duc­tive lives, yet they are crim­i­nalised for some­thing that harms no one.

What harms peo­ple are the sit­u­a­tions cre­ated by the pro­hi­bi­tion of drugs.

What harms peo­ple is the igno­rance and mis­un­der­stand­ing that is fos­tered by gov­ern­ments and by the tra­di­tional media.

I’ve smoked cannabis for nearly 26 years and dur­ing that time I’ve either been a gain­fully employed, tax-paying mem­ber of soci­ety or a stu­dent in full time edu­ca­tion. I’m still sharp as tack with the men­tal skills of some­one half my age. I don’t really take any­thing else these days and I hardly if ever drink alco­hol. Should I be a criminal?

Of course not!

Think of all the dosh lost in uncol­lected VAT on all of the weed I’ve smoked over the years! There goes that extra MRI scan­ner for your local hos­pi­tal! There goes an extra cop or two on the street!

It’s a plant for fuck sake! How can you ban nature?

Some of the biggest and most vocal sup­port­ers of a rethink on ille­gal drugs are the police. Yes, the police, the same peo­ple who have to enforce these point­less laws. The cops would much rather be chas­ing down gen­uine crim­i­nals than a bunch of dope­heads for possession!

I’ve spo­ken to cops who have told me they pre­fer to police a hous­ing estate that has a higher per­cent­age of weed smok­ers than drinkers. The smok­ers are much more chilled out, whereas we know what peo­ple who abuse alco­hol are like. If you don’t, just visit any city cen­tre this week­end after 11pm and you’ll receive a les­son you won’t soon forget!

Remem­ber, the police don’t make the laws and it seems like they’re not even con­sulted when they’re best suited to offer guid­ance from real life expe­ri­ence. Lis­ten to the cops, please Mr. Politi­cian man! He doesn’t want to arrest any­one for possession!

What we need is an MP with balls, prefer­ably one to become head of the Home Office. Charles Clark was lean­ing in that direc­tion; so was David Blun­kett, but not John Reid. He doesn’t want to rock the boat; he’s plan­ning a future in politics.

How about David “call me Dave” Cameron? Before he was leader of his party, he posed a ques­tion over whether drugs should be legalised. He didn’t offer or sug­gest an answer, he just sug­gested the ques­tion could or should be asked.

Since then, he hasn’t even come close to this posi­tion and if any­thing he’s backed away from it. Since the rev­e­la­tions of his boy­hood indis­cre­tion with a spliff (shock/horror!), there is even less chance of him keep­ing his mind this open. It’s a pity, I had high (no pun) hopes for him.

Leave it to the leader of the Lib­Dems, Sir Men­zies Camp­bell to be the one voice of rea­son, wel­com­ing the RSA report and endors­ing its find­ings. The Lib­Dems would legalise weed in an instant and we’d have Dutch-style cof­feeshops in every neigh­bour­hood! I wish they would get their act together and get some more support.

Do I think the law is going to change?

Yes, even­tu­ally it will, but not soon enough. I’d like it to change yes­ter­day, or even the day before. If every­one would just see sense and avoid all the knee-jerk reac­tion bull­shit that the sub­ject always brings out, we could change the laws for the ben­e­fit of not just one lone hippy in north Lon­don, but all of society!