Pubdate: Sat, 16 Mar 2002
Source: Press and Journal, The (UK)
Copyright: 2002: Northcliffe Newspapers Group Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.thisisnorthscotland.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/347
Author: Derek Lord

DANGER LURKS IN GOING TO POT IN LIFE AND ON STAGE

LAST weekend, the Liberal Democrats called for the legalisation of 
cannabis, the downgrading of ecstasy and the end of prison sentences for 
the possession of hard drugs.

The sort of woolly thinking behind their stance on drugs is to be expected 
from a party which sets such store on the freedom of the individual, but 
there are certain freedoms which it is necessary to curtail for the common 
good.

I assume that most of the politicians who advocate the legalising of pot 
have tried the substance at some stage of their development. Perhaps they 
shared a joint or two in a fellow-student's flat while at university and 
found the experience to be a bit of a giggle, which the first joint 
invariably is, as it usually promotes an uncontrollable urge to laugh.

Strangely enough, this first reaction to the weed rarely occurs again. One 
assumes that, having tried it, they dismissed it as a bit of harmless fun 
and proceeded to get on with their lives. If so, they had a lucky escape.

LIKE most people of my generation, I can think of several folk who have 
destroyed their lives through an over-indulgence in the use of cannabis.

There was the television studio floor manager who got hooked on the stuff 
while on holiday in Morocco. She brought enough of the stuff back with her 
to ensure that any show on which she worked was an utter shambles as she 
sauntered through the chaos of her own creating with a benign smile on her 
face, muttering: "Don't worry, man, everything's cool.'

Her boyfriend, a scenery hand at the Abbey Theatre, did not fare any 
better. He was sacked about the same time as his stoned mate after a large 
flat collapsed on the head of one of Ireland's leading thespians during the 
opening night of a new play. He just couldn't be bothered securing the flat.

The trouble with cannabis is that it suppresses our feelings of fear and 
discontent, which are probably our two most powerful motivating forces. 
Only last week a teenage boy stabbed himself to death with a pair of 
scissors in front of his father. He did not intend to commit suicide. His 
mind was so scrambled with cannabis that he believed he was immortal and 
was just trying to demonstrate this fact to his dad.

There are many less-extreme cases of the mind-bending potential of this 
insidious drug which can be every bit as lethal. I remember a habitual 
pot-smoking lady telling me that she had crashed her car into the rear of 
another vehicle while it was stopped at a red light. When I asked her why 
she hadn't braked in time to avoid the collision, she told me she couldn't 
be bothered. "Anyway, once you have seen one red light, you've seen them 
all," she cackled.

Can you imagine an airline pilot or a train driver in the same frame of mind?

Unfortunately, the police have no way of telling whether a driver is stoned 
out of his mind or not, as the scientists have not come up with an 
effective detection device for cannabis as they did for alcohol.

Until they do, the police will have to fall back on the old method of 
getting suspects to walk the white line. Presumably, if they try to sniff 
it up their noses, they'll get done.

ADVOCATES of this particular drug never tire of telling us that it is less 
harmful than alcohol and point out that drunks are more prone to violent 
behaviour than pot smokers.

Strange, then, that historians have discovered that the Zulu shamans 
supplied the warriors who wiped out a British column at Isandlawana and 
went on to give Michael Caine a fright at Rorke's Drift with a 
specially-cultivated type of cannabis plant which made them feel invincible 
and bloodthirsty.

I do not want that particular strain made available to the knife- wielding 
thugs who are plaguing our city streets. They're bad enough on Buckfast.

A recent poll indicated that cannabis was the drug of choice among the 
financial whiz-kids who run our money markets, so we could see a rash of 
Nick Leeson-type scandals as these fearless young speculators throw caution 
to the winds and play double or quits with your pension funds.

I HAD the misfortune of working with a group of actors who were partial to 
the weed - not, I hasten to add, in High Road.

They were a pleasant enough bunch, but they had a habit of bursting into 
laughter for no apparent reason.

Rehearsals were quite amusing and I was impressed by their lack of 
opening-night nerves, but their performances were rather lacklustre.

One young actress was so laid-back that she could not be heard beyond the 
second row of the stalls. It was not until I discovered them sharing a 
rather large cigarette a few hours before curtain-up, that the reason for 
their sang-froid became apparent.

I think I would rather take my chances with a drunk on stage. At least 
drunks try to cover up the fact that they have had a few too many.

One such gentleman was quite brilliant in a comedy sketch in a show in 
which I was appearing at a Glasgow theatre which shall remain nameless for 
obvious reasons.

When the time came for the curtain call, the actor in question failed to 
appear. A stage-hand was dispatched to the actor's dressing-room, where he 
found him slumped unconscious on the floor. Fearing the worst, he phoned 
for an ambulance. Before it arrived, I dissolved couple of soluble aspirins 
in a glass and attempted to force the liquid down the throat of the 
comatose actor.

When one of the other actors asked me what I was doing, I told him it was a 
precaution against a heart attack. 'Heart attack?" he said, 'The man's 
steamin'."

He went on to explain that they had demolished the contents of a bottle of 
brandy during the course of the evening; Needless to say we kept this 
information from the theatre's manager, who was so concerned about the 
actor that he paid for a taxi to take him home after the paramedics had 
given him the all-clear.

It was not until the following day when one of the cleaning ladies found 
the empty brandy bottle and six empty cans of lager in the actor's 
waste-basket that the manager discovered the real reason for the thespians 
collapse.

He duly parcelled the empties and posted them to the offending actor's home 
with a rather terse note. The actor wrote hack explaining that the empties 
had accumulated over the period of the three-week run of the show.

The manager sent him a receipt from the local off-licence for a bottle of 
brandy and six cans of lager, dated the day of his fall from grace, which 
the cleaning lady had found in the waste-basket along with the empties. 
Correspondence ceased forthwith. 
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart