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. - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart