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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Peter York On Ads: So that's why they call it dope
Peter York The Independent
Sunday 05 Nov 2006 My drugs hell was always hearing people talk about them. Garden-fence gossip in the Seventies, comparing Spanish Old Spot with Lebanese Red. Worse still was the business of drugs tourism - upper-class druggies always loved Afghanistan and all its horrible clothes and products. (They're welcome to go there now and help but, strangely, few do.) And the whole palaver of pastes and pipes and cakes. The smell of it, the taste of it, all so unattractive. But dope never really felt illegal; it just faded into the background as a sort of middle-class staple while other more pharmaceutical things appeared. The feeling was that dope was... organic in its resiny, leafy way, and harmless, like peppermint tea. The other stuff was clearly the bad stuff. Crack made underclass people violent - and in that state they could mug nice people. E killed teenagers in nightclubs and made brains spongiform, which explained why post-boys and couriers seemed so dumb. And heroin, so they said in that useless Eighties government campaign, screws you up and makes you pale; in line with a strand of romantic mythology going back to the Forties and Fifties and glorious outsiders. The man with the Golden Arm. Coke was like champagne initially - money, aspiration, party confidence. But it rolled-out socially, getting cheap in the Nineties. Coke-induced paranoia gave the edge to City boys moving on from intravenous Bolly. But it was boring, and worse, for friends and partners. Living with a cokehead was like living with a crazed conspiracy anorak, as in "you only said that because... " or "I saw you wink at her." And now there's crystal-meth, cutting a swathe through rural America, leaving the Waltons as toothless teens in ditches. They say it's as easy to make as hooch or airline bombs. Dope looked more and more like something for dear old jazzers to self-medicate for arthritis. But this left out its massive diffusion, its turbo-charging, over the years. Dope 2006 is different, worse for brains and behaviour. Don't drive or operate machinery. Skunk means people get muddled, hostile and hopeless in minutes. And the brain-people say it can have long-term effects, slowing reactions, making it harder to learn. Which is why the new campaign for Frank, the government-backed drugs advisory service "for young people, parents and carers concerned about drugs", seems to concentrate on dope and brains. I say seems to because it's so determined to be relevant to the younger viewer that the aesthetic urge and production values have taken over. It's set in a sort of Boots 2020, opening on a giant plasma screen with a Chinese lady in a white coat saying, "Welcome to the Brain Warehouse". Sad teens wander round the pinky-grey merchandise. One is stopped by a crazed assistant who asks him if he's a puker. ("No, I'm all right, mate.") The assistant has a giant mouth, a surgery scar on his head, and he's lit and shot in that clichéd bad-trip way. There are new-model brains with car-like names - The Freak Out Free X50 - an out-of-it black man eating hash cakes and a strung-out brown man in a turban making bad hand signals (Whitehall's requirement for broad ethnic coverage). "The more you mess with cannabis the more it can mess with your mind" seems to be the burden of this period comedy, Chris Morris-ish affair. If you want more cannabis comedy go to www.ukcia.org where committed cannabis anoraks argue over every word on the Frank website and show miniature pictures of hash and weed Peter@ sru.co.uk http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article1956500.ece -- WebBooks Amazing Amazon Store: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/webbooks05
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