“You always say your favourite colour is green
I thought you meant the shades of trees and leaves
Now bitter tears have taught me that you mean
The blindness of that emotion which deceives…”
From The Othello Papers by Bachchoo
In my teens there was a lot of cannabis about in my home town Pune and in the rest of India. There was “grass” knows as ganja and cannabis resin known as charas, available in little balls like the excreta of mice under the counter from local paan shops. There was of course the all-Indian traditional bhang, cannabis leaves mixed into a milk drink and served to all and sundry at Holi. I’d love to ask Indian politicians, as a reporter asked Bill Clinton about smoking joints, whether they’ve had a drink of bhang at Holi.
These thoughts are occasioned by the move today in Britain to legalise the growing and sale of cannabis. A commission led by two lady members of the House of Lords and a former Metropolitan police chief have published a report asking Parliament to debate the issue. Very few people are prosecuted in Britain for the possession of small bits of the drug. In one form or other, the “drug” is commonly used by all ranks of British society. I am sure that the authors of the report, Baroness Meacher, Baroness Manningham-Buller and Lord Blair the former police commissioner, are not endorsing the use of cannabis through any personal need, though one can never be certain.
Cannabis is now legal in Holland and in several of the United States of America. Other European countries are debating the idea of decriminalising it. The favourite way of smoking cannabis is to powder or mix it with tobacco and roll it into a “joint”. More than 20 years ago I gave up smoking tobacco and so can’t smoke joints for fear, not of the police, but of being sucked back into nicotine addiction.
Despite the government’s efforts to demonise cigarettes by getting cigarette companies to print dire warnings of cancer and death on the packets, by banning smoking in public places and prohibiting the advertising of cigarettes, there are still over eight million smokers in Britain. Of these 75,000 each year succumb to smoking-related illnesses. On the same day as the report recommending the legalisation of cannabis emerged, the research body called Public Health England urged the government to distribute e-cigarettes, the tobacco-and-tar-free electronic product through doctor’s prescriptions. This, they said, would save lives and save billions of pounds in healthcare for the National Health Service.
This report says that e-cigarettes, which supply the smoking addict with nicotine through an electronically lit robot “cigarette”, free the smoker from tar and other harmful products of cigarette smoke. They expect the users of e-cigarettes, who are being called “vapers” rather than “smokers”, will give up cigarettes completely and gradually give up “vaping” too. Others are sceptical of such an expectation. Vapers, they say, will go back to nursing their nicotine addiction through cigarettes or get addicted to e-cigarettes which will, if the recommendations are accepted, be paid for through the NHS by the tax-payer.
I have observed several friends and loved ones, spread over three generations, attempting to give up smoking through vaping, through chewing nicotine gum, through hypnosis or through a determination to reduce their intake and gradually move to complete renunciation. I haven’t seen any of these methods work. My own surrender of the habit was sudden and absolute. I was probably addicted to cigarettes from about the age of 25 into my late 40s. I smoked 20 to 30 a day.
In the months of spring in certain years I began to suffer from hay fever. One year it was particularly bad and my breathing was severely impaired. I went to my local surgeon to ask for an effective, fast hay fever remedy if such a thing existed. I was seen by a young doctor whose first day it was in the job. Instead of giving me a prescription for anti-histamine or an injection or whatever, she examined me extremely thoroughly and then, while writing down her diagnosis, said I was to go straight to the local hospital and get a lung X-ray.
I must have said, “What for? I know I’ve just got hay fever.”
“I think you’ve got a collapsed lung,” she said.
“What?” I was naturally alarmed. “As in cancer and death?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said and gave me her reference note.
I waited four hours at the hospital for an X-ray and when it was done asked the doctor at the radiology department what she thought.
She said she’d send the results to my local doctor.
“But tell me now. Has my lung collapsed?”
“No,” she said, “You’ve got hay fever.”
I left the hospital and climbed to the top deck of a London bus which would take me to work. I breathed a sigh of relief and reached in my pocket for my packet of fags. As I took a cigarette out, I stopped myself. What the hell was I doing?
I put the cigarette back in the pack and was about to throw it out of the window when a young man sitting next to me said, “What are you doing?”
“Throwing these cigarettes away,” I said.
“Can I have them?” he asked.
“Not good for you,” I said, handing them over, “You could get a collapsed lung.”
He took them and shrugged.
I haven’t touched a cigarette since. I don’t suppose everyone who wants to give up can subject themselves to a shock but the thing to do, as I found out through the first difficult months, is not to “give up” but to say, as you would if you were offered rat’s flesh to eat or sex with a camel, “It’s really not something I do!”
