Express & Star

Peter Rhodes: A dopey dope campaign

PETER RHODES on cannabis, composting and political correctness on the telly.

Published

HERE we go again. Yet another attempt to legalise cannabis is headed by the Adam Smith Institute which claims that legalisation is "the only workable solution to the problems of crime and addiction in the UK." I used to believe that. Then I began noticing how often the words "cannabis" and "psychosis" crop up in reports of serious crimes, from rape and murder to terrorism. The dope in circulation today is not the happy wacky-backy of the flower-power 1960s. It is potent, brain-bending stuff. Legalising cannabis to reduce addiction is like legalising napalm to cure arson.

AND while I know, and have known, people who use cannabis. I can't honestly say I know anybody who has ever been improved by cannabis.

BACK to the surgery, this time for a routine ECG. That's the one where the nurse lays you down, fixes sticky terminals to your chest, arms and ankles, switches on the machine and says, dammit, the bloody computer's not working again. After several attempts, she could get no readings. Trying to be helpful, I suggested I might be clinically dead. She said, no, it was definitely the computer. While she fixed it, I was escorted to another room, clutching my clothes and clumping in my unlaced boots.

I WAS transported back 50 years or so to the annual school medical which, for reasons none of us understood, involved undressing down to our underpants and removing our socks, but keeping our shoes on. Thus stripped, we clumped inelegantly into the deputy headmaster's study where a genial old doctor cupped our tackle and told us to look to the left and cough. I assumed we were joining the Freemasons but apparently it was a test for hernia. Again, in a world awash with terrible diseases, no-one ever explained the education authority's alarming fixation on ruptures.

ANYWAY, back in real time, the nurse got the machine working, I was reconnected and produced a heart reading identical to the one I gave 10 years ago, except with a slower pulse of just 54 beats per minute. "Do you go to the gym a lot?" she asked. Oh, how we laughed. I believe it was Churchill who said he got all the exercise he needed walking behind the coffins of friends who had exercised.

IN the TV series entitled It Was Alright in the 1960s/70s/80s (C4) , today's politically-correct celebrities queue up to gasp in well-rehearsed horror at the terribly un-PC humour of 30 or 40 years ago. Benny Hill, thy name is mud. The assumption is that we have now created such a squeaky-clean, inclusive and politically-correct society that we will be immune from such criticism in the future. Wanna bet? Consider, for example, Still Game and Two Doors Down, a pair of current BBC comedies set in Scotland, both based on Scottish folk getting drunk and insulting each other. How is this parade of national stereotypes allowed? Meanwhile, My Mother and Other Strangers (BBC1) tells how a village full of violent, feckless, dishonest and dim Irishmen is knocked into shape by a strong, wise, middle-class English woman. Our grandchildren will blush.

A LADY friend of a certain aged emerged, all smiles and girlishly skittish, from An Evening With Monty Don. Tell me, when did composting become sexy?

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