HIGH TIME

"Thank God It's Friday"

Professor Ken Ramchand deserves special recognition for being both caring
and courageous enough to admit to having smoked marijuana as part of his
recommendation to the Senate that possession of the drug for medicinal
purposes be decriminalised; I just can't decide whether he should get the
Trinity Cross or a big fat Bob Marley spliff.

Now, because I will shortly be taking the piss out of the rest of our
Members of Parliament, I want to say three serious things unequivocally.

First, Senator Ramchand ought to be congratulated for his statesmanship. It
could not have been easy to take a daring or any stand against the common
hypocrisy of so many of the elite groups to which he belongs: the
university; the Upper House; the upper class; the upper caste. (He is not,
however, the first Trinidadian social leader to do so; that honour belongs
to Emile Elias, who has a clearer view of the big picture and who,
accordingly, espouses the legalisation of all currently illegal drugs.)

Anyone with any knowledge of Prohibition (and without a vested interest)
can see that the illegal drug trade is destroying civil society in our part
of the world. Sooner or later, we will have to legalise all. If it were not
for the disproportionate economic strength of the two groups who alone
derive their livelihood from illegal drugs--drug dealers and drug
legislation enforcement agency employees--we would have decriminalised
marijuana long ago.

Second, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a marijuana smoker; it is an
annoying denial. You don''t have to proclaim your heterosexuality, for
example, to argue that the one group ignored by Clause 7 of the equal
opportunity legislation (homosexuals) is the only one that needs its
protection. Of course, like most people I know, I took a toke in my youth.
(Again, it pisses me off that I should have to stipulate that I did so in
another country and while still a juvenile but the last thing I want is
some idle police officer, who ought to be arresting criminals, not pleasing
the political executive, coming to my house with a search warrant and an
attitude. Luckily, I know I could pass a drug test without studying for it;
or cheating.)

When I was 14, my father did me the good negative favour of convincing
himself that I was smoking marijuana. Just to deny him the satisfaction of
being right, I never tried ganja until shortly before my 18th birthday. At
that relatively clear-headed age, I assessed the experience immediately as
being unworthy of the trouble; particularly when there was beer in the
fridge.

Maybe it was down to the horrible stuff the English call weed but I found
the high distinctly unpleasant. It made me first intensely stupid and then
unavoidably sleepy. (It took years and the patient explanation of many
collie-loving friends for me to understand that this was what the high
was.)

Third, in the particular case of Trinidad and Tobago, illegal marijuana
guarantees a violent bandit-training school instead of a penal system. We
do not reform criminals in our jails; we form them. A teenage boy takes a
pull, like many of the other boys in his class at school, but a policeman
happens to stumble upon him. He becomes a criminal for a roach, the only
qualification you need to enter our criminal school and class.

Young lives are being ruined in Trinidad every day for the equivalent of
the dregs of a bottle of beer. If Trinidad and Tobago were a business, the
lowest level manager would have realised ages ago how destructive such a
small, unimportant part of the process was, and would have peremptorily
changed it.

About one in 20 people I know are regular ganja smokers and they include
lawyers, doctors, engineers, priests, teachers, taxi-drivers, musicians,
policemen, politicians and a surprising number of highly successful
business people; and, as I write that, it strikes me that five per cent of
anything is simply too large a group to ignore, far less well-paid people:
market forces alone will lead to legalisation.

Whenever it happens, the generation following will be puzzled that it was
ever illegal. It will be like telephones in ten or 15 years, which will all
be cellular, and will make difficult to explain to the everyday young user
that phones were once tied to buildings. Perplexed children will want
explanations why the harmless, indeed beneficial, marijuana/cellphone was
deemed illegal/anti-social.

They will be staggered that cancer-causing tobacco companies were allowed
to sponsor important sports events while medicinal marijuana sent its user
to prison.

Until that time though, which of our Parliamentarians would you bet your
own money have not smoked marijuana? If studious, conservative, respectable
and intelligent Ken Ramchand used to pull deep, the rest of them could have
been dealers. From the looks of their waistlines, most of them have had a
serious case of the Munchies for several decades; and from the quality of
their contributions to the debates, most of them have been dazed for even
longer. Of course, it could be that none of them has ever taken even a
single pull; but I would quicker bet on Panama to whip Argentina ten-nil in
overtime in Buenos Aires.