DRUG CULTURE

I was on the very horns of a dilemma.

There were two huge queues at the airport, the ends of which were so
far away from the check-in desks that I couldn't see which queue
belonged to which destination. Queue one: the 18-25 crowd with their
designer sportswear, high-ticket trainers, and portable stereos the
size of a two-seater couch, blasting out the sounds of "Ibiza '99".
Queue two: couples, no kids, sportswear at the leisure (rather than
the active) end of the scale, age group 45-plus. Too old for one, too
young for the other.

Who was I kidding?

I snuck into the back of queue two.

Queue one was bound for a well-known Mediterranean
fleshpot.

The queue two dwellers, on their way to an island paradise in the
Indian Ocean, were not keen. "I've heard", said one of my new
companions confidentially, "that the people who go to those places
spend the entire time off their heads on drugs". "How else", agreed
another, "could they cope with listening to that music for a
fortnight?" Perish the thought, ladies!

We were in the bar when the flight was called, and hands delved into
bags for travel-sickness tablets.

Market-leaders in funky packaging competed on the table tops. People
swapped, borrowed, took two, and downed their preparations with the
remains of stiff drinks. "You're not really suppossed to mix those
things with alcohol", I suggested to no-one in particular. I was
saving my stash for the boat journey, 12 hours hence when, I reckoned,
I would really need them. I fingered the re-sealable freezer bag in my
hand luggage that held the collection of medicaments I have been
bringing with me on holiday for years.

I could have stocked a small pharmacy with my pills and
potions.

Except that I would have had to be in charge of the dispensary. Most
of my little cure-alls are in the wrong packaging. Everything that had
been in a glass bottle is now in a plastic bottle, and all bulky
packaging, including contraindication leaflets, has been binned. This
could pose a few problems for the uninitiated. For example, the
product I use to treat diarrhoea is in an old shampoo bottle--rinsed
out, of course.

Come to think of it, my treatment has a higher proportion of an
addictive compound than is deemed safe nowadays.

My travel-sickness tablets were taken off the market at least 20 years
ago. Since their original packaging disintegrated, I keep them in a
little plastic bag that used to contain spare buttons.

The labelled bottle that claims to hold a cholesterol-lowering product
actually holds two different kinds of painkiller. I began to feel a
little uneasy.

What would I say if asked the perfectly sensible question "and where
did this little lot come from, madam?"

It wasn't hard to figure out. My grandmother had a chemist's shop
(pharmacy) in a seaside resort.

Her speciality was holidays.

She kept everything from the latest lipstick shades to cures for
Donegal diarrhoea. When the shop was sold in the early 1970s, a
selection of stock was given a new home in a locked room that is still
known in our house as "the poisons' room". A treasure trove of old
pharmacy paraphernalia, useful pharmaceuticals from the time before
use-by dates, and the really exciting stuff--barley sugar, scents and
cosmetics, sunglasses, and flip-flops. Growing up, I believed you
could find a cure for anything in the poisons' room.

Obviously, I still do. It is from there that I have pilfered around
half of my holiday pharmaceuticals. I was carrying enough stuff of
dodgy provenance to get me a hefty jail sentence in most countries, I
thought.

I began to see the benefit of joining the beyond-suspicion older folks
in queue two: "Turn that dreadful music down, young man!"