THIS IS A POTTY SITUATION, SURELY?

The sponge space-cake was delicious, as were the filo parcels with ricotta,
basil and bud

IF it's any consolation to the Welsh grandfather sentenced to a year's
imprisonment yesterday for smoking cannabis to relieve his arthritis, at
least this way he'll be guaranteed a regular supply without having to grow
his own. Everyone knows that getting hold of pot in prison is a great deal
easier than, say, finding an assistant in Sainsbury's to direct you to the
organic carrots. "Organic" is the key word here. The 12 healthy marijuana
plants that Inspector Knacker and his boys found when they busted Mr Eric
Mann in his Pembrokeshire attic were prize specimens of bio-dynamic
horticulture - no pesticides, no organic phosphates, no toxins.

Let's hope his suppliers over the next 12 months will be as meticulous about
the quality of their merchandise, though let's face it, most people would be
pushed to tell whether their after dinner spliff had been sprayed with DDT
or fertilised with the well-rotted ordure of last year's Derby winner. I
know I couldn't.

When I talked about the Welsh Connection to my friend Lester Grindspoon
yesterday, his chief concern was that even now Mr Mann was being prescribed
some really dangerous drug to relieve his arthritic symptoms by well-meaning
prison authorities - aspirin for instance.

Sorry, have I mentioned my friend Lester before? His full title is Dr Lester
Grindspoon, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School. We
first became acquainted when I published an account of the extraordinary
effects that smoking cannabis has on my appalling eyesight - I have a
tiresome condition known as RP, retinitis pigmentosa. Professor Grindspoon
immediately sent me a copy of his latest book on cannabis, Marijuana - The
Forbidden Medicine, a sequel to his best-seller Marijuana Reconsidered,
first published in 1977 and recently reissued by Harvard University Press in
their all time classic series.

To describe Professor Grindspoon as being in favour of cannabis is a bit
like calling Michael Schumacher a Sunday motorist. Professor Grindspoon
reckons that in years to come people will regard the first decade of the
next millennium in medical terms as the cannabis decade, in much the same
way as they associate penicillin with the Forties. "They'll call it the
wonder drug, and that's precisely what it is," he told me on the phone from
Massachusetts. "No side-effects; no one's ever died from using cannabis. Do
you know that in the US up to 2,000 people die from aspirin poisoning every
year? Cannabis not only works for RP, glaucoma, MS, arthritis and weight
recovery for Aids victims, but it's absolutely safe."

I said gloomily that I wished he'd been on the radio phone-in I did the
other day. In the blue corner me pro-cannabis; in the red corner a fierce
Glaswegian drugs counsellor who said she could give us 20 case histories of
hardened heroin addicts who had started out smoking pot. "Ah, the gateway
hypothesis," said Professor Grindspoon. "It's never been proved. On the
contrary, they did a survey the other day where they questioned 100 heroin
addicts about the drugs they'd started out taking. Ninety-eight per cent
said coffee, 95 per cent said alcohol, 92 per cent said Coca-Cola. Very few
of them had ever smoked pot."

Two years ago Lester and the then US attorney General Ramsey Clarke made an
11th-hour mercy dash to Kuala Lumpur where an American tourist, Kelly Wiley,
had been found guilty of possessing cannabis and was due to be executed in a
couple of days. The chief prosecutor told Lester cheerfully that he'd
already had 100 Malaysians executed for possession, but hanging his first
American would almost certainly result in a top government job. Lester had
brought with him X-rays of Wiley's arm, which had been injured in an
accident 20 years earlier. The bones had never properly healed, and to
relieve the pain Wiley regularly used cannabis. The judge studied the
X-rays, Wiley got off, the prosecutor never got his top government job.
"Tell your readers, if they're interested they can log on to our website for
all the latest medical information we've collated on the subject," says
Lester. "I'm now working on another book, The Uses of Marijuana, which
spreads the net much wider, illustrating how useful creative artists have
found it in their work."

It suddenly occurs to me that among the sackloads of mail I got following my
dope-smoking piece there was a slim green paperback called Cooking with
Ganja by someone calling himself simply "Eric". Good heavens, could that
possibly be the arthritic grandfather from Pembroke Dock currently detained
at Her Majesty's pleasure? If it is, thanks Eric. The all-in-one sponge
space-cake was delicious; as for the filo parcels with ricotta, basil and
bud - mmm, wonderful. If I were charitable I'd do a Sydney Carton and stand
in for you - heaven knows I broadcast my crime often enough and, what's
more, that my kids supply me - but hang on, was that a knock on the door?