DANGER LURKS IN GOING TO POT IN LIFE AND ON STAGE

LAST weekend, the Liberal Democrats called for the legalisation of
cannabis, the downgrading of ecstasy and the end of prison sentences for
the possession of hard drugs.

The sort of woolly thinking behind their stance on drugs is to be expected
from a party which sets such store on the freedom of the individual, but
there are certain freedoms which it is necessary to curtail for the common
good.

I assume that most of the politicians who advocate the legalising of pot
have tried the substance at some stage of their development. Perhaps they
shared a joint or two in a fellow-student's flat while at university and
found the experience to be a bit of a giggle, which the first joint
invariably is, as it usually promotes an uncontrollable urge to laugh.

Strangely enough, this first reaction to the weed rarely occurs again. One
assumes that, having tried it, they dismissed it as a bit of harmless fun
and proceeded to get on with their lives. If so, they had a lucky escape.

LIKE most people of my generation, I can think of several folk who have
destroyed their lives through an over-indulgence in the use of cannabis.

There was the television studio floor manager who got hooked on the stuff
while on holiday in Morocco. She brought enough of the stuff back with her
to ensure that any show on which she worked was an utter shambles as she
sauntered through the chaos of her own creating with a benign smile on her
face, muttering: "Don't worry, man, everything's cool.'

Her boyfriend, a scenery hand at the Abbey Theatre, did not fare any
better. He was sacked about the same time as his stoned mate after a large
flat collapsed on the head of one of Ireland's leading thespians during the
opening night of a new play. He just couldn't be bothered securing the flat.

The trouble with cannabis is that it suppresses our feelings of fear and
discontent, which are probably our two most powerful motivating forces.
Only last week a teenage boy stabbed himself to death with a pair of
scissors in front of his father. He did not intend to commit suicide. His
mind was so scrambled with cannabis that he believed he was immortal and
was just trying to demonstrate this fact to his dad.

There are many less-extreme cases of the mind-bending potential of this
insidious drug which can be every bit as lethal. I remember a habitual
pot-smoking lady telling me that she had crashed her car into the rear of
another vehicle while it was stopped at a red light. When I asked her why
she hadn't braked in time to avoid the collision, she told me she couldn't
be bothered. "Anyway, once you have seen one red light, you've seen them
all," she cackled.

Can you imagine an airline pilot or a train driver in the same frame of mind?

Unfortunately, the police have no way of telling whether a driver is stoned
out of his mind or not, as the scientists have not come up with an
effective detection device for cannabis as they did for alcohol.

Until they do, the police will have to fall back on the old method of
getting suspects to walk the white line. Presumably, if they try to sniff
it up their noses, they'll get done.

ADVOCATES of this particular drug never tire of telling us that it is less
harmful than alcohol and point out that drunks are more prone to violent
behaviour than pot smokers.

Strange, then, that historians have discovered that the Zulu shamans
supplied the warriors who wiped out a British column at Isandlawana and
went on to give Michael Caine a fright at Rorke's Drift with a
specially-cultivated type of cannabis plant which made them feel invincible
and bloodthirsty.

I do not want that particular strain made available to the knife- wielding
thugs who are plaguing our city streets. They're bad enough on Buckfast.

A recent poll indicated that cannabis was the drug of choice among the
financial whiz-kids who run our money markets, so we could see a rash of
Nick Leeson-type scandals as these fearless young speculators throw caution
to the winds and play double or quits with your pension funds.

I HAD the misfortune of working with a group of actors who were partial to
the weed - not, I hasten to add, in High Road.

They were a pleasant enough bunch, but they had a habit of bursting into
laughter for no apparent reason.

Rehearsals were quite amusing and I was impressed by their lack of
opening-night nerves, but their performances were rather lacklustre.

One young actress was so laid-back that she could not be heard beyond the
second row of the stalls. It was not until I discovered them sharing a
rather large cigarette a few hours before curtain-up, that the reason for
their sang-froid became apparent.

I think I would rather take my chances with a drunk on stage. At least
drunks try to cover up the fact that they have had a few too many.

One such gentleman was quite brilliant in a comedy sketch in a show in
which I was appearing at a Glasgow theatre which shall remain nameless for
obvious reasons.

When the time came for the curtain call, the actor in question failed to
appear. A stage-hand was dispatched to the actor's dressing-room, where he
found him slumped unconscious on the floor. Fearing the worst, he phoned
for an ambulance. Before it arrived, I dissolved couple of soluble aspirins
in a glass and attempted to force the liquid down the throat of the
comatose actor.

When one of the other actors asked me what I was doing, I told him it was a
precaution against a heart attack. 'Heart attack?" he said, 'The man's
steamin'."

He went on to explain that they had demolished the contents of a bottle of
brandy during the course of the evening; Needless to say we kept this
information from the theatre's manager, who was so concerned about the
actor that he paid for a taxi to take him home after the paramedics had
given him the all-clear.

It was not until the following day when one of the cleaning ladies found
the empty brandy bottle and six empty cans of lager in the actor's
waste-basket that the manager discovered the real reason for the thespians
collapse.

He duly parcelled the empties and posted them to the offending actor's home
with a rather terse note. The actor wrote hack explaining that the empties
had accumulated over the period of the three-week run of the show.

The manager sent him a receipt from the local off-licence for a bottle of
brandy and six cans of lager, dated the day of his fall from grace, which
the cleaning lady had found in the waste-basket along with the empties.
Correspondence ceased forthwith.