A TV newsreader in Alaska recently quit her job live on air after revealing that she owns a cannabis club and has decided to dedicate herself to promoting the legalisation of the drug. "F*** it," Charlo Greene declared, not exactly in the manner of Edward VIII abdicating the British throne in 1936. "I quit."
That's pot lovers for you. Hand them their own made-for-YouTube Jerry Maguire moment and the best they can come up with is a line that sounds like a 15-year-old turning their back on a career stacking shelves to sit at home, eating Hula Hoops and watching endless reruns of This Is Spinal Tap.
In all the debate about the pros and cons of legalisation, no one ever mentions the one genuinely irrefutable argument against: it makes people dull and lazy. Yes okay, wine – my drug of choice – does too, but it doesn’t smell as bad.
For many places, it's no longer a question of if, but when, marijuana use will be decriminalised. Here in the US, recreational marijuana is already legal in Washington and Colorado, while other US states, including California and Alaska, are likely to follow. On the streets of San Francisco, the smell is so pervasive it's hard to believe it's not already decriminalised.
In Ireland, over half of young people believe it should be regulated, and 28 per cent have used it in the past year, making them the most enthusiastic tokers in Europe, according to two recent surveys.
It’s hard to argue against decriminalisation: cannabis has well-documented pain-relieving effects; it is less harmful to the physical self and society at large than alcohol; recent studies have shown it does little lasting cognitive damage. Most persuasive of all is the argument that points out what a spectacular failure the war on drugs has been. If you need further proof of this, I refer you to the recent stories about the increasingly desperate PSNI issuing the public with “scratch and sniff” cards to help detect the illegal dope plants springing up across the North faster than cut-price German supermarkets.
Weed is so respectable now it hardly seems credible that smoking it could still have you arrested. The list of people who have admitted indulging in an occasional spliff ranges from Barack Obama to Nigella Lawson.
If it ever comes to a referendum, I’ll probably vote in favour of decriminalisation, mainly because I think public money could be much better spent on things other than pursuing people who spend their recreational time in a state of semi-catatonia.
The point of marijuana, unless I’ve missed something, is that it makes you dull, sleepy and slow, less likely to get into fights, less likely to do anything other than sit on a couch, eating pretzel crackers and atrophying in front of YouTube videos.
But I will do so with a heavy heart. Laws shape the kind of society we want to have, and I don’t much want to be part of one where people sit around at dinner parties doing bad Elmo impressions and discussing whether Moroccan squidgy is really better than Mexican haze. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for conversations about the price of hot tubs and two-bedroom apartments in Bulgaria.
What do we want? Universal suffrage for dogs
“Can I have a peek?” The baby was asleep but I didn’t want to be rude, and besides, the woman was already halfway in there, peeling back the UV cover designed to keep the sun rays and flies off my daughter.
“Oh,” she said, and jumped back.
It turned out the woman who stopped us in the street wasn’t passing unfavourable judgment on my child (who has been found in survey after survey of passing strangers to be perfectly cherubic.)
“I thought it was a widdle doggie,” she explained, just a tad reproachfully.
Fair enough. I mean what kind of lunatic wheels an actual human infant around in a pushchair? This is California, after all. The dogs here have their own strollers (yours for $207 on Amazon); beauty salons; diamond accessories; magazines; inflatable pool toys; coffee shops and surf competitions.
From next January, dogs will be legally allowed to join their owners on restaurant patios here. In places where they are not technically allowed – farmers’ markets, chiefly – you see them being ferried around strapped to their owner’s (sorry, human companion’s) chest in a dog sling.
As far as I know, no one has yet suggested giving them the right to vote or allowing them to drive a car, but it’s only a matter of time.
Crossword v Scrabble: the battle of the brains
It’s a question that has perplexed nerds and dope smokers of a more intellectual bent for years. Who is smarter: Scrabble players or crossword buffs?
Finally, we have an answer. A study in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology recruited 26 elite Scrabble players and 31 top crossword pros and got them to complete a range of tests of visuospatial and verbal ability, and working memory. The crossword users performed better in tests of verbal reasoning, but overall there was little difference in cognitive performance between the two groups. Both sets performed significantly better than non-Scrabble players and crossword buffs with similar US exam scores.
So if you look at the word “quixotry” and find yourself thinking “doubt, at heart replaced by rise of mostly harmful, foolish idealism” or even “triple-triple and I can turn that into 365 points”, congratulations. You’re smarter than the rest of us.