[Peter Graham]

This debate has rumbled on for as long as I can remember, but in my view, the reality of the situation is that pot smoking is uncool. Deeply uncool. There's nothing difficult or impressive about it, after all.That doesn't mean it isn't fun, or at least mildly diverting, but by and large the British recreational weed smoker, whether they be feral little scroats of the sort who upset the Daily Mail, students who think they are inventing rebellion or gnarled old hippy burn-outs who are old enough to know better, fall into two unremittingly tedious categories.

The first category consists of the numpties who think that getting caned/stoned/bladdered or whatever is, like, really cool and great, whether it's drink, weed, pills or whatever else. "Like, I was totally cabbaged, yeah? It was, like, really mint." These people just reinforce everything that is depressingly puerile about the British attitude to intoxication. They are not cool, although they generally believe themselves to be.

The second category consists of those who think that smoking weed is somehow a political statement or a religious experience. They are not cool either. If anything, these people are even more dull than the wreckheads, who at least go about life with a modestly positive, albeit vomit-stained and bug-eyed, joie de vivre.

If alcohol and tobacco were dicovered now, they would be banned. But they cannot be banned because they are totally entrenched in society (although ciggies are on their way out, I suspect). But that doesn't make it hypocritical to ban the rest of it.

If it is true that people smoke weed because they like breaking the law and breaking the law is cool, isn't that actually the best argument for keeping weed illegal? Because if we don't, they'll all end up injecting smack or smoking crack instead. Unless we're going to legalise all that poison too.

I suspect that the reality is that it is not breaking the law that is cool, but rather that certain laws are considered to be rather stupid and petty and therefore it is OK to break them. In Britain, you might lump weed smoking in with breaking the speed limit, forgetting to renew your tax disc, not having a TV licence, small-scale defrauding of Her Majesties Revenue and Customs and disobeying licensing laws. The same might be true of other countries, but speaking as a man who has recent first hand experience of how slowly Canadians drive on straight, empty roads, I'm not sure. But that said, Canadian rozzers are so utterly joyless that perhaps it is best not to have any dealings with them for fear of some Dementor-esque sapping of your life force.

So I suspect that legalisation wouldn't really change a thing, at least not over here.

Right. I'm off for a pint. Just the one, mind.

Regards,

Peter