I WILL be candid with you, readers: sometimes I feel out of the swim of things. Modern pop groups, celebrities, television programmes: I know little of them.
Into that category also comes drugs. I’m not going to be holier than thou here. Were someone to approach me and say: “With this pill, you will feel happy and your nose will shrink to an acceptable size,, I’d reply with no hesitation: “I’ll take ten packets, please. Don’t bother wrapping them.”
But I don’t know anything about drugs. At times, if you read the public prints, we seem surrounded by drugs. But, unless I’ve missed a secret aisle at Lord Sainsbury the grocer’s, I’d have no idea how to get them. Is there an application form at the Post Office? Do you just knock doors until someone says: “Oh yes, I’ve plenty of these. How many do you want, big nose?”
And yet everyone else seems able to get them, in the same way I suspect that everyone else except me gets a government grant allowing them to afford holidays.
It says here that you can buy poppers – the drugs under advisement in today’s thesis – on the internet. Well, I have an internet and I’ve never seen them advertised there. Anyway, after a previous bad experience with an unguent supposed to aesthetically enhance one’s private parts, I’m unlikely to buy from that source again. To this day, I am still unable to stand beside other men at the urinals.
Enough micturition, let us consider the case of Crispin Blunt, a Tory MP who this week, during a Westminster debate on psychoactive substances, came out – as a user of poppers.
These so-called “party drugs” apparently increase one’s sense of joy but the other problem with poppers, properly known as alkyl nitrites, is that they enhance, you know, wotsit – don’t make me say it, oh all right – sexual pleasure.
This cannot be correct. We are talking about public members, so to say, inhaling stimulants which facilitate commotion in their nether constituencies. Now, when Hansard records that the member rose, we cannot be clear what they mean.
Perhaps it’s a sign of progress that a gay Tory MP can stand up in yonder Hoose o’ Commons and say he’s opposed to banning the sale of an apparently popular stimulant.
Certainly, this could never have happened back in the 1950s. I cannot imagine Sir Anthony Eden telling the Flannel Trousers and Associated Habiliments Committee: “I say, would you excuse me a moment, for I am about to inhale some poppers from a bottle?”
MP at a cabinet meeting: “We need to do something about the underlying rate of inflation, ken?”
Sir Harold Macmillan: “Never mind that. I have in my hands the most marvellous disc recorded phonographically by Mr William Haley and some Comets. Let us be jolly and dance.”
Fair enough, no one’s talking about taking them at the Commons, but at less outré venues such as discotheques and raves. And, of course, there are drugs and drugs. Take alcohol, for instance. No, not now, madam. At least wait till the bottom of the page. In the world of politics, Sir Winston Churchill didn’t get where he was yesterday without ingesting vast vats of sherry daily. But drink is different. It makes you handsome and more interesting. I know, I’ve tried it. The subsequent court appearance remains fresh in my memory.
Mr Blunt has spoken bravely before the bar of public opinion, but other voices warn that poppers are potentially harmful, particularly to people with heart problems. I confess I possess few scoobies and am uncharacteristically out of my depth here.
To be sure, the vote on a Labour amendment exempting poppers from a list of banned substances was lost by 309 votes to 228, so there’s a fair body of opinion tolerant of the drug, which I learn comes in liquid form and is sniffed out of bottles. I just got an image of me making a mess of that.
The point I’m making is that all of this indicates how much society has changed. You say: “Of course, society has changed, you massive-conked berk. That’s what societies do. They change, ken?” Oh, I ken, I ken. All the same, surely society should make more effort to take the rest of us with it, perhaps with an illustrated newsletter or bulletin telling us of the latest developments in drugs and sexual pleasure.
And no, madam, I do not mean the Daily Mail.
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