h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm glad you're not, but the point of Ben Elton's book is that everyone knows someone who is taking drugs, but says and does nothing.

30+ years ago I said and did nothing as a friend of mine went through heroin addiction. I thought I was helping him by being a friend and being supportive through the hard times. I used to buy the belt buckles and bongs he made out of scrap metal.

If I'd shopped him to the law when he first started on coke, maybe I could still be drinking with him today.

That's a fair point but my experience differs. I lost a friend to heroin last year, but that was an OD, not a slide into addiction.

Pretty much all of my friends smoke, and most of us went through an LSD/mushy/speed phase when we were younger. Most of us used charlie when we couldn't be doing with after effects of the LSD/mushies/speed. Most of us have realised that charlie's overrated and a bit useless, and we've all grown up enough to knock it on the head.

I honestly don't know anyone that's had a problem that hasn't been resolved by their mates having a word and/or changing the environment. I know that makes my mates & I lucky - some people don't have that kind of level headed support.

Drugs are a perfectly natural thing for us to use: the problem is that we use them in unnatural quantities. It's one thing chewing a coca leaf, it's an entirely different matter when it's been refined and you're whacking half a plant up your nose in one line. Unfortunately we've gone so far down the line of prohibition & excess that I doubt we'll return to natural usage - what should be a grey issue is represented as a black and white one (in more ways than one!)

Rambling again - the result of a completely legal hangover!

Could you take your reminiscence, be they good, bad or indifferent, elsewhere please. It was that kind of stuff that got this thread killed off in the first place. Which then broke the chain in the progression of my journal - a thing that I'm both upset and bloody cross about some nine months after the event.