Second opinion

PEOPLE are easily led, but only to evil: they are never led easily to virtue, good taste or refined pleasures. When a man says he is easily led, therefore, you may be sure he is about to excuse his vulgarity, his ignorance or his ill-conduct.

So when I asked the 20-year-old daughter of a professor of archaeology why she had become a stripper at the age of 16, I knew the answer in advance: because she was easily led.

'But what actually happened?' I asked, eager as ever to descend from the heights of philosophical generality to the depths of trivial particularity.

'I was standing outside a club called the Golden Pheasant when this girl came out and told me how I could become a stripper.'

I had a suspicion that it was no accident — as the Marxists used to say — that she was standing outside a club called the Golden Pheasant, but I let it pass.

'Did she kidnap you? Did she tic you up, drag you inside and force you to strip in front of audiences?'

'No.'

It is one of the great truths of existence that one thing leads to another, and before long she was smoking crack, as well as what is known colloquially as brown and weed. Crack, Brown and

Weed: at her age, I should have thought they were a firm of solicitors.

She was an intelligent young woman who had succumbed early to the tawdry, rotting glitter of popular culture. I asked her whether she had been any good at school.

`Until I was 15.'

`What happened then?'

`It started to go downhill.'

'What did, you or the school?'

'Me — and the school.'

'And then you started to take drugs?' 'They were everywhere.'

In the bed next to hers was a young woman whose three children had not seen their father for four years.

'Why not?' I asked.

`He used to get me on the bed until I was blue all over.'

`With his hands round your throat?' 'Yeah, of course.'

Of course: silly of me to ask. What else are hands and throats for?

moved on to the question of why the patient had called the ward sister a fing cow. 'I'm coming down off the weed, that's why.'

'I don't see how that makes the ward sister a f—ing cow,' I said.

'I mean, what else can you expect? I haven't had nothing to smoke since yesterday afternoon.'

'Do you take other drugs?' I asked, having given up on my former question. 'I'm not into hard shit or nothing like that, I just take a spliff when I feel like it.' 'And when is that?'

'24 out of 24,' she replied.

'And are you going to give up?' 'I'll have to, won't I?'

'Why?'

"Cause I can't f—ing afford it no more. The electricity's on my back, the gas has gone, my dealer's after me.'

That afternoon, I went from the hospital to the prison. My first patient was what is known as a smackhead. He said he was in for possession.

'With intent to supply?' I asked. 'Of course not.'

'Why of course?'

"Cause if I was a dealer, I wouldn't be in here, would IT 'Where would you be?'

'In the South of France, or somewhere like that.'

Theodore Dalrymple