DIARY
MARY KENNY My views on the smoking of cannabis have generally been neutral, or indiffer- ent. Hash-smokers are bores — even William Burroughs thought that — and the French word stupefiant describes the condition aptly. Yet I am no zealot either for decriminalisation or prosecution. But I did have a very alarming tutorial last weekend from a drugs expert in Dublin about the effects of cannabis. Grainne Kenny is no kin, and her name is pro- nounced Grania, and it is the Irish for Grace. She is an energetic, buxom blonde in her sixties, and she has been working on the drugs problem since the late 1970s. She runs a small organisation called Eurad, an education forum with links in other European countries, though unasso- elated with the European Community. I have been looking at heroin issue, but Grainne thinks that cannabis is in some ways worse than heroin. You urinate heroin out of your system in a matter of hours, she explained. Cannabis, being fat- soluble rather than water-soluble, takes between four and six weeks to leave your body. If you smoke hash occasionally at weekends, you are never drug-free. And cannabis is ten to twenty times stronger than the tobacco with which it is smoked: it contains 2,000 chemicals and can lead to cancer of the tongue, mouth, throat and lungs, to chromosome damage and to the early onset of senility. Grainne showed me slides of the brains of cannabis smokers — their vessels and synaptic clefts darkened and broken — in contrast to the clear brains of non-smok- ers. 'And these fellas were smoking very mild stuff — about 2 per cent, which is what the Beatles were smoking in the 1960s. You couldn't buy it today.' Dutch skunk (a cannabis much favoured today) is apparently 40 per cent narcotic and stronger than a hit of heroin. It is widely used as 'the gateway drug' to all the oth- ers. I am still not sure of the political answer to the regulation of cannabis. I would favour a genuinely independent- minded Royal Commission to consider it. But I certainly felt I had been given an arresting health education lesson.
The link between drugs and sex is obvi- ous to anyone who has ever been plastered and woken up in a strange bed without the slightest clue as to how they got there. One of the reasons why the Pill and other forms of contraception fail youngsters is that we live in a very druggy (and under- age drinky) culture, and children are vet- erans of intoxicants by the time they are 14. Then sex education is imparted as though it were a function of the rational mind, whereas sexual arousal, even if not experienced when stoned, is a function of a rush of irrational feeling. There is even a correlation between dumbing down and sexual activity. As the Yiddish expression puts it (literal translation): 'When stands up the cock, then falls down the brain.' If Tony Blair is amazed and shocked that girls of 12 are becoming mothers, and boys of 14 are getting to be fathers, after copy- ing what they see in sex-education lessons, he is a naive man indeed. It is as clear as the nose on your face that if you have a vulgarised mass culture which markets brash sex to very young girls and boys (see the mags for lads and lasses), endorsed by permissive-social liberals who think girls of 11 should be routinely given condoms anyhow, it all follows. Poor Victoria Gillick tried to uphold the age of consent back in 1985 and was crucified for her pains, led by the ghastly army of agony aunts, who have a demonic influence. If Tony Blair desires his people to have a `new moral purpose', then he needs to `empower' parents, as the phrase goes. But parents have been disempowered by suc- cessive government regulations — the Gillick ruling, the guidelines on smacking — and they are now totally without the confidence to control and supervise their young.
Iblame the decline of moral authority on the Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Hol- loway, an absolute stinker when it comes to upholding any moral values. His latest line is that 'adultery is natural', with the impli- cation that this makes it okay, then. As Princess Anne, a far superior moral theolo- gian, has put it: 'I thought human nature was what we were put on this earth to rise above.' I know being a Protestant means making it up as you go along — no central teaching authority, no Pope — but doesn't there come a time when a clergyman is deemed to have affronted what he is sup- posed to defend and should be reprimand- ed, if not unfrocked?
Iheard an Ulster Protestant phone home to Belfast from Dublin's Connolly Station the other day. I could tell he was a Loyalist by the cut of him, but that is not discrimina- tion, it's just description. He just couldn't bring himself to say 'Connolly Station', invoking the old Bolshevik Sinn Feiner after whom it is named. 'I'm at the Central Station in Dublin,' he told his kinfolk. I can identify: I remember thinking once that I couldn't bring myself to live on Cromwell Road, and the French have similar difficul- ties with Waterloo Station. Yet I like places being called after people and battles: it adds colour and narrative to city life. There is much more of a story behind 'Connolly Station' than 'Central Station'. Cromwell Road, too.
The BBC's word for able-bodied people is now 'non-disabled people'. I merely observe; comment is otiose.
Dcan Martin, the late crooner, is enjoying a revival: a re-release of his song `Sway' and a re-issued CD, The Very Best of Dean Martin have appeared in the popular charts. A great singer, like a great novelist, creates his own world: there is a recognis- able Dean Martin (born Dino Crochetti) universe. It is insouciant, romantic, soft- Italian, without the acid edge of Sinatra. Martin's backing arrangements can be banal, but his voice and songs are pleasing and even witty. He is by no means in the same category as Presley, but then Elvis had the advantage of obviously being black. Anyhow, Dino's chart-toppers are just fly- ing out of the music-shop in Deal, Kent, where I live at weekends. 'It's probably a gay thing,' says my husband. In Deal, any- thing artistic usually is.
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