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Just Say No
Tom Wilson 09.07.04

Meet Cosmin. Cosmin is an advertising executive, and his favourite word is 'product'. He's one of the 4,200 people who've pre-ordered Dacia 's latest model of automobile, the Logan , on the basis of a pixelated photo that he downloaded on his PowerBook laptop. Though he doesn't know it yet, his inability to get hold of an iPod mini mp3 player before its release is soon to be the cause of many anxiety dreams, and will make him genuinely feel like a second class citizen for weeks to come. (The only person to see the inside of Cosmin's bachelor-pad bedroom is his mother, who comes to clean once a week.)

Meet Alex. Alex is a networking specialist and has a ponytail. You can recognise him by the fact that he wears his mobile phone in a little leather holder that clips onto his belt. Next to it you'll see that he's carrying with him a Pocket Leatherman tool with screwdriver, nail-file and mini-saw attachment, though he's never yet had the opportunity to put it to use. (Alex tucks his polo-shirts into his chinos and used to be unhealthily enthusiastic about CB Radio.)

Meet Dave. Dave is a third-year history student. Every Friday night, the people from his floor all come round to his flat and smoke cannabis, staying up rolling joints and listening to Coldplay until the sun rises. Dave spends most of his time having discussions about whose turn it is to go to the shop to buy crisps and chocolate and half a litre of flavoured milk, but he usually ends up going himself. (After equally forgettable discussions, Dave usually falls asleep or plays multi-player games on his PlayStation II.)

What do all these people have in common? They all lead particularly uninteresting lives. Though their existences hardly qualify for consideration as the Aristotelian ‘Good Life', none of them are doing anything immoral. Lou Reed, one-time heroin addict turned sickeningly healthy 62-year old, famously called for the legalisation of drugs ‘to rob them of their glamour'. My suggestion is similar. I propose that we legalise cannabis and let people see exactly the kind of boring individual the drug turns you into.

The situation concerning cannabis (‘weed', ‘ganja', ‘jingle-snuff' etc) in the west and in Romania couldn't be further apart. In the UK cannabis use is so widespread that in many parts of the country it's decidedly difficult to get arrested for possessing the stuff. This policy of reluctant tolerance was formalised in the Brixton area of London , where the police announced that they wouldn't be arresting people for possessing the drug for their own use. Especially in the capital, you're almost as likely to find old ladies smoking cannabis as rude-bwoy Jamaicans. And everyone has friends whose parents or grandparents are regular users. This isn't to encourage the use of the drug. Be warned – this is a substance that makes you fat, lazy, paranoid, and most importantly of all, very, very boring. Trust me; your stoner alter ego makes David Beckham look like a razor-sharp commentator by comparison.

These are facts that often escape the western press. The middle-class, university educated types who form the bulk of our journalists are often slightly older versions of our loveable character Dave. This was particularly in evidence this week, when a study was published suggesting that cannabis might help you see in the dark. The findings were made on the basis of (and this isn't a joke) tests carried out on Moroccan and Jamaican fishermen. Cue many smug articles written with the sniggering naughtiness of a sixth-former who's just discovered a porn magazine in the boys toilets. Like actually smoking the stuff itself, slipping references to your own cannabis use into your writing is a sad indication not having anything of interest to say.

In Romania , by contrast, cannabis is expensive, difficult to purchase and dangerous – getting caught could cost you a 5-year prison stretch. You can be punished simply for being found to have consumed the drug. Levels of education about drugs in general resemble those in America at the time of ‘Reefer Madness' - a 1936 public information film that became a cult hit thanks to its depiction of kids smoking cannabis, going insane and murdering each other. That the Romanian authorities aren't quite as drug-savvy as their western counterparts is hardly surprising, given the fact that before the revolution such subjects were shrouded in mystery. However, police behaviour still often borders on the bizarre, as I discovered myself this weekend at the seaside town of Vama Veche .

At some point in the early morning, I was approached by a gentleman and asked if I knew where he could get some weed. ‘No, man,' I replied (for it's obligatory to use the word ‘man' whenever discussing drugs). ‘But I'll let you know if I find any, man,' I lied (for it's obligatory in such situations not to give the impression that you're one of those ‘squares' whose not ‘hip' to the ‘groovy' world of mind-altering substances.) It was only later that I was reliably informed that my momentary drug-buddy was probably an undercover policeman.

Given the huge problems that Romania has with genuinely life-destroying substances like heroin, surely the police have better things to do than pester a few old hippies? Are there no more pressing things to be done in their War on Drugs? I have it on good authority that this is a technique that's being commonly used to snare youngsters like myself. This may be so. In which case, it's just another reason to ‘just say no'. On the other hand, this could all just be the paranoid mumblings of my drug-addled stoner friends… Drugs are bad, bad things.