College days remembered
by Steve Grant, Executive Editor of "Time Out"

In the autumn of 1969 I was a research student in the English department of
Manchester University, a late entrant who'd intended to continue his studies at
Hull. Despairing of the loneliness of postgraduate life in a new town, I was
happy to fall in with a crowd of interesting, barbased students, the nucleus
being a fellow English researcher who'd just returned from a creative writing
course at an American university and had been in the same class as reclusive
novelist Thomas Pynchon. Cool.

One evening in his flat in the Fallowfield area, I "turned on" for the first
time. A bunch of us sat around on cushions as the joint was rolled and passes
around. At the time I felt nothing, and couldn't understand why people paid so
much for so little of the stuff: I felt the same way several hours later after
I'd waded through half a dozen chicken biriyanis. The person who brought and
supplied the dope was new to me. He was Ed Straw, and was and is the younger
brother of Jack, then a feisty student leader across the Pennines in Leeds, now
the Home Secretary. He was accompanied by his splendid sister, Sue, a blonde
ringer for Patti Boyd, then beloved of George Harrison and later to marry Eric
Clapton. At the time, Ed was what could be termed "an enthusiastic user",
certainly no pusher, not even a dealer, but someone in London, a notch above the
rest of us on the hipscale, and a guy who could always lay his hands on it, it
seemed. God bless him.

This incident, pleasantly remembered and lost in the narcoleptic mists, has
gnawed at me for some time: ever since such uptight attitudes were assumed by
certainmembers of the Labour cabinet on the subject of decriminilisation;
especially since the news that instead a proper debate on a subject that remains
a fundamental issue of civil liberties, the Government intends to ape the
Americans and appoint a "drugs commissar" aah, those reassuringly English
phrases. Though I make no allegations about Jack Straw's behaviour or beliefs
he had and still has his own agenda the incident does mirror the hypocrisy of
a government that on the one hand celebrates its longhaired past, its love of
Led Zeppelin and the Rollong Stones, a government that invites Noel Gallagher to
No 10 and talks excitedly about its links with the young, and then when it
suits tries to deny its own roots, its own history.

Several people were present on this evening, three with whom I'm still in touch:
one is a company director, another a headmaster, the third a senior lecturer at
a college in an area of Wales not known for its progressive lifestyle.
Unsuprisingly, none of them wants to be involved though all are sympathetic and,
like me, hardly regard a retelling of these subhippy japes of nearly three
decades ago as an act of betrayal.

Of course it may embarrass Jack Straw, may even make him accept that marijuana
is not as alien and unfriendly a substance as his previous pronouncements may
indicate. I'm sure he considers it a trivial issue: people used to think the
same about the laws against homosexuality before their reform, a year before
this incident occurred. Then otherwise law abiding citizens went around scared,
risked disgrace and blackmail; now so many people, from plumbers and milkmen to
local government heads, head teachers and BBC executives, feel very much the
same way.

I expected better from this new government: I expected something honest and
grownup, not the same kind of ill informed, "I didn't inhale" garbage. After
all, we survived, didn't we? Those of us, that is, who haven't been driven mad
by LSD, killed by heroin, or battered, bothered and bewildered by those more
famiiar scourges, alcohol and tobacco. "We can't legalise cannabis: we don't
know its long term effects." But we do know the long term effects of alcohol and
tobacco, so why not ban everything?

Come on, Jack and co, do something positive about the ludicrous state of our
cannabis laws. The drug culture is already with us: in music, on film, in books,
on the stage, on television didn't we all howl with delight as Rab C Nesbitt
got smashed in Amsterdam, or when Eastenders threw a hashcake party? And while
Rizla will tell you that its highly successful, kingsize cigarette papers have
nothing to do with the jointrolling subculture, just ask yourself: do you know
anyone who smokes kingsize, rollup cigaretes?