Dope.

Like living in Sydney or practising law, the worst thing to cope with when you're smoking dope is the company of others doing the same. Dope smokers, whether because of the dope or natural inclination which leads them to it in the first place, are full of self- delusions, the chief one being that they are vaguely interesting.

No Nick, you are not biased. I see no evidence in your statement that you discriminate against dope smokers in favor of any other kind of self-indulgent, bullshit-ridden, attention-seeking wankers who think the sun shines out of their backsides.

At age 36 I was *!*!*MONUMENTALLY*!*!* bored with who I had become. (On the other hand, I have a pitch-perfect memory...)

my edited version: "dope is an introverted drug that sometimes causes very dull and talentless people to express how very interesting they think they've always thought they were (even before they started smoking dope) but sometimes provides pleasant and interesting experiences to people who are pleasant and interesting in the first place. most serious dope-smokers are basically just as dull and tedious as most people who don't smoke dope, and as with people who don't smoke dope, some of them are not. (the dope-smoking does, however, tend to make the divisions clearer.) serious dope-smokers also tend to be lazy because you have to be sort of lazy in the first place to find a whole lot of time to be on drugs and probably not accomplishing a lot of conventionally productive stuff. since smoking dope changes one's perceptions in slight and often amusing ways, dope smokers tend to be amused by a lot of stuff that's going on in their own heads; if they are dumb people these things they're amused by will be dumb, whereas if they're clever people these things they're amused by will probably be clever. (again, this is basically the same as people who don't smoke dope, only more pronounced.) spending a lot of time smoking dope will also make it difficult to maintain serious emotional relationships with people who don't smoke dope, just as spending a lot of time collecting stamps may make it difficult to maintain serious emotional relationships with people who aren't interested in stamps. a lot of dope-smokers have bad taste in music, as do a lot of people who don't smoke dope. whatever taste in music they do have, it's possible that dope-smokers are listening to that music slightly differently than other people, the same way people who always listen to music in the car are listening to music differently that people who are always listening to music in bed.

If you wake up and roll yourself a joint straight away do you have the same kind of problem as someone who wakes up and pours themself a scotch?

yes. unless you are on vacation, in both cases. pot-smoking is obviously a recreational activity, and it can seriously distract you from accomplishing everyday things. smoking pot all the time will mess with your non-recreational life the same way going bowling all the time will mess with your non-recreational life: you won't get anything done.

Does smoking hideous quantities of dope place you in a state of suspended adolescence or arrested emotional / social development?

see bowling, above: if you spend an inordinate amount of your time doing things that other people don't do, whether it's smoking pot or bowling or reading the NME, you may indeed miss out on a lot of the social and emotional developments you would otherwise have been having. this is particularly true if you're getting high by yourself all the time: doing anything by yourself all the time is socially stunting. alternately, you may wind up following a weird developmental path that's contingent upon being high, a developmental path that's not going to be very helpful when you're not high and trying to deal with not-high things. this is also why people probably shouldn't smoke very much pot until they're close to 20: by that point you've figured out what you mean to do with yourself apart from being high all the time, and are less likely to get carried away and distracted and start framing your whole life around getting high because you have no idea what you actually want to accomplish.

none of the above are reasons why smoking pot in itself is a bad thing. if you're dull and have bad taste and can't find anything better to do with yourself than being high all the time, then pot will leave you dull and with bad taste and doing nothing besides getting high all the time: obviously. but it's silly to create this category of "pot-smoker" and then point out that loads of pot-smokers are idiots: loads of everyone are idiots. there's no reason pot-smoking should be any different. pot-smokers just tend to be idiots of a particular type, so people mentally create this category of "pot-smoker," ignoring the countless people who smoke pot but don't actually fall into that pot-idiot stereotype: "sure they smoke pot, but they're not pot-smokers."

am I PARANOID?????

Hmm, Glastonbury mushroom fudge.

The problem with marijuana is that it can make interesting people less interesting but it certainly makes boring people more talkative. And that's me saying that.

That is to say I rarely buy it. Sometimes myself and a few mates will buy a small enough amount if we're going away somewhere for a weekend, or if we're going out clubbing and want a spliff afterwards, but I don't even bother with that anymore.

I think it has its place on a Sunday night when you have one or two joints between 3 or 4 of us and we talk about whatever happened at the weekend. But when I see people drinking and smoking hash on a night out or something, I think it's stupid.

I've definitely had a few fantastic moments after yoghurts and the like, half hours or so of hysterical laughter with friends. But they're rare. I'd rather do it when I had nothing whatsoever else to do, generally.

Put water/cooking oil in spoon.

Burn hash from lump and break bits off and put them on the spoon in the oil.

Then get a grown up to help you put a lighter under the spoon until the water boils or the oil gets hot and the hash melts into a paste. You look like a heroin addict at this point.

Stir it into a yoghurt, and eat the yoghurt. It takes about an hour to do anything but I've found it doesn't make you sleepy so much as it makes you laugh hysterically. Obviously you need resin.

I feel a fool explaining this, I'm not a stoner, I really amn't.

i.e. it's not an irish thing.

Was it Tom Baker? PLEASE tell me it was Tom Baker... Actually, it would be better if it was Pat Troughton.

Pot- yogurt as yeast infection cure is the funniest thing I've read today, BTW.