In September, I witnessed the undeniable psychedelic pleasures of watching Tame Impala play to thousands of lightly toasted millennials in Victoria Park. It was a fitting farewell to the first summer in three you could do this sort of thing, oddly moving in its own abstract way. Lasers dusted the night sky. Beats pulsed against the trees. Women in their boyfriends’ Aries bucket hats swayed on shoulders. Love was in the air, as was that another inescapable element of our city — the smell of weed.
This week there have been whispers that the Government’s new Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, would like to upgrade cannabis to a Class-A drug. Amid stiff competition, Braverman is becoming the most emblematically loveless of a Cabinet demarked during its catastrophic first month by its absence of compassion. Her views are light years behind what is happening on the ground, archaic enough to make Jacob Rees-Mogg look like Rihanna.
You don’t have to go to a gig specifically crafted for the cosmically curious to guess how much pot is being smoked in London.
Yesterday, I caught a whiff of weed behind someone with a vape pen outside Holborn Tube station; then a uniformed kitchen porter, clearly still in service, puffing in the back doorway of a fancy West End restaurant; then several more on the Regent’s Canal towpath. Entire generations have watched the mess alcohol made of their parents and grandparents’ finances, relationships, health and ambitions. They looked elsewhere for their kicks. Who can blame them?
The borderline insane idea of upgrading weed to a Class A drug projects unforgivingly onto the world stage. It would mean total wastage of police resources, making London look like the fusty old maiden aunt of New York and LA, where cannabis is a legal, thriving, taxable 21st century economy. We’ve seen the statistics from Lisbon, where the legalisation of recreational drugs has bestowed positive effects on a modern European capital. Addiction figures dropped, help was properly targeted, job done. If we can smell weed everywhere in London, what does it even mean to call it illegal?
For a Government obsessed with growth, cutting off potential revenue streams feels like another clumsy sidestep in their quick dance toward madness, a blinkered miscomprehension of the Britain they’re actually governing. No other ministers have joined Braverman’s draconian voice of doom, making her uniquely anti-growth coalition a weak subset of one.
I’m not a pot smoker. Never have been, unlikely to turn into one at this age. That doesn’t mean I don’t want those who are to be able to make that choice for themselves, legally. For London adults to be treated like grown-ups.
Not for the first time that beautiful Victoria Park night, I wondered from a state of total and complete sobriety, why isn’t weed legal? The horse has already bolted. Decriminalising it is the prudent thing to do.
It was while strolling through the beauty counters of Selfridges that a friend noticed an unforeseen new luxury product. “Hot in here, isn’t it?” she noted, while eyeing up a lovely palette of Charlotte Tilbury eyeshadows. “You want to tell your bosses to watch those bills,” she advised the counter assistant.
Switching the heating on has joined the rarity of a semi-functioning set of teeth and the unadorned joy of an in-person GP’s appointment as the height of new luxury Britain. What once would have been considered mere functionalities are now the epicentre of excess. Times change, I suppose.
Status updates humblebragging, turning the central heating on to cope with an autumn chill. Radiators as the new midlife crisis motors. Small talk on astronomic utility bills, delivered with unbothered nerves of steel. A new class has emerged, and it is setting the timer on its combi boiler quick-sticks, just to say it can.
