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| Text to separate 1 | Tick Bite Fever | Text to separate | British As A Second Language |
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Available now from Ebury Press:
British As A Second Language More details here Click here to buy it Also published by Ebury: Dave's highly acclaimed African memoir Tick Bite Fever |
| Legalise Everything - For Fashion's Sake [The Guardian, 1998] MY CYPRESS Hill T-shirt fell apart eventually, from overuse. I was sorry to see it go. It was class stuff, for a promotional item. Quality cotton, in a fetching shade of beige that looked smart under a linen jacket, with a handsome foliage motif printed across the front in an appropriate leaf green. It had been sent to me by the band's record company, and I sported it throughout the summer, until the incident on the train. After that, I wore it only at home, and then with the lights off. The incident was minor and hardly traumatic. All that happened was, as I changed trains at East Croydon, someone leaned out of the window of a departing carriage, shouted - without a flicker of sarcasm - “Nice shirt!” and gave me the thumbs up. I would have felt flattered, if my admirer hadn't been a grinning, tufty-headed cider-punk with more metalwork in his face than St Sebastian had sustained throughout his entire body during a full-blown martyrdom. It wasn't the muted colours that Old Crusty appreciated, it was the pot leaf emblem stamped across my chest. I hadn't really thought about it before then - I just liked the shirt - but I was blatantly advocating the legitimisation of illegal drugs. Something I would happily continue to do to this very day, years later, if it weren't for the kind of company I'd have to keep. The arguments for legalising drugs are many and plausible. A report issued by the House of Lords only a few days ago favours the approval of marijuana for medicinal purposes (possibly just to annoy Tony Blair, that being their Lordships' hobby in these, their numbered days; but probably not.) Recreational substance use is rendered far more dangerous by the absence of safeguards. Ecstasy pills, for instance, come stamped with a wide variety of designs, but a kitemark isn't one of them. At a conservative estimate, over 2,000 deaths in the UK every year are associated with illicit drug use. Druggies also get poor value for money. Price fixing is commonplace; anyone who undercuts the going rate will be promptly grassed up to the police by other dealers. Watchdog has yet to take action on this. Notoriously, the drugs trade - worth an untaxable £5 billion annually across Britain - fosters villainy at every stage of its operation. Research undertaken by the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence for the Home Office attributes anything up to 21 per cent of all Britain's “acquisitive crime” - stealing, cheating, dealing, robbing - to heroin addicts alone; while some divisions of the Metropolitan Police put the figure in their areas, for all drug users, as high as 70 per cent. Muggings, break ins, car thefts, kerbside prostitution, turf war murders - you name it, drugs breed it. Call me a woolly liberal, but I really don't give a shit. Now that my own interest in drugs has flagged to all but zero, it's of no consequence to me if a pair of acne-ridden gonks with socks on their bonces use each other for target practice in Moss Side; or whether some bobtailed mooncalf named Toby can skin up in the street without harassment from the fascist police state (a caution from the local bobby, as we Nazi stooges would call it.) As long as the whole lot of them keep far away from me, they can suit themselves. I'd rather not be burgled by a junkie, and I don't care how the Home Office chooses to stop that happening. Whether it's doling out free heroin with every giro, or attacking prowlers with half-starved Czech Wolfhounds - do whatever you have to, Jack, if it works. Still, I do believe that drugs should no longer be prohibited. And I have very sound reasons for that belief. We should legalise everything for the sake of style. My idea of drug abuse is a tight red top with familiar white curly lettering spelling out the slogan: “Things go better with co caine.” Legalisation would halt this kind of travesty in its tracks. You don't see people walking around with clothing that makes it desperately clear how much they love paracetamol or Pro-Plus or Night Nurse. Here's the sorry truth. Nobody - bar a few maiden aunts in Dorset - cares if you like drugs. Everybody pretends to be outraged, for form's sake, or because they love a good bout of righteous indignation. That's why it's such an easy way to stir up a fuss. But as an act of insurrection, taking drugs ranks with streaking and getting your navel pierced. All three will cause you physical discomfort and make you look absurd, but in the end, the only victim is you. Drug style, though - that's a different matter. We all suffer. Each major drug creates its own style abominations, and the only way to combat this is to remove their spurious outlaw status. When was the last time you heard anyone complain about lager chic? MARIJUANA The major offender. Not only do dope-smokers bang on endlessly about their dreary proclivity, they actually wear clothes made of the stuff. If you want to know who buys hemp schmutter, you need only look at the labels: G.R.E.E.N., High Mountain Hemp, Earth Stuff, Citizen Hemp, Mama Gaia Ecoware and - to its inventor, stoned as a bat, this must have seemed like a stroke of Shavian wit - Hemptation. We're talking, in a very real sense, money for old rope. Hemp is cheap, durable, environmentally friendly and lends you the appearance of an oak-dwelling eco-hobbit. It's been millions of years since we came down from the trees; now a bunch of mud-spattered evolutionary throwbacks want to drag us back up. The only good thing to be said for this crew is that when they're not cuddling the shrubbery, they're usually off somewhere manacled to a Dutch elm or dug in under a proposed bypass route, where it might be kindest to leave them. Far more of a nuisance is your urban doper, who comes in two basic types. The first is concealed somewhere inside a vast, crumpled morass of hip hop clothing, whose chief purpose in its country of origin, the USA, is to confuse potential assassins as to which bit to shoot. The second, often but not always from continental Europe, will favour tight blue jeans and a humorous black T-shirt depicting a hippie smoking a very large spliff. These are the kind of people whose own mothers avoid them at parties. HEROIN The junkie look works wonderfully on camera; hence both Trainspotting and the infamous Heroin Chic episode, kicked off a couple of years back by a series of Calvin Klein adverts. Older readers may also have fond memories of the Heroin Screws You Up campaign in the late 80s. Unfortunately, real scag addicts rarely appear so beautifully wasted. True Heroin Chic is embodied by sallow, cataleptic, monosyllabic, lank-haired, blotchy-faced numbskulls with piss stains down their grubby leather trousers, whose main form of social interaction consists of scratching themselves - qualities which Calvin never quite caught in the photos. Worse yet, heroin doesn't necessarily make you thin. There are just as many fat smackheads as skinny ones. True, if you have the money for high-grade stuff, then it's better than Nivea for banishing wrinkles. Sadly, most dealers do not have their customers' dermatological concerns foremost in their minds. Nor do the customers themselves; in the absence of the real thing, they are often prepared to inject themselves with distilled kaoline-morphine mixture, which has the same effect on the complexion as a facial wash made from Mars Bars. Legalising heroin won't make such individuals go away; in fact it will probably deliver up a whole lot more of them. But no longer will impressionable young innocents be charmed out of their Kickers or their knickers at the very thought of them. And certainly not at the sight of them. ECSTASY AND COCAINE Lumped in together because, when British literary fiction in the 1990s comes to be assessed many years from now, the first thing scholars of the future will conclude is that the entire country was on a mad-for-it, coke-powered, ecstasy-amplified rave expressway to the far side of hell and beyond. The second thing they'll conclude is that British literary fiction in the 1990s was drivel. You can't blame Irvine Welsh, whose best work deals with heroin and alcohol rather than ecstasy and coke - and who, more to the point, writes about people rather than drugs. All the same, the bizarre alliance between literature, fashion, clubbing and the art world - a liaison far more fervently pursued by writers, designers and artists than by clubbers - has led to style repercussions in Cloud Cuckooland (also known as central London.) One of the more grievous results is the garishly hued suit; a fearful, gaudy burlesque on the menswear classic which leaves its victims suitably attired for no environment other than Teletubbieland. But this is merely the culmination of a decade's worth of appalling clobber. Great, fat, boldly-delineated shapes filled with outlandish colours are a constant delight to the coke-sniffing E-head, as they are to toddlers everywhere. For female poppers and snorters, meanwhile, the undersized T shirt battles with the low-cut crop top for ascendancy. While I would never be so foolish as to complain about this, I can't be the only one getting weary of the semi-ironic slogans. I first spotted a “Nice Tits” logo about five years ago; and it seems as if it's the same women, now well into their thirties, who are still wearing this stuff. Nowadays it's “Slut” or “Tart” or some variation thereof, which usually proves to be flagrant false advertising. Only a combination of pills and powders could make anyone think this is still funny. As soon as these substances become freely available in their local Co-op, you can be sure the joke will wear off pretty damn fast. CRACK The following passage is taken from an American newspaper article. It describes how an undercover officer working on a police sting disguises herself as a crack whore: “Ms. Larkin is wearing jeans, a clingy knit T-shirt, and an open chambray shirt. She smears dirt on her clothes, puts tape on her glasses, and tousles her brunette hair to look as stringy as possible. She wears no makeup but pastel lipstick. She carries a remote transmitter, a 9mm Smith & Wesson and a can of pepper mace.” Crack whore chic has yet to catch on in fashionable circles, but it's only a matter of time. We can look forward to the more daring designers incorporating elements of it into their shows. I have especially high hopes for the remote transmitter and the pepper spray. In the meantime, crack remains the only major illegal drug whose users don't see fit to advertise their affinity in some way. Perhaps they will link up with the ever-present Seventies revivalists and take to wearing little silver pipes around their necks. Think about that for a minute, and you'll see that a pre-emptive legalisation of crack is the safest - indeed the only - way forward. LET's not forget the strong counter-arguments against legalisation. It would mean giving in to criminals. Our country would be transformed into a haven for drug abusers from every corner of the planet. Addiction rates would very probably rise. But take a look at the public figures who oppose legalising drugs. Figures like the “drugs czar", Keith Hellawell [chk. spl.], who resembles nothing so much as a hapless minor-league football commentator, or the shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdicombe, who resembles nothing on earth. Such people clearly have a vested interest in the rest of Britain continuing to dress like a pack of delinquent bozos. Next to us, they look good. As long as we persist in banning them, drugs will debase our lives, our culture and above all our fashion sense. Legalise the lot, I say, and criminalise something else instead - at random - to give the prohibitionists something to do. Pork scratchings, say. They probably help kill more people than heroin and crack put together. Then let's see how long it takes for some idiot to run up a line of pork couture. All material on this site is copyrighted © to David Bennun and may not be reprinted or reused without permission. Y'hear? Back to Comment |
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