Shock horror of today’s youth

Marijuana on every street corner, sex on a meagre proposition, getting smashed at every possible opportunity, skipping off work and going to the beach on an impulse. Oh! call me old fashioned but, I miss those days!

In 1967 it would have been inconceivable to propose that forty-four years after the Rolling Stones drugs debacle, we the greying establishment, evolved baby boomers, who like the song says, “are stardust we are golden”, are still criminalising our nation’s youth for smoking a bit of ‘pot.’ First we, then our children, now our grandchildren, are jailed’ or fined and pilloried for smoking cannabis just like our parents and grandparents conspired to do to us. The ‘shock horror’ expressed regularly in the local rag that one of our offspring has been growing cannabis in his back garden all too frequently regurgitates the same hackneyed storyline that has been expressed in the ragamuffin media and articulated in the past by locals for years. The over ripened story is a ready made cash crop passed from generation to generation as a sort of journalist’s annuity. Smoking hash has mutated from a shifty activity into an integral ingredient of contemporary youth culture. Today’s youth are comfortable being in or around this scene however, what may be a revelation is that we in the aged community don’t care! This scenario, as a, news worthy, narrative, has played itself out. Neither I nor any of my pruning face pensioner friends give a monkey nut what young people choose to do to with marijuana in their leisure time. In fact, if pressed, the general consensus is that growing hash at home should be encouraged as this will cut out the wholesale dealers, foreign farmers who grow drugs instead of grain, smugglers who escalate their criminal activities at the sniff of a dollar, the gangs who control the distribution and the petty dealer on the street who sells it indiscriminately. “Hey teacher leave those kids alone.”

ALAN DOUGALL

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