Nice one Zoe

This is a civilized version along the lines of my rabbit rant. See? If journalists can be this sensible in print, the law will catch up one day. Scag's not so bad. If I do it at my own pace I don't have to chuck my guts up.

You were saying Zoe?

DRUGS GOING CHEAP

This week I've been sweating under a heap of abuse over something I wrote about Sainsbury's cherries being, unit for unit, more expensive than E.

I was expecting the complaint to come from Sainsbury's, since I didn't actually work that out, and the odds of my maths being very slightly off were overwhelming. But in fact the complaints were that I "trivialised" drugs.

Two thoughts: first, the person trivialising drugs is surely the one flogging them for 50p each, not the person who read about it in the Daily Mail; second, had I added a bracket (like this, for instance: 50p? For an E? What clearer testament to our declining standards?), then I would have gotten away with it. Instead, I started the week with a drugs shame.


Obviously, the shame would be greater if I had been taking instead of trivialising the drugs, and if I'd then been caught on camera, by the very newspaper I forced an apology out of for the very same offence two months ago, and if I were, I don't know, Kate Moss. Yet I feel very little shame, and I don't think I would if I were her, either. It's terribly easy to make a person feel ashamed of cocaine use the next day, when they're at a low ebb and still have their party clothes on, but leave it a week or more, and you might as well try to make them feel guilty about saying arse in front of an old lady.

Drug use, in fact, holds exactly the same cultural position as swearing - politicians definitely, positively, don't do it, people who work in newspapers do it all the time, but you'd never know it to read the newspapers, and everyone else is pretty neutral on the matter. They might, they might not. The ones who don't might disapprove, but it's rarely the lodestone of a person's moral apparatus.