Posts Tagged ‘weed’
Under Pressure
About four months ago I embarked on a course of medication for high blood pressure. For some time I’d been warned that I was marginal with a reading of 140/90 so I decided it was time to start looking after myself. I was a heavy smoker and drinker. My only redeeming factor was that I walk with my dogs every day for about an hour – and that’s vigorous walking, up and down steep hills.
I was started on a calcium antagonist and within a few days I had virtually lost the will to live. I had no energy at all. I’d lost all motivation. In the most degrading epsiode of all, one morning I found myself prostrate on the sofa watching “Homes Under the Hammer”. That’s when I knew it was serious.
I took myself straight off that poison and went back to see my GP. My blood pressure reading was now 168/100. He advised a change to a thiazide diuretic. Being the not so patient patient that I am, I insisted on a full explanation as far as my “O” level science was capable of understanding.
This time it was more subtle. My energy, motivation and enthusiasm was sapped gradually. As my positive life signs went down my thirst rocketed to absurd proportions. After a month or so I was regularly up six times a night with a raging thirst and a full bladder. When I cleaned out the space behind the passenger seat in my car I had two carrier bags full of empty drink bottles.
In the meantime, I gave up smoking. I give the pharmaceutical industry credit for this. A month of patches and a nicotine inhaler weaned me off the evil weed easily. About this I am both pleased and proud. I have at least one “cigarette moment” every day but I am not going back to it. Although I can recognise no physiological benefit at all (if anything I seem to get more breathless now), I am much richer and everything around me is cleaner as a result.
The next visit to my GP saw my pressure reduced to 150/95. Better but not good enough. He advised me to start taking an ACE inhibitor as well as the diuretic.
I researched ACE inhibitors and was horrified at the range of side effects and contraindications. Then, suddenly, coming fast up behind and undertaking me before I knew what was happening (forgive my blushes) I discovered I was impotent. One embarrassing date and then a dawning realisation that nothing was happening, even involuntarily. No more waking up with a big itch!
I’m not ready to give up my sex life just yet. The one and only criticism I have of my GP is that he never warned me of this side effect. I have also cut my drinking by a huge proportion. From a half bottle of whisky upwards a day I am now comfortable with a single glass of wine or a small beer. In the last few weeks my motivation has gone again. I can’t be bothered with long walks with the dogs anymore. Just half an hour out in the mornings and I’m exhausted. I’m not interested in anything. My occasional lunchtime nap has become a necessity. Sometimes, even before midday I feel so exhausted, I just can’t wait to go back to bed.
Four days ago I stopped the diuretic and yesterday I felt like I had got my life back. I have so much more energy. I’m enthusiastic as I can’t remember for months. I fair romped up the hill with the dogs this morning. My thirst is calming down and I was only up twice last night. My mojo isn’t back yet but I can feel a little twitch developing. Come Christmas time I advise you to lock up your daughters once again.
The punch line? My blood pressure is now 170/110. I may be heading for a massive stroke or heart attack any minute but at least I’ll die happy. Despite giving up smoking and decimating my alcohol consumption, my blood pressure is much worse than when I started. So what does that tell me?
I have no idea at all but at least now I have a smile on my face!
Cannabis
God's Herb
I have smoked cannabis since I was 14. There have been a few breaks, some of a few months, some of a year or two but those apart, I have smoked cannabis every day of my life for nearly 40 years.
I have come to regard weed or hash, in all seriousness, as the Rastafarians do, as “God’s herb”. It is a sacrament, a truly positive, honourable and precious thing in my life. Something that I thank God, I did not miss.
I grew up with smokin’ dope. It was a fundamental part of my adolescent culture with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, with a heady summer living the love and peace dream in Amsterdam. LSD blew my mind in those days but a joint was always a sustaining experience. Something I held onto.
As I grew up and got interested in business, I relished the delicious and maverick escape that I enjoyed. I took it seriously and wrote a 40 page report for the Home Affairs Committee entitled “An Unaffordable Prejudice”.
The prejudice, misinformation and sheer nonsense has continued throughout my life. The idiocy of downgrading cannabis to a Class C drug and then, just two years later, back up to Class B is only outdone by the crass stupidity of failing to decriminalise it completely. Prohibition has proved time after time to be an ineffective solution. Worse than that, the law makes a complete ass of itself by sustaining the criminal supply and distribution of a product that is never going to go away.
Regulation is the only viable solution and would provide the framework to care for those very few who may suffer from cannabis use.
What are the dangers? Clearly any intoxicant offers more potential for harm when used by the young, when the brain is still developing. Despite my own experience, cannabis use should be for adults only. In adults it has been proved to be one of the least harmful substances known to man time and time again – despite the fact that most have actually set out to prove the opposite.
Recently the popular argument has been against skunk, a strain of cannabis that can be up to 20 times stronger than that previously known.
To claim this is a recent development is simply wrong. For at least 20 years it has been difficult to buy anything but skunk and other F1/F2 hybrids of the plant. There are many others: Northern Lights, Haze, Blueberry, etc. In my teens it was difficult to buy anything but Lebanese or Moroccan hashish. In Holland where the market is partly regulated there has always been a wide choice of grass or hash from all parts of the world grown and/or processed in many different ways.
The latest suggestion is that skunk is causing psychoses in adolescents – yet the incidence of psychoses in adolescents has remained constant since records began. This is just the lastest scaremongering. 60 years ago it was said that cannabis caused young women to be promiscuous with black men. The standard of the argument has not improved.
It really is time that this hopeless policy against a benign, natural herbal product was stopped. Hemp is one of the most ecologically friendly, sustainable crops in the world. As regulated cannabis it would pull the rug from underneath a great swathe of criminality and produce billions in additional tax income. As biofuel, building materials, fabrics and cattle feed it could help to revitalise agriculture and many other businesses.
Peter Reynolds 