Wot, no spliff?

Whatever is the world coming to? Telegraph blogs editor Damian Thompson, who lives in Notting Hill, had a predictable moan about this year's Carnival: it's too big, in the wrong place, blacks and whites don't mingle (not with him maybe).

And then he shows how with it and street the new Notting Hill Tories are trying to be by complaining that 'I was struck by the shortage of spliff being smoked today. My theory: the stuff is now so ubiquitous that Carnival-goers no longer get excited about scoring and then being able to smoke it outdoors without being arrested. Call me a fuddy-duddy, but the clean air smelled wrong, like a Catholic church from which incense has been banned by a trendy priest.'

That's him in the picture, by the way. The idiot grin is a dead giveaway.

Smoking the celestial dream

Jimmy Cliff is playing in Finsbury Park later this afternoon as part of the Greater London Authority's Rise festival. One of Boris Johnson's first acts as mayor was to strip the free event of its anti-racist theme, a decision that led to the withdrawal of £60,000 in trade union sponsorship but was greeted with delight by the new BNP London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook.

Of course any multicultural event still carries an implicit anti-racist message and Bojo hasn't invited the BNP to set up a stall - yet - so it's still worth trying to get along. Jimmy Cliff did as much as anyone to bring ska and reggae to an international audience, starring in Perry Henzell's iconic film The Harder They Come, currently revived as a stage musical at the Playhouse Theatre; and there's a huge range of other acts, all free.

I reviewed The Harder They Come before its West End transfer in a piece called 'Guns and Ganja', which you can read here. And if you want to read even more from me about the blessed 'erb, my article 'Smoking the Celestial Dream', from the June/July issue of Red Pepper, is now available in full on their website,

Class B criminals again

Oh dear, as if it wasn’t bad enough that we wasted all those nights damaging our lungs and laughing stupidly on the sofa, now most of my friends and I are Class B criminals again. Actually, most of us are Class A criminals because cannabis isn’t the only drug of choice that we’ve ingested over the years. Apart from anything else, there’s the little matter of magic mushrooms, which got listed alongside crack and heroin the year before last, forcing us all back onto ecstasy and other chemical substitutes for our entheogen experiences.

So now we’re back to where the Wooton Report kicked off in 1969, when its advice to classify cannabis as a class C drug and to make possession a non-arrestable offence went unheeded. Good old Gordon, whose government has set itself the target of getting something wrong at least once a week, has decided to emulate King Harold, formerly of that parish, in ignoring all the expert evidence (not to mention the fact that the number of cannabis consumers has fallen substantially across all age groups since David Blunkett reclassified it as Class C in 2004) and humping it back up to a B drug again.

So that’s up to five years and an unlimited fine for having a spliff, and up to 14 years and an unlimited fine for passing it on. And no excuse if you don’t inhale it yourself: it’s still 14 years for letting someone else do so where you live. (I’ve sent people out the back for the past ten years – can’t stand the smell of smoke in the house – but that doesn’t get me off the hook either.)

I can barely be bothered to marshal the arguments against prohibition and punishment when what you’re dealing with is a public health issue. And it hardly seems worth repeating the obvious point that all this stuff about skunk being so much stronger than the old-style weed is just, well, stuff and nonsense – the extra strength just means people smoke less of it, as they drink less brandy than beer.

I’m curious to know, though, why a Cabinet that was falling over each other not so long ago to say that, yes, they’d smoked a bit when they were younger, but gave up on it without the intervention of the boys in blue, thinks that the best way to deal with kids doing the same today is by criminalising them. Immoral in principle, unworkable in practice: the old adage is as true as ever.

Oh, and by the way, as I once read in Viz, if smoking is so bad for you, why does it cure salmon? Boom, boom!

Guns and ganja

Guns and ganja at the Barbican for The Harder They Come, the Theatre Royal Stratford East’s stage musical version of Perry Henzell’s 1972 film featuring Jimmy Cliff. The guns weren’t real but some of the ganja was. Either that or the Barbican backstage crew can produce some remarkably good sensory effects, with the sweet smell of the sacred ’erb wafting across the audience from the stage.

‘Fifteen minute ganja break,’ announced the Rasta ‘trader’ with the monster spliff at the interval – and at least a few of the audience made their way to the Barbican lakeside to take him up on his suggestion.

The Harder They Come is an exhilarating reggae stomp through the Jamaica of a half-century ago, loosely based around the true story of outlaw anti-hero Ivanhoe ‘Rhygin’ (bad, hot) Martin, who died in a shootout with police in 1948. The original film, by a (white) Jamaican director with an all-Jamaican cast, was the first full-length feature film to be made on the island focusing on the realities of life for its inhabitants; it is widely credited with taking reggae music onto a world stage. The Barbican musical, which runs until 5 April, is blessed with an energetic and talented cast and two of the sweetest, most soulful singers performing in London today, in Rolan Bell as Ivan and Joanna Francis as Elsa, his girlfriend.

There’s no doubt where your sympathies are meant to lie in this tale. Ivan may have shot two policemen but it’s him who’s the hero who’d ‘rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave’, in the words of the song. A Caribbean Robin Hood, give or take a bit of ganja.

But does it glamourise guns, which seems to be a question you are required to answer about any black creative project that features or mentions the things these days?

No more so than (for example) westerns is the obvious answer, a point that the production makes implicitly by screening a particularly bloody Spaghetti western bar fight and shootout during the ganja break.

Coffee pot

It’s not just the ‘smart shops’ that are under threat in Holland. Many of its famous ‘coffee shops’, where the sale and consumption of marijuana has been tolerated since the 1960s, also face closure under a forthcoming smoking ban.

There are at least 3,000 such establishments in Holland, catering for many hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the country each year specifically because of its liberal attitudes on such matters. So they carry a lot more economic and political clout than the smart shops.

One consequence is that Holland’s smoking ban is likely to have more ‘get out clauses’ than the UK one. And some coffee shop proprietors are also looking at moving into the pizza business, with a whole new range of toppings to cater for their particular clientele.