The relatively small sounds of disapproval when
a candidate for British Conservative leadership said he once sniffed cocaine showed
there has been a change of heart and
mind somewhere. When an Irish politician also admitted having a sniff or two in
his youth that clinched it. Admitting you had dabbled with drugs in your days
of youth used to raise eyebrows and lower expectations of a career in politics.
And yet......
And yet we
had such a friendly , even loving relationship with alcohol, a drug that could
make you pleasantly relaxed, ferociously
intense, sloppily fawning and terribly angry
one after the other all in one evening. No matter how many changes of
mood alcohol pushed us into in quick and sometimes disastrous succession we
seemed to love it dearly. And forgive it a lot. Other drugs got a much less adoring public.
We Oldies remember
the days of innocence when , believe it or not, defence lawyers in Belfast
courts often pleaded : " Your worship, my client greatly regrets what happened
in this assault but regrettably he was under the influence of drink at the
time...." . Because , surprising
but true, magistrates often accepted
this as proof of a defendant's
reduced responsibility. Penalty for being drunk and disorderly reduced or
abandoned. Mid-20th century Belfast
respectability was a curious thing.
One magistrate
however would have none of this. He made it known that if any such plea were
made at his hearings, it would mean increasing the guilt, not excusing it. He
was Mr Charles Stewart, popularly and deservedly known affectionately as Charlie.
No, I did not make this up. Even Belfast had
its soft spots. There was a big whiskey store
opposite St Malachy's Church , the whiskey company complained that the
church bells upset the whiskey ( don't ask why ) and the church people adjusted
the bells accordingly (don't ask how), and , it is said, all was well again. Mutual respect.
Various
accounts have suggested Winston Churchill was fond of a cigar and a drink quite frequently, there was rum for the sailors
sailing in warships , rum for troops about to die. But our tolerance did
not include sniffing cocaine, however long ago and light-headedly it was done. Now it seems a softening of heart has
happened , not towards the drugs, but towards those who followed a fashion and
actually used them in their youth.. Experimenting
perhaps.
On theatre stages
and film screens our heroes and important
villains smoked tobacco and drank a lot.
Theatres handed their audiences printed programmes gratefully acknowledging
" cigarettes supplied by.......".
The tobacco factory supplied Belfast
workers with free gifts of cigarettes
every so often. We were indeed a society in a cloud of unknowing but at least before and after WW2.there was no drug culture
as we know it now.
Then in the nineteen thirties someone invented
Benzedrine.
It was meant
to relieve depression, to be a temporary help for patients and was used that
way. But it was also looked on by some hard-studying students as a help coming up to "exam swotting" or " baking" time. It kept you
awake during the long night hours as you went over papers and books and indices
and things neglected or half forgotten. It did not give you new knowledge or new information of course but it helped
you regain some you had mislaid during a partly wasted year. Especially useful
the night before the written exams. Students who used it had to be cautious though. If they did not
sleep but took more of the medicine afterwards they were asking for trouble. It
was dangerous. Students who could pride themselves on
avoiding the demon drink or the glamorous cig. did not always realise
the risks.
But the
students knew the danger of dependency. Student folklore recommended that after
such a night and day of study, and showing off the result of it, at least 24
hours sleep was required. This gave rise
to the black joke in student magazines
about the one who was in a quandary - nowadays it might be called not a moral,
philosophic or scientific quandary but an existential one : "I
don't know which to do , take a Benzy and go to the hop or take a tablet and go
to sleep..." .
Many
students - and lots of others - had been brought up with a reading diet of adventure
stories in which London's Soho was dotted with opium dens run by nasty men from
China whose clients, some respected and wealthy from the "Home Counties", smoked opium. So it was easy to forget that opium wars were run by London merchants to take control of the opium trade. Propaganda given to us as
children instilled the lesson , "Heavy drugs, however near at hand are really
rather foreign you know."
We learned
to tolerate some things, not others. Burning tobacco and inhaling the smoke did
not bring the fire brigade, it was something you did because everybody else
seemed to be doing it, glamorous ladies on
film screens were allowed long cigarette
holders and short kisses - the Legion of Decency decided how many seconds a
screen kiss could last - but not a screen smoke ! - and the stars seemed to head for the drinks cupboard after every hard day at the office.
Belfast City
Corporation was still discussing whether to bring in Prohibition, because
" It had been such a success in America"!
There was
little student money around. Universities charged fees. Some students had scholarships, some had hopeful parents or relatives
who provided in their wills for payments
of fees for "Nephew..... for as long as he
(there were few women university students until much later) is at
university ". This benevolence of relatives led to some students staying as
long as possible, and even missing out on an exam or two so as to prolong the
benefit. These - and some students who
regularly failed exams were unkindly
known especially among the medical undergraduates as "chronics". It
was unkind but universities kept students
who failed because numbers were important where fees were involved. The picture
changed after the second World War 2 when partly in order to save government
from social upheaval new rules were brought in to extend education, welfare
housing and much else, much of which came under attack decades later from high
conservative politicians. That attack is now becoming fiercer.
Scarface and
James Cagney films we thought just couldn't
really be true. We never believed that drug gang killing would come to our Irish
cities and we would one day realise that Belfast was built on dangerous
foundations anyway - the docks with their asbestos, the tobacco factory, the
match factories with their phosphorous, linen mills full of artificial wetness
for the sake of the product whatever about the workers, the rope works where
the noise of the machines was so loud and piercing that the women workers lost
their hearing and the way Belfast people
talked to each other was shaped for the
rest of their lives.
Now we know
better.
Although of
course we are now being urged to manufacture more bombers and some universities
in the world are researching how much torture is possible for government to
inflict without actually killing a
prisoner.........
