CHANGED TIMES

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.........