Drugs

Fewer people are smoking cannabis these days, down to 1.4 million from two million, they say. I say, if you believe that, you’re high. Arrests, prosecutions and the issuing of ‘cannabis warnings’ might be down — but then, I’ve seen the police quite deliberately look away from dope smokers on the street. Weed is everywhere. I’m sure of this, because the smell of the city has changed. A decade ago, as I cycled across town, the dominant scent was diesel. There were also wafts of tobacco from the fag-break gang and the odd drift of ground coffee. Ten years later both the cigarettes and the diesel have faded. There’s the cartoonish smell of vaping, but as far as I’m concerned, the smell of London is now cannabis.

Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that I like. There’s a new whiff in town, and it’s a bad one. Weed. The smell of marijuana hangs over LA like an invisible menace. It’s an omnipresent fug. To walk from one end of a street to the other, whether it’s along the chaotic Hollywood Boulevard or the half-gentrified, half-terrifying Broadway in downtown LA, is to risk developing a skunk habit. I swear I almost got high popping out for a bottle of Dr Pepper. It’s such an awful smell.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia rules mankind in a way that renders the masses compliant consumers. The apex of medical mind control in the book is soma: a tranquilliser offering 'a holiday from reality’. Huxley describes how its users' ‘eyes shone (and)...the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles’.  Huxley’s vision was intended as a nightmare but PricewaterhouseCoopers appear to have taken it as an inspiration. Their new report, Workforce of the Future, predicts what the labour market could look like in 2030. As you might expect, automation takes the starring role and a survey of 10,000 workers across the world presents mixed opinions.

The guests at my brother-in-law Rick’s 70th birthday lunch party were distinguished, silver-haired, well heeled. Long before Rick rescued the Rothschild’s giraffe from extinction, and did so many other things for wildlife conservation in Africa, I remember him and his friends in the 1970s. The chap sitting opposite me at table, now big in IT, had once been a hard-core hippie with heavy-lidded eyes like the stoned rabbit in Magic Roundabout. A coffee baron, now discussing ‘aromatic compounds’, once wore a headband, blue-tinted shades and hair down to his bum, and a man who is today a company chairman I picture still in his Afghan fur-trimmed coat, going barefoot.

Repatriated after two months sur le continong, I walked down the sunny high street marvelling at English cheerfulness. A poster in the window of Lloyds bank showed two young chaps hugging joyfully below the words ‘He said yes!’ And a man loitering beneath these newly betrothed I recognised as my great friend Tom. When I think of Tom, I always think of a sentence of Max Beerbohm: ‘None, it is said, of all who revelled with the Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell.’ Tom spotted me from 20 yards away and his expression changed from blandness to incredulity to that look of apology he always gives me as he remembers what happened the last time we broke bread, and the time before that.