THE DRUG ADDICT AND THE DANDY

It was a brisk morning in London and a young American man in a nip-waisted denim jacket, skin-tight denim jeans, purple Chelsea boots and an aubergine beaver-skinned hat greeted his friend at the bus stop after arriving from the airport. His friend was sporting black pants, a ripped-up Pogues T-shirt, a black trench with assorted punk buttons applied to it and a floppy black hat. His hair was extremely mod.

“Hey! It’s so good to see you again!” said the jet-lagged dandy.

“Alright mate. You as well!”

“So how is that job you had last time I was here; the one where you were helping out drug addicts? How did it work again?”

“Right. Well what it is was a sort of bureau run by this heroin addict, you see. And his philosophy was that there are lots of people in the world who are doing massive amounts of drugs and it is pretty unreasonable to think that they will stop using completely. So his idea is to teach people how to use drugs responsibly.”

“How does a person use drugs responsibly?” asked the curious American.

“Well let me give you an example. We had this big time corporate guy as a client, you see. Now he did loads of heroin everyday. Well he was running through his money and not doing a very good job running his company, as you can imagine. So, we taught him how to use heroin responsibly. He sat in support groups and my boss gave lessons on how to take just a little bit of heroin to get through the day and if you were really good, you could go without for a day or two. So now this big corporate man right, well now he is running a successful company and still getting a bit of a fix!”

“Wow, so you are teaching the world that it is OK to use hardcore drugs in the workplace?”

“Even better. It is not just hardcore drugs, but we are teaching people how to live life with any sort of drug. Last week we had a group of drug counselors meet with us to learn about drugs and drug habits. Man, they were so dumb. One old bird asked me if you could shoot up marijuana! Where do these people come from? No wonder they can’t help people kick the crack; they are so out of touch. We were really changing the way the world sees drugs. We were shedding new light on the subject of addiction. We were revolutionaries!” The British boy was so elated he nearly flailed his arms into some poor Pakistani woman seated next to him.

“Well all this just sounds so terribly fascinating. I mean in America we would never have such radical ideas, and if we did they certainly would be shunned upon. So why were you using the past tense; what happened?”

“Oh yeah, well the real bummer about the whole thing is that the founder started smoking too much crack and really went off his head. He started getting paranoid and yelling at all of us and changing the locks. So we all quit and he went back to being a junkie.”

“Oh, that’s a crying shame.”

“Yeah, hey mate you got a fag?”

“Sure!”