slightly off-topic, but: marijuana
...weed, hash, cannabis, skunk, whatever.

They shouldn't spend so much money on fancy ad campaigns or headline-grabbing research in order to dissuade people from smoking too much of the stuff.

They should just make my colleagues tour the schools:

One smoked various grades of weed intermittently for around 15 years and now has regular bouts of time off work while he's sectioned, spending time in what he calls "nut houses" where he reckons about 50% of the patients' psychoses, schizophrenias, paranoias and freakout rolling-eye dementias are weed-related.

One guy desperately wants to escape his polite middle-class upbringing and be a proper Rude Boy and has taken to buying and smoking as much weed as he can from as many sources, that he frequently turns up to work more or less incoherent. He's well on his way to being fired from the only job he's ever had and although he secretly wants a responsible job in the emergency services, if he gets the boot and blows a few years, his health and his inheritance on crap drugs then the job will never be his.

And my nearest colleague, an eight-year weed smoker responsible for several members of staff and a lot of dangerous equipment, has such unpredictable mood swings that conversation with him is always like a slightly more sociable game of Minesweeper. Fortunately his short-term memory is so mashed that fifteen minutes' later he'll have completely forgotten what he was just so angry about...
( sanityclause is waiting until, Tue 25 Mar 2008, 10:12, Reply)