My Life as a Drug Runner
May. 12th, 2016 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmMy mother is too infirm to get to the shops by herself, so she often sends me out to buy fags. I'm always a bit embarrassed to do so, and usually manage to slip into conversation with the shop assistant that they aren't for me, that I've never smoked, etc. My inner prude bubbles straight to the surface.
My daughter is still a month or two too young to buy her own Nos at the local head shop, so when there's a party in the offing I usually end up doing it for her. Here, though, I put on my smartest clothes and affect the most confidently middle-class accent I can muster: "A box of your finest laughing gas, please!"
There's a logic to this behaviour, I suppose, though much of it is perversity on my part. Nos kills one or two people per year in the UK, as opposed to around 100,000 killed by smoking. Adjusted for the number of users, you are 5,340 times more likely to die of smoking than of using laughing gas. Naturally, it's laughing gas rather than tobacco that the government is proposing to make illegal.
I also feel affection for Nos because its use as a recreational drug started right here in Bristol, with Sir Humphrey Davy. (S T Coleridge was an early user, unsurprisingly.)
On the other hand, I've not tried it myself.
My daughter is still a month or two too young to buy her own Nos at the local head shop, so when there's a party in the offing I usually end up doing it for her. Here, though, I put on my smartest clothes and affect the most confidently middle-class accent I can muster: "A box of your finest laughing gas, please!"
There's a logic to this behaviour, I suppose, though much of it is perversity on my part. Nos kills one or two people per year in the UK, as opposed to around 100,000 killed by smoking. Adjusted for the number of users, you are 5,340 times more likely to die of smoking than of using laughing gas. Naturally, it's laughing gas rather than tobacco that the government is proposing to make illegal.
I also feel affection for Nos because its use as a recreational drug started right here in Bristol, with Sir Humphrey Davy. (S T Coleridge was an early user, unsurprisingly.)
On the other hand, I've not tried it myself.