My Life as a Drug Runner

[steepholm]

My 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 adopter, unsurprisingly.)

On the other hand, I've not tried it myself.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I blew a little weed in my yoof but that was it.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Just alcohol, me. I didn't find drugs an interesting prospect, generally. On the other hand, I would like to breathe some helium and sound like Mickey Mouse.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Ah! But I never did alcohol.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Wait. You can get nitrous oxide over the counter? We can't even get it for childbirth here!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, £10 for a box of twenty canisters. (Plus a couple of quid for balloons from the party shop over the road.) The boxes advertise them as being for making whipped cream, and presumably someone somewhere uses them for that purpose, but not many caterers would buy them from a head shop, I imagine.

You do have to be eighteen.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, those are available here as well. I was thinking of something more, er, blatant.

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

Blink! I had no idea that anyplace, anywhere had laughing gas on sale and in use as a (semi-)accepted recreational drug!
So now I'm better informed than I was five minutes ago - thank you! That's most interesting to ponder.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Buy it while you can! I believe the ban is coming in later this year - just as my daughter becomes old enough to buy it for herself, no doubt.