Family poisoned by cannabis

I have a close friend who lives with her husband and small children in an end of terrace house. Next door live cannabis smoking - and probably cannabis growing - neighbours. For a whole year now my friend - let's call her Sally for the sake of argument - and her family have been poisoned by cannabis.

Environmental health officers have been called, police have been called. The offenders have been arrested, fined, had equipment confiscated, cautioned and warned. But still the pollution continues.

As Sally says, it would be illegal for her children to be poisoned by cigarette smoke in a public place, yet the authorities seem to be impotent to act to stop them being poisoned by something far worse in their own home.

Sally and her husband have filled in every hole and crack that they can find in the fabric of their house. Their children have a tendancy to asthma but it is made far worse by the effects of the cannabis. The GP confirms this and on many occasions the children have been taken for treatment and received medication.

Frayed tempers, hunger and feeling sick, extreme lethargy - Sally and family all suffer from these side effect of the cannabis poisoning. They notice how well they all feel once they have left their own house and gone out to friends or for a walk in the fresh air. Goodness knows what long-term effect the pollution is having on the small brains of the children.

About six months ago the dog was 'put down' after becoming very ill because it had caught a chill. The dog of course was so much more susceptible to the cannabis fumes. It used to raid the fridge - something it had never done prior to the cannabis problem. It exhibited unusual behaviour which the vet confirmed as being a likely effect of cannabis poisoning. Because it became so distressed when the fumes occurred that Sally put it out in the garden once too often and it got too cold. It's sad they have no dog now, because with their acute sense of smell a dog was the early-warning that the fumes were coming through.

Sally's father came to stay the other day. He got up feeling extremely ill and of course he's been sleeping in the bedroom nearest the neighbours. Sally actually wonders now if she and the family are actually so accustomed to inhaling cannabis that they're becoming desensitised to its presence. That idea in itself is very worrying because if that's so, then they aren't likely to detect low levels of the pollution so well.

There is law that exists in this country to stop people polluting but the environmental health officers don't seem to want to use it. The police don't appear to be able to do much to stop things either. Smoking dope in your own house is apparently not something they can stop.

I'm blogging about this because I'm wondering if Sally is alone. Are there out there hundreds of other families suffering in a similar way? This has been going on for over a year now - simply because there's a large hole into which such anti-social behaviour falls and which means that neither police nor environmental health officers can act effectively. I wonder.

Unfettered growth

I don't know about you but I get very worried about economists who keep telling us that markets must grow in order to have success. Have they not worked out that we live on a sphere with limited resources?

There must come a time, it's just common sense, when we have to stop acquiring, we have to stop growing our aspirations, our belongings, our greed. Because it we don't do it voluntarily eventually it will catch up with us in a most unpleasant way.

I crave the day when a Chancellor of the Exchequer says we must maintain our current levels, we must make do and mend, we must grow the principle of re-use, re-manufacture, and build a truly sustainable and green economy. At the moment government ministers - especially those in favour of plastering the south east with high-density flats - use the word 'sustainability' all over the place with little regard to its true meaning.

They sprinkle they planning-speak proposals with it, while they advocate the building of nasty blocks of bleak housing. These they will built cheaply, not to last, but probably to be reviled and pulled down in an orgy of regeneration and even higher density development in another 30 years.

In a town near me a supermarket chain wants to pull down an enormous building that it only put up about 20 years ago. What for? To build an even bigger retail centre. And the shop - the enormous warehouse that passes for a shop - that is there already contains multiples. Multiples of everything, masses of choices for the same product; thousands - probably millions of lines - of things that none of us really need.

Is that the sort of growth that is really going to ensure that we can sustain our comfortable lifestyle? I very much doubt it.

Re-establishment of Common Sense

One of these days I really must set up the International Campaign for the Re-establishment of Common Sense. It would be applicable to so many areas of life.

Charity shopping - a state of mind

I'm positively addicted to charity shopping in so far that I try to buy everything I need, if I possibly can, in a charity shop. That's second-hand items - things people have worn already or already used. I have a psychological strategy about the whole transaction. I don't look on it as a purchase.

No, I approach it differently and get none of that "have I really spent that much on that?" negativity about it. I get two feel-good moments instead. First I decide what it is I like. Then I give a donation to the charity to coincide with the price ticket on the item and that makes me feel good. Giving freely without strings to a really good cause makes anyone feel a sense of purpose, satisfaction and pleasure.

The second feel-good moment comes when the assistant in the shop gives me the object of my desire, and they give it to me completely free. How generous of them, how nice, and how satisfying that I have the item now in my ownership.

That's two moments of immense pleasure derived from the transaction. I feel doubly good having given a donation to the charity and then to top it all, I receive the item for nothing.

I can thoroughly recommend this strategy. And the wonderful thing about it is that the larger the sum of money involved, the better the feel-good factor!