Loopholes

A couple of years ago, cunning entrepreneurs discovered two legal loopholes in the UK. Because of concerns about rural bespoilment, it’s illegal to erect advertising hoardings in roadside or railside fields; and because of concerns about people enjoying themeselves, it’s illegal to sell hallucinogens.

Said cunning entrepreneurs noticed that respectively, it was legal to stick disused lorry trailers in roadside fields with adverts on the side, and that it was legal to sell magic mushrooms as long as they were fresh. Long car or train journeys rapidly began to feature a great deal of ugly lorry-based advertising; head shops and silly places such as Camden High Street rapidly began to feature a wide range of psychoactive fungi.

One of these developments was an entirely harmless development with no negative consequences and many fun ones. The other indisputably made the countryside look uglier, while its positive aspects were tenuous at best. Guess (well, probably you know already) which one the government passed new laws to prohibit, and which one it was happy to tolerate…

Still, at least we’re not as fucking mentalist as the Indonesians.

5 thoughts on “Loopholes”

The really sad part is the group caught before this guy were fingered in Australia before they went. In other words in order to get the bust the Aussie cops let them go to Indonesia knowing they would face the death penalty.

I took a wistful wander through Camden a couple of days before ‘shrooms were made Class A. You could get mushroom grow-kits at half-price and the shrooms themselves were marked down by between 25% and 75%. In the short-term the law was almost certainly responsible for a sharp increase in psychedelic use.

Despite this, it’s clearly a crap law. Drug prohibition, as a general principle, is irrational. But it’s doubly so when applied to a plant / fungus that grows naturally all over the country. Any culture that finds it necessary to criminalise the natural environment is suffering from a psychosis of some kind.