Yes and in the supermarket the other day an old man asked me if stoned olives were the same as unstoned ones Well they
Yes, and in the supermarket the other day an old man asked me if stoned olives were the same as unstoned ones Well, they were probably not hallucinogenic, anyway. Sorry, Miles, I don't mean to make you feel bested - or worsted.. It is surely time to allow people like Clare Short to lead a proper public discussion of such issues.Finally, it is wonderful Miles Kington's turn on Voicebox (WS), the series about quirks of language. This week he was talking about the odd way we use words - like mean and wicked - to mean their opposite. He was challenged by a reader to find a word that still meant the same when prefixed by un-.
Defeated, he was told that the word was loosen, which means the same as unloosen. They were the very few lucky ones.R5 has also been Taking Drugs Seriously. In this fine series, Marianne Henry is tackling the whole murky business clearly and cleverly. In previous weeks we have heard about the failure of prescribed methadone as therapy, about the alarming increase in crack addiction across all ages and classes, and about the plight of MS and cerebral palsy patients whose suffering would be relieved if they were only allowed can-nabis.
Acquiring it illegally leads to random punishments depending on local practice: pot luck rules.This week exposed another dangerous anomaly, the abuse of over-the-counter and prescribed drugs. One man had been drinking up to 90 bottles of cough mixture a week, driving to thousands of chemists to buy his poison and, over 15 years, systematically destroying his life. David Prosser's impassioned report argued strongly that we should call these men to task in our own courts for such grisly behaviour, as 12 other Western nations do already. At the time of writing our Government was expressing a different view.