Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Designer Drugs

After my last note, admittedly a bit out of control, I was glad to see The Economist is reading my stuff, and referenced the news item that so enraged me. (cf. The Economist, February 21, 2009, p. 6). That ghastly decapitation certainly deserved wider exposure, although I was a bit disappointed that the magazine didn't zero in on the ludicrous second degree murder charge. Still, the focus of The Economist is,...er....economics, and given the current gloom and despair in the financial world, I can understand where its priority lies. Hell, even Warren Buffet is being buffeted these days. (Thought I'd get that in before it appears in The Wall Street Journal.)

But right now I have another worry.

My eldest son (not my younger one, Mark, who careens down snow hills on two sticks) has found himself in a spot of trouble. He is called Sebastian --Lord Strunsky was much enamoured of Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited -- and is a very successful designer of women's clothes. His emporium in New York is always a hub of activity, mainly because he rather upsets the designer apple cart, and makes clothes that women actually will wear. He also exclusively uses natural fibres -- cotton, wool, linen -- and this apparently makes him a mini-hero to the ecological sensitive. Apparently, however, he went too far, and began putting out dresses, pants and skirts made of hemp.

These outfits were enormously successful, but then the whole thing went south. A frantic phone call from Sebastian brought me into the picture.

A woman had purchased several hemp jumpers. Then, and this is where things went off the rails, the silly thing proceeded to cut them to pieces, roll up the fibres, and sell them as marijuana. She was arrested about a week later, something that doesn't surprise. Hemp fibre is not the psychoactive drug cannabis, something she could have learned in Grade Ten biology if she had actually gone to Grade Ten. (Do they even teach biology these days in America?) So we are dealing with a person here who is not particularly swift, but canny enough to say that she purchased her supplies at Aloysius' store, Real Clothing For Women. Bitch.

Aly had been arrested and charged in turn, with drug trafficking. He had no trouble posting bail, but was clueless when it came to how he was going to answer the charge, and was worried about the possible sentence -- ten years at Rikers.

I made a phone call to a first rate criminal lawyer in New York that I had once saved in a white water rapids incident, and who owed me one. He leapt at the case -- this was drug enforcement gone mad -- and assured me that all would be OK. I was not so sure. Americans have this insane War On Drugs, and strange things can happen. So I am off to New York, and will let you know how all this turns out.

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