Stoned In Suburbia is another surprisingly balanced drug doc from the beeb which I caught on rerun a few nights ago. I found it pretty amazing how widespread weed usage is across the British population, and that the speakers came off as favourable characters (Cannabis Granny in particular is very funny).
I've never been very engaged with weed or the culture around it, but the more I find out the more I see it as an incredibly popular and robust cause that I think represents the best hope for the future of ahem, proper psychedelics, particularly shrooms, which most British people would probably rank alongside weed in terms of risk. That the ultimate staid, hidebound institution that is the BBC is now regularly portraying it in a... good? not-entirely-devilish? light is a pretty good development all round IMO.
The psilocybin segment of The Brain doc is good too. I was a bit concerned they'd veer off into zomg!midcontrol!madness! territory, but it's hard to see anything negative in there. The presenter is slightly nervous going in but his elation post-trip is obvious. I'd read the write-up on the BBC website but it didn't convey just how happy the guy evidently was with the experience.
"It was all rather beautiful."
Christ, what next? Might the beeb stop using that hushed tone of abject awe when reporting what pair of shoes the Queen has chosen to wear today? A bit less prostration before the glorious dead of our just and noble wars? Maybe a bit of that skepticism stuff now and then? Hm, well, some honesty about drugs is a start I suppose.
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.