Just say: 'know' :: 10:57 PM :: easyjetsetter

Despite the yummy sunshine, yummy food and the even yummier nanotechnology student from the Dominican Republic that I met and exchanged email addresses with on my trip to Holland, I still don't like Amsterdam.

In my hotel there was a rack of little cards on hooks, presumably for guests to take at their leisure. The cards were three inches by two, and had information on them about things to do around Amsterdam.

Between a card about the Hard Rock Cafe and another on Madame Tussauds, I found this little gem:

Hash & Marihuana: Facts and Tips
Using HASH or WEED can make you happy and relaxed, but there are also risks. Keep this card with you and read the tips on the reverse before use.

It has a picture of a smiling, winking, anthropomorphic joint.

I have a problem with drugs. I really hate them. Most people with a strong moral aversion to drugs feel that way without knowing much about them.

However, I do. I know their names, their effects, the chemistry, the biology and the psychology. I even, roughly, know the street value. And it's that knowledge, and my erstwhile tolerance, that has led me to my position today.

I've watched a classmate over years of heavy weed smoking slow down and lose the spark in his eyes, becoming dull and slow. I've sat with someone through a bad trip on magic mushrooms. I've seem someone lash out in anger because they're paranoid from one too many speed pills. But still, one has to live with others' chocies no?

Until I lost my flat because of someone else's drug-taking. I had known that my roommate did drugs, but I thought of myself as a tolerant person, and of her as a grown up who could manage to keep it out of our house. That was my one demand, because from a simply legal persepctive, I could never be even tenuously linked to drugs if I wanted to stay in the States. On a visa to the US, if there is even a sniff of drugs around your name (and bear in mind the lease was in both our names) they kick you out and bar you from returning for up to ten years. We had had this conversation several times, and she agreed with me.

Then one day, Leslie noticed some brownies on the side and, peckish, ate one. Well, you can guess what kind of brownies they were. Luckily, there was no effect, but I was so angry that my roommate had created a situation in which my friends couldn't trust the food in my house that I told her that if anything like that happened again I would move out.

I came home a few days before Thanksgiving to find my roommate and her friends snorting crushed white powder from a porcelain plate that had been chopped up with a credit card. There was a $20 bill on the table. It was all so cliche and so thoroughly crushing at the same time.

I called a friend to come and pick me up and broke the lease two days later. I lost a very close friend, because she never understood why I felt I had to go. She didn't think it was "that big a deal" that we had agreed on my legal situation and she had broken that agreement twice, and the second time with a class A drug.

I know now that there is a limit to how tolerant I will be, because even if you make relatively simple demands, with good reasons, of people on drugs, they will not be able to stick to them. That's what drugs do to you, they rob you of your mind, and of your will. And I include alcohol abuse in that criteria too.

Of course, you can go ahead and choose to do drugs, and I won't try and persuade you otherwise, that's your choice. But if you're a drug user, I know I can't trust you, and I won't have any more to do with you. That's one of the consequences of your choice. It's my perogative to not want anything to do with people who think it's fun to poison themselves.

And a little jolly, pointing, smiling joint cartoon isn't going to change that.