Nickie Muir: Dazed and totally confused

Why are legal highs still legal in our country?

I'm spectacularly clueless when it comes to drugs. Many years ago I went round to a boyfriend's house to find his back paddock covered in small seedling containers. He said it was for a new crop.

"What crop requires such babying along?" "Maize" he said. And that was over.

I've either been lucky or dim-witted enough to avoid the tidal rip of the druggy world. Except for that one time I ended up on a small island in the middle of the Buenos Aires Delta with a bunch of coke heads and Katherine Mansfield's short stories as sole reading material.

Some work mates had invited me to an Argentine asado and the weekend away in the company bach and added 'don't bother coming if you don't like Charlie.'

Frankly I thought it was a bit mean to be inviting Charlie and then talking about him behind his back to complete strangers and surely he couldn't be that bad. It was only when I went into the kitchen to help out with what I had wrongly assumed to be the frantic chopping of veges and was confronted with vast piles of baby powder on mirrors, it occurred to me that Charlie might not be a person, and that I might be in for an extremely long weekend. And no boat out till Sunday.

The only peer pressure involved in the choice to take drugs, is that those on them make such spectacularly bad company that one is almost forced into drug use in order to relieve the suffering inflicted by people speaking absolute nonsense at high volume and triple speed.

Katherine and I partied hard on a day bed in the midst and as I read, I listened to the 'I'm gonna quit any day soon' yahdaya that triggered a downer which set off another round with Charlie.

It was the most tedious 48 hours of my life. Lets just say I'm no expert on drugs. So I asked someone who is.

He trawled around the chemical playgrounds of South America and Europe in the 80s. From mushrooms to paco he danced with them all and like most seductive relationships that are just bad for you he escaped with his head intact and only his liver and pockets shot to bits.

Considering the alternatives: Aids, liver cancer, psychosis and or death, he got off pretty lightly.

"What is this artificial cannabis stuff like?" I asked. "It's the worst $%@* I've ever had." He said. "I only tried it because I heard my son's friends talking about it and wanted to know how bad it was and - if it's legal ... probably no worse than a fruit smoothie. Wrong! It was the worst trip of my life. I thought I was going insane. The ceiling was trying to crush me! It lasted for days. I didn't want to leave the house and then the first thing I wanted to do when I did, was go buy more and not come home. I didn't come right for months. God knows what it does to kids' heads. Why the hell is that stuff legal in this country?" he asked.

"Dunno."

Still clueless - after all these years.