URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n102/a07.html
Newshawk: UK Cannabis Information Website <" target=win2http://www.ukcia.org>
Pubdate: Mon, 21 Jan 2002
Source: Times, The (UK)
Copyright: 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd
Contact: letters@the-times.co.uk
Website: http://www.the-times.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/454
Author: Magnus Linklater

SUNDAY JOINT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN FOR THE MATRONS OF MORNINGSIDE

You could hear the hiss of intaken breath the length of Morningside Drive. Behind the lace curtains of Murrayfield the lips were pursed.

At James Gillespie's High School, where Miss Jean Brodie taught the "creme de la creme", they turned their faces to the wall. For sheer vulgarity, Edinburgh had never heard the like of it. A plan has been proposed to introduce cannabis cafes to this, the most respectable city in Britain, thus transforming it into the Amsterdam of the North, a place where sex and drugs and possibly even rock 'n' roll would take the place of a brisk walk up Arthur's Seat on a Sunday morning.

The idea is that, with the easing of legal constraints on smoking pot, Edinburgh would be well-placed to attract the fun-loving youth of Europe.

To judge from early reactions, the idea has some way to go. "Seedy", "disreputable", "undignified" were some of the responses that greeted the suggestion, which came from Peter Irvine, an impresario whose innovations have included rock concerts in Edinburgh Castle, and a Hogmanay Festival on Princes Street. He denied wanting to turn Edinburgh into a "magnet for dopers" but said that by introducing a few cafes where cannabis could be smoked, the city would send out a message to the world that it was "enlightened" and "different", just as Amsterdam has acquired a reputation as the free-thinking capital of Europe.

His proposal was immediately condemned. "Amsterdam," pronounced a Tory councillor, "is sleazy and vile, so why are we trying to emulate it?" You could see where she was coming from. This after all, is the city where John Knox condemned women as a frivolous sex, and gave warning that too much dancing would incur the "displeasure of God's people". It is where they signed the Solemn League and Covenant, and a woman hurled a stool at the pulpit when Archbishop Laud forbade the Presbyterian order of service.

On the other hand, the introduction of cannabis is likely to happen anyway, for Edinburgh is a city of delightful hypocrisy. Despite its reputation for apparently inalienable propriety, it loves to sin. Sex thrives in its saunas and massage parlours, and street prostitution has been given protection in a "toleration zone" down by the docks, in an area discreetly protected by CCTV cameras.

The city has won a reputation as the gay capital of Scotland, and has an array of late-night clubs catering for a variety of bizarre tastes.

This is all very much in the tradition of Mrs Dora Noyce's well-patronised brothel in Danube Street, in the heart of the Georgian New Town, which, within recent memory, catered for the requirements of distinguished visitors, and is said to have done brisk trade during the annual meetings of the Church of Scotland General Assembly. A hundred years earlier, the city invented the 19th-century version of lap-dancing. The Beggar's Benison was a club in Fife, but with branches in the city, where they celebrated Jacobite politics and free sex. Women were paid to be "posing girls", while their patrons proposed bawdy toasts and drank from phallus-shaped glasses.

Edinburgh, according to Allan Massie, author of an excellent book on the city's history, has long been "held in the grip of a dual identity - respectable and God-fearing on the one hand, rebellious and scornful in its debauchery on the other". Its double-life entranced Robert Louis Stevenson who based Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on the scandal of Deacon Brodie, town councillor and cabinet-maker by day, burglar by night, who was finally caught and hanged on a gibbet of his own construction. In the early 1990s it played host to an archetypal scandal, known as the "Magic Circle" affair, which provoked a judicial inquiry into a louche subculture of dubious lawyers, unscrupulous detectives and assorted rent boys. Nothing of real substance emerged, but the whiff of sulphur lingered long afterwards.

For all its prim reputation, it has always been quietly permissive, and it was, therefore, not surprising to hear, last week, a minister of the straitlaced Free Church displaying remarkable sang-froid at the prospect of Edinburgh becoming a pot-head city. "Historically it has always been progressive," said Professor John McLeod, Principal of the Free Church College. "It prides itself on being culturally and intellectually avant-garde."

Later this year the radical publisher Kevin Williamson, who is credited with discovering Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame, plans to take the minister at his word and open the first cannabis cafe in the city. If past experience is anything to go by, the matrons of Morningside will utter a brisk tut-tut, then pop in for an afternoon spliff.