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• Mr Nice
• Dope Stories
• Senor Nice
• Tripping

Book Name:	Dope Stories
Author:	Marks, Howard
Sale Price:	£7.00 plus P&P
Buy Online:	Yes, Available Now
Signed by Author?:	Yes, only when purchased via this website.

OVERVIEW

When I wrote Mr Nice, I did so with fellow elderly hippies in mind as potential readers. I was, therefore, truly astonished to discover that its unexpected best-seller status was primarily due to its popularity among people several decades younger than I was. Through a plethora of media interviews and several public book readings, it became clear that the predominant reason why so many adolescents and university students read and enjoyed Mr Nice was their frustration with the law prohibiting cannabis consumption and trade. Until then, I had no idea of the extraordinary extent of cannabis use by young people today.

Despite having made enormous amounts of money through illegally trading cannabis, I have never been able to begin to see this as a justification for condoning any prolonging of its prohibition and have always supported its legalisation. In the past, I has to do this clandestinely or anonymously: it would have been unforgivably unprofessional to do otherwise. After the publication of Mr Nice I found myself swamped by the spotlight of media attention. I determined to use my sky-rocketing notoriety in as respectable a way as possible and to do whatever I could to hasten the day that cannabis would be relegalised.

My first high-profile attempt to move towards cannabis relegalisation was to smoke a joint at a London police station and offer myself available for immediate arrest and imprisonment. The police declined. It occurred to me then (perhaps for the first time) that the police were not the enemy. Most policemen choose that profession for completely honourable reasons, such as protecting the society they love; they did not join to imprison people for smoking herbs. Policemen have walked the streets far more than the rest of us and know what the problems are and what caused them. The one's that I've talked with, almost without exception, do not see the consumption of cannabis as problematic, but they do see the law prohibiting it to be so. I cannot think of any law that has done more damage in terms of social upheaval, parent-child alienation and police-public hostility.

Although it's hard for me to imagine anyone deciding to favour the prohibition of drugs after reading this book, its purpose is not an appeal for legalisation. The drug stories and extracts herein are chosen on the basis of their interests, rarity, amusement and provocation.

I suspect that all anthology compilers are plagued by which criteria to adopt for ordering the chosen extracts. I certainly was and longed for the sudden acquisition of an undifinable skill, somewhere between that of a hard-working house DJ and that of a full-time bibliographer. Do I do it by drug, by mood, by content, or by time? Eventually, I decided to let the order reflect my and many others' journey through the world of drugs: a period of wonderfully gentle and civilised discovery followed by a smattering of learning, a far more intense and raw discovery phase ending with extreme frustration with the social taboos surrounding drugs, then a long but finite period of living from drugs, and finally an eternal time of living with them.

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