Name: Sir David Amess.
Age: 63.
Occupation: Conservative MP for Southend West and newly appointed chair of the government’s psychoactive substances bill committee.
He has a background in pharmacology, does he? Good heavens, no, but he’s very religious and supports homeopathy.
That’s not really the same thing. What is the psychoactive substances bill anyway? It’s a new law that the government will shortly introduce, with Labour support, to impose a blanket ban on the supply, importation or exportation of all “psychoactive substances”.
And what are they? Ooh, now that’s a tricky one. The draft bill says: “For the purposes of this act, a substance produces a psychoactive effect in a person if, by stimulating or depressing the person’s central nervous system, it affects the person’s mental functioning or emotional state.”
They’re talking about my duvet! That makes me feel all warm and cosy and then go to sleep. This Amess chap wants to ban my duvet! Nonsense. He’s only proposing to ban the supply, importation or exportation of duvets, and indeed any other substance that affect how people feel, such as sunlight, clothes, the smell of a loved one’s hair and so on … Plus “legal highs”, of course.
Aha! So that’s what this is about. Amess is an expert on legal highs, is he? In a way.
In what way? Well he is rather famous – probably most famous – for having been duped by Chris Morris’s Brass Eye programme in 1997.
Got any gory details? Yup. Brass Eye approached Amess with news of a preposterous, bright yellow drug called “cake”, which it claimed was being legally imported from Czechoslovakia and doing terrible harm to users. Amess believed it all, and even asked a question in parliament about the government’s plans to deal with the imaginary menace. Cake was “a big yellow death bullet in the head of some poor user – or custard gannet, as the dealers call them,” Amess compliantly told the camera.
So you’re telling me that a man already proven to be inept when it comes to understanding legal highs will be in charge of scrutinising the government’s inept legal-high legislation? I am.
It kind of makes sense. I suppose it does.
Do say: “Many legal highs stimulate a brain region known as Shatner’s Bassoon.”
Don’t say: “Want some cake, Sir David?”
