When you chuff on a fattie (and I don’t mean break wind on the morbidly obese), the chemical ‘acts like a herbal terrorist, hijacking the brain’ according to this effort, shown last night on BBC Three.
Strong and faintly ridiculous words indeed – and coming from a particularly weak documentary. Words weren’t its forte in any sense, with its using the term ‘skunk’ as a catch-all for any and every high grade bud on the market being a clear indication that the writers weren’t really looking to educate, but simply to regurgitate common misconception at an audience presumed ignorant.
To clear things up, skunk is a name that can only accurately be applied to a few strains of high-grade bud. There are countless other names for strains of the same kind of class – among them kush, cheese and haze – but ‘skunk’ is the name used by critics, presumably because it smells of wee.
When participants smoked cannabis in this slightly tawdry show, the graphics team sprang into action with third rate CGI, attempting to show what happens to the body when THC is absorbed into the system, while the faceless narrator became suddenly psychic and told us about their internal breakdowns.
What may have seemed like four stoned, teenage lads attempting to jump a small ditch and having a laugh whilst about it became a quartet of feckless dope-fiends hallucinating that a tiny trench was an enormous chasm, as the show had it. An office worker, having smoked a joint upon returning home, then began to organise her belongings for a move. The fact she fancied another joint as a reward for doing the mindless task was taken to be a sign of impending addiction. When the aforementioned lads later fancied a snack, we were told that smokers ‘seek out food whether they’re hungry or not’, conjuring images of hooded teens burgling houses for Bakewell tarts, which is quite far removed from the reality.
It was a strange and melodramatic approach, as for the most-part the participants were adjusted, studenty types or young professionals, whose experiences were distorted by the script into negative areas. But when they needed someone to describe the hell of cannabis addiction, they turned to Chris, clearly a rung below the others on the desperation scale and only able to access soapbar, on the evidence we saw – a highly polluted hash that’s contaminated with all manner of rubbish. His addiction (or was it dependency? Or habit? We were never accurately told) was documented for us in a section so brief it only lasted one night and got a five minute sequence, in which he got a bit mardy and asked his girlfriend to stop filming him.
What really galled by this point was just how bad the science involved was. Without any qualification, the narrator told us that ‘skunk is responsible for rising rates in addiction’, which is a bit like saying not that espresso is responsible for high rates of caffeine addiction (which is enough of a problem to prove in itself), but that a specific brand of espresso is to blame. By the time a girl was psychometrically tested after a massive vaporizer hit and had her answers wilfully misconstrued, it felt like we were on the end of a comedic sting.
But sadly, this was trying desperately hard to be the real deal. And when you consider it ended up being a lazy, tabloid slab of misinformation, you have to conclude that there’s nothing remotely funny about that.
