Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
whisky, but the point is that whisky already does, and we should treasure this, indeed we
need to celebrate the fact.
Whisky really is an international drink in that sense too, and this ability to accept and
combine with distinctive flavours from elsewhere, to enhance them and be enhanced by
them, is, potentially at least, an important symbol.
The Scots as a people are the result of a great blending and marrying over the millen-
nia, of Picts, Vikings, Angles, Saxons and countless others, and Scots people have been
leaving Scotland and venturing out into the rest of the world for centuries. Like the Irish,
they often had to go without much choice in the matter, but go they did, and they blended
in, as a rule, while tending to retain a distinctive flavour, an identifiable note, within those
other conglomerations of people across the globe.
Those Scots - often poor and fleeing injustice, with their homes burned behind them,
victims of a corrupt and persecutive legal system which was glad to see the back of them
and would not have welcomed their return - were the economic refugees of their day;
they were, effectively, asylum seekers. Where they were allowed to put down roots, they
flourished. Where they were accepted, they added immeasurably to the intellectual, cul-
tural and financial wealth of the countries which had taken them in. It is only to our shame
that we even think twice about extending the same basic human decency, the same self-
interested courtesy, to those in the same situation now as we were in then.
In any event, we need to relax now and again, and a lot of us need to get out of our
heads, with a little chemical help. If we're sensible, we'll accept this and set things up so
that when we, or others, indulge ourselves so, we'll be - or they'll be - protected from
avoidable harm within a sensible set of agreed rules. So a legal framework is required
which on the one hand stops the unscrupulous from adulterating whatever it is we're us-
ing for such recreational purposes, while on the other hand prevents us from inflicting the
effects of our inebria on others, by, for example, driving, operating heavy machinery or
taking flash photographs in wildly volatile environments.
We pretty much have this already with alcohol and tobacco, though arguably without
the commitment to early education that might help prevent later abuse. The legal frame-
work surrounding alcohol use needs to proscribe things like drunk driving because alco-
hol has such profound behavioural effects on us. The legal framework surrounding to-
bacco use is just there to try to stop the young getting hooked too early; tobacco is such
a rubbish drug there's no real problem with it affecting your ability to drive a car beyond
the trivial aspects of needing to glance down at the lighter or ash tray now and again.
I speak as an occasional user myself here, a social smoker, and let's face it, fellow to-
bacco junkies, it really must be the single most pitiful drug ever discovered. Its two most
profound effects are that it gets you hooked and it's deadly. That's it.
