If you believe your first sentence Dear Dianavan, you're guilty of crass self-deception. Just may be true in Alaska - that the right place? - but I assure you it's going on in lots of other parts of N. America, and it certainly feels as though it's endemic in the UK - and they don't have "Smack-Head" tattooed on their foreheads!.

Thanks for the sympathy Dianavan (genuinely, I mean it, thanks), but I spilled the beans about my boy as a warning to the dopes (what an appropriate word!) who think pot's like vegetarian Smarties (another appropriate word), not to get the sympathy vote. Not that I expect them to listen, none are so blind as they who will not see, or are so clever that they have to gainsay anything that highlights their own fallibility.

Thanks also Georgiansilver, like you I've seen first hand the eventual results of playing with the cannabis fire, and having it rage out of control. Maybe some of these people should experience sitting by the hospital bed of their son who's just been revived by the paramedics after a huge O/D, or watching helplessly while they go through the 'Rattle' of withdrawal, sweating, screaming, spewing yellow puke, convulsing. The only unpleasant thing they don't usually do is shit themselves, because they don't eat so there's no shit. And it all started with a 'harmless' spliff.

Have a happy life in La-La Land guys, must be nice there.

I'll ask the question no-one dares to answer one more time. How many of the Yea-Sayers on this thread are a parent of a child with a hard-drug habit?

Or I'll pose a different question which, hopefully, might draw a better response - if anyone out there reading this thread has a child with a hard-drug habit, what drug would you say from experience was their intial entry-point into habitual drug abuse?

Anybody want me to make a prediction?