"Patient smoked weed - now feeling funny".

The thing that I normally ask these sorts of patients (for there are a fair few) is, "Isn't that what it is supposed to do?"

Our patient was used to smoking cannabis, but for some reason this particular strain of 'erb had caused him to become panicked. So he gone out into the street where his friends had poured some cold water over him.

Cold water - I never understand it...

We were told that it was 'commercial cannabis', whatever that means.

It was a good thing that I was driving this night, I would have been seriously tempted to tell the patient that there was a new and potentially fatal additive to cannabis in the area just to see how quick I could get his pulse going - but we were being nice, so my crewmate calmed him down and, by the time we reached the hospital, he was laughing and joking with his friend.

I suspect that he wouldn't wait to be seen by a doctor - instead he'd take himself back to the party that we picked him up from.

Now, unless I'm mistaken (and, y'know I am terribly naive), but isn't it still illegal to smoke cannabis? So why didn't it cross anyone's mind to call the police?

The answer I would guess is that it is a 'victimless' crime (unless you count the person having an angina attack we could have gone to), that the CPS wouldn't be interested, and that the police have many more serious things to be getting on with (like filling in their countless forms). We as the ambulance service also have too much work to be calling the police ever time we witness something illegal.

Of course, if we did start reporting people then we'd be viewed by certain (violent) members of society as little more than stool pigeons and end up getting beaten up a lot more than we do at the moment. At the moment we aren't seen as being part of the forces of law and order, which is why we can often walk unharmed through the worst parts of town and stroll into crack dens.

Current Status : Full of illness, throat like the bottom of a parrot cage and an eye that is leaking *stuff*. And my mobile phone isn't working, I suspect that it knows it will soon be replaced...