Random reminder

Press, 18 April 1979, Page 24

Random reminder

CORDON VENT

The news that the latest drugs craze' in the States is parsley, smoked with I an animal tranquilliser called PLP has I caused us not a little concern. We are] not worried about the PLP aspect of the matter: according to a Mr K. Twaddle, the press officer of the Otago branch of the New Zealand Veterinary Association, PLP is not imported into this country, and very pleased we are to hear it, although one can wonder at the wisdom of a veterinary association appointing a press officer with a surname like Twaddle. The whole point, after all, of a press officer is that the press accepts what he says, whereas a press statement emanating from the mouth of a person called Twaddle might, we should have thought, be greeted occasionally with a certain amount of scepticism. However. Mr Twaddle's handicaps are not what is exercising us. It is this matter of the parsley. In the first place we are staggered to learn that you can actually smoke parsley. As an amateur chef we have

I done lots of things to parsley in our : time, but the thought of setting it i alight and inhaling the fumes is one • | that would never have Occurred to us. Our parsley is lush and verdant, and ; we doubt very much if you could get ; it alight unless you doused it in II meths. Which would then make it ' dangerous to light, and, we should have though, foul to smoke. But leaving the matter of smoking aside, and accepting that everything that happens first in America happens here sooner or later, will we find in a year or so’s time that parsley has become a Class C controlled drug, whose cultivation is forbidden, except by the DSIR? Will hundreds of innocent domestic cooks, growing their i own parsley, be knocked off the by the Drugs Squad? Will police armed with tracker dogs and low-flying aircraft uncover huge crops of parsley, nodding its heads in the sunlight in Hawke’s Bay? We say: Parsley growers of New Zealand, unite. You to have - everything to lose, including your >' souffles and casseroles.