DRUGS AND CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY AIN"T WHAT THEY USED TO BE...

Don't you just love it when Grandpa shakes his head, disapprovingly, about things not being the way they used to be back in the good old days.

Keith Richards; the legendary sixty something guitarist from The Rolling Stones, has complained about drugs today, telling the London based Q magazine; "the quality's gone down. All they do is try and take the high out of everything. I don't like the way drugs now are working on your brain area instead of just through the blood stream."

Not that I would dare question the world's undisputed connoisseur par excellence of narcotics, but I thought that drugs were more powerful today and therefore more dangerous or at least that's what people of Richards' and Bill Clinton's generation usually say to justify their own drug use back in the '60's and '70's but warn younger generations against it when they, themselves, became responsible senior citizens.

Anyway, this old geezer (Richards) has been the subject of more stories and urban myths than there are cracks on his face and my personal favourite dates back to when General Motors were sponsoring a Rolling Stones tour back in the day. The world's largest automakers were terrified that Richards, who was at the height of his monkey on the back dependency, would overdose and die under the GM logo causing a PR nightmare for the American corporate institution. Consequently; a series of black suited GM executives would reguarly show up at Richards' hotel suite with a stash of checked and approved highest quality heroin, just to make sure that The Human Riff was getting only the finest brown sugar available, thus ensuring that he would survive the tour. Now you don't see that kind of corporate responsibility from big business anymore...