Soon we’re off and I stare out at the streets, the cars, buildings, the people that make up this city. It’d always felt like home, until everything went wrong. Then it felt like an alien landscape, a place I’d somehow travelled to with no purpose, and no way back. Until, after months of medications and doctors and therapies, which hardly made a dent in it, Joel persuaded me to try a different approach. I resisted, but eventually things got so bad I decided I had nothing to lose. I remember that first time. Really, it was amazing. I’d had an alarm going off in my head for years, constantly putting me on edge, priming my already exhausted body for action even when it wasn’t needed. No wonder I couldn’t sleep, no wonder I’d broken down and they’d diagnosed me with PTSD. And yet that one simple thing, a few puffs from Joel’s vaporizer, and that alarm shut off, like it had never been there. I still can’t believe it. I’ve come to see that the alarm is the black wolf. That’s what I’m fighting against, that’s what cannabis helps me with.

‘You do know that production is still against the law, don’t you?’ Vermeer finally says.

I never thought I’d say this, but …

‘Fuck the law.’

‘You’re a police officer.’

‘Yeah, and, I say again, fuck the law. No one has the right to tell you what you can and can’t ingest. Least of all a plant.’

‘Hey, chill, man,’ she says in her best stoner-stereotype voice. ‘Loosen up.’

‘Well, we can’t all be little miss perfect. And anyway, what about the drink?’

‘What about it?’ she snaps back.

‘You sank two high-strength cocktails in quick succession and then stormed a building where there was possibly a madman on the loose. And you didn’t even look tipsy.’

She looks across at me, raises her eyebrows as if to say oh really but stays silent.

‘Let me ask you this, how many times have you been called out to a disturbance where alcohol was involved?’

She doesn’t answer.

‘Hundreds, right? Probably thousands. And then ask yourself how many times you were called to a disturbance caused by cannabis?’

She still doesn’t answer. Well, fuck it. She can sit there on her little high horse. Maybe she can come back to me when she’s been in this game as long as I have, see what she feels like then, when the sheer volume of bad shit has seeped into her and is festering inside, threatening her very core. Who knows, she may find moral judgement’s trickier then.