TEENAGERS TRYING OUT SOFT DRUGS ISN'T SO BAD FOR THEM - OR FOR US

Face It, a Joint May Be a Lesser Menace Than Binge Drinking

Apart from the fact that it is completely illegal and that I don't in
any sense recommend or condone it, I don't actually think there is
anything especially heinous about teenagers experimenting with the
softer drugs. I'd prefer them to be tucked up in bed familiarising
themselves with Kant or Spinoza, or going for 10-mile runs, but we do
need to keep a degree of realism about these things. The reality is
that for the majority of young people the odd period of light
recreational drug use does little harm. I'm not talking about crack
or heroin - but then most children don't experiment with crack or heroin.

A quarter of England's secondary school pupils have taken illegal
drugs at least once, according to figures released last week by the
NHS Information Centre. This is a 4% fall since the previous set of
figures in 2001 - but it still means that more than 40% of the
nation's 15-year-olds are likely to have tried drugs; 6% of
11-year-olds had taken drugs in the past year and 3% in the past month.

Obviously I am firmly of the opinion that 11-year-olds should be
playing with their dollies, not taking illicit substances (does
anyone play with dolls past the age of five any more? I was devoted
to mine until I was about 12). But I don't find the figures for
teenagers especially alarming. I know we're all supposed to tremble
in our boots at the evil of recreational drug-taking but
experimenting with drugs just seems to me normal - banal, really.

Teenage binge-drinking is another story, because soft drugs don't
cause you to get cirrhosis when you're still in your early twenties,
or render you so out of it that you get raped, or leave the streets
of Britain awash with vomit (although the figures for alcohol have
dropped slightly since 2001 - teenagers are drinking marginally less,
which is cheering, although they are averaging 12.7 units a week, which isn't).

Possibly I feel this way because I liked taking (soft) drugs when I
was a teenager myself - my fondness for marijuana got me expelled
from boarding school, in fact, due to an unfortunate incident during
an Italian translation class. The vocab had struck me as so intensely
hilarious - it was something to do with Jesus at Gethsemane - that I
couldn't control my laughter, fell off my chair and lay on the
ground, convulsed with mirth, unable to obey increasingly furious
orders to get up.

The fact is that this had only positive consequences: I changed
schools, stopped having to play bloody lacrosse (the sheer hell of
which had sent me in search of new pastimes in the first place),
moved home to London, regained normal freedoms and occasionally took
more drugs. By the time I went to university I had grown bored with
the druggy scene and had evolved enough to get over the sense that
drugs were exciting and naughty - an insight, I observe, that still
eludes many less precocious middle-aged types, 20-odd years later.

God save us from cringe-making naffness of the "cool" (they wish)
kidults with the paunch and the mortgage and the coke habit: the
great advantage of moderate teenage drug-taking is that, by the time
you're 20, you understand perfectly that there is nothing glamorous
about spontaneous nosebleeds or talking very fast.

I know people in their fifties, whose teenagehoods were models of
probity, who still haven't fathomed this one out. It's worth bearing
in mind if you're despairing of your dopey 16-year-old: at least he
or she is unlikely to turn into an embarrassing dopey adult.

All of which makes me think that a bit of teenage soft drug-taking
is, for the vast majority, simply a rite of passage. Just as having
underage sex doesn't turn you into a nymphomaniac, so underage
drug-taking tends, in the vast majority of cases, not to turn you
into a tragic junkie. There will always be exceptions, of course -
several of my teenage drug-taking companions ended up in rehab and a
couple still struggle with various addictions.

In my experience this is often to do with certain depressive
personality traits which would have manifested themselves in one
destructive way or another in due course anyway. And, of course, when
I was young, the noxious strands of skunk that are around today
didn't exist, so I doubt that any of my contemporaries became
psychotic as a result of smoking a joint.

Abstinence is best of all, it goes without saying. But in the absence
of abstinence, soft drugs often have something to recommend them over
alcohol. I'm not saying this as a partaker, but as an observer - asa
person, say, who is trying to get from A toB at 11pm. A clean-living
friend recently spent a weekend partying (without artificial help) in
Ibiza and couldn't help noting that although every person he came
across was on ecstasy, they were all smiling, kind, polite, courteous
and friendly.

Compare and contrast, he said, with trying to walk through central
London on a Friday night, when every other person is loud, obscene,
aggressive and trying to start a fight and there's always some poor
sod on the night bus with a bleeding face, to say nothing of crumpled
girls who are either crying or comatose with drink. "I know which I
prefer," he said, and so do I.

The real fact of the matter is that drugs are no longer cool - they
haven't been since roughly 1987 (when acid house reigned and young
people's social lives were revolutionised by the cheapness and
availability of ecstasy). Which is why three-quarters have had
nothing to do with them - quite a whopping percentage.

For the majority, being cool about drugs means shrugging them off -
not because you're nerdy or square, or because you're scared, but
because you're intelligent enough to check out Pete Doherty or Amy
Winehouse, both touched by genius and both made repulsive through
their excesses, and think, "Ew, no thanks". This doesn't mean that
the spirit of experimentation is dead - teenagers are teenagers and
trying things out is part of the process - but it does mean that we
can ease off a bit on the gloomy prognosis front.

Smoking the odd (nonskunk) joint isn't automatically going to turn a
teenager into a raving, scabby crackhead. Frankly, it's more likely
to turn him into a newspaper columnist.