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Drugs May Be Bad For Us, But Banning Them Is Not The
Answer

A month or so ago, following Julie Burchill's Guardian piece on her
earlier, admirably unrepentant, extravagant cocaine use, columnists
queued up to reveal the exciting details of their own lives in the
druggy fast lane. Some had a wild old time, others no more than the
odd toke, blow or snort which they now rather regret. But all were now
sure that however good it might have felt at the time, drugs were as
dangerous for them as it was for less sensitive self-observers.

True, they were usually hard put to explain precisely why feeling good
was bad, but they were agreed that that was then and this is now. And
now we - or rather, they - should just say no.

Of course they would say that, wouldn't they? The national press, of
whatever political stripe, is far too responsible an institution to
allow its columnists to advise readers to turn on and drop out. But at
least they went half-way to the truth, which is: most drugs are fun
and safe. (Bear with me: the qualifier is yet to come.) Last week on
Radio 4's Today programme, the Deputy Drugs Tsar, Mike Trace, turned
up to talk about the number of only-just teenagers using and even
dealing in drugs.

Trace was worried. Teenage drug use is growing and the kids have to be
persuaded that drugs are bad for them, that they're dangerous, that
they should leave them alone. It is a valid point... at least if
you're a grown-up Deputy Drugs Tsar or a newspaper columnist or a
parent or anyone else who has blanked the memory of what it's like to
be young and have nothing more pressing to worry about on a Saturday
night than which club to go to and what top to wear.

The point is, teenagers aren't stupid. They are, like the rest of us,
empiricists. They hear that drugs are bad for them, will enslave their
souls, sap their youthful spirit, deprave, even kill them. But that
isn't what they see. For all Leah Betts' parents touring schools
warning pupils of the dangers of Ecstasy, the teenagers know better.
And I'm not being ironic: the evidence they have is precisely the
opposite of that which their elders and betters present to them. Every
weekend they see hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, of their
peers taking E and having a wonderful time. The chances of them ever
coming across another Leah Betts are tiny: only some 60 users have
died in Britain as a result of taking Ecstasy.

If he wants merely to save lives, Mr Betts would be better off telling
children not to fly, not to eat nuts, not to get stung by wasps, not
to play by the rail-tracks, not to do any of the things which kill
more than the half dozen teenagers who each year die taking Ecstasy.

If teenagers go to a different sort of club - the sort where booze
rather than drugs help the night along - there's more likelihood that
they'll see the effects of the intoxicant of choice: punch-ups,
loud-mouthed drunken oafishness, blood, vomit, the post-euphoric
depression that inevitably follows drunkenness. And on that evidence
why should they believe the Government official who tells them what
they're doing is dangerous and illegal, but what the man with the
black eye retching into the gutter is doing is legal and relatively
safe?

The recent Euro 2000 was a case in point. The Dutch police at
Eindhoven turned a blind eye to the dope peddlars. Thus, when Holland
lost to Italy, the Dutch supporters were seen, on camera, stoned into
inoffensive passivity. Cut to any English match and I can't help
concluding that selling joints rather than cans of lager on the
terraces might be a rather more effective way of combatting
hooliganism.

I have an equal distaste for all substances, legal or otherwise, that
make the user out of control to the point of unsociability, but the
facts are shocking.

These are the known drug-related deaths in the UK, 1990: tobacco,
110,000; alcohol, 30,000; volatile substances, 112; morphine, 91;
methadone, 84; heroin, 62; barbiturate type, 7; anti-depressants, 4;
cocaine, 4; pethidine, 3; MDMA (Ecstasy), 3; amphetamine type, 2;
hallucinogens, 0; LSD, 0; psylocibin, 0; cannabis, 0.

If the above are right, then the case against drugs is a difficult
one. Those of us with children see beyond the figures to our little
loved ones in later years being zonked out at best, and annihilating
themselves at worst. It's hard not to have that picture, and I would
assume that most of us know enough people who have more or less
destroyed themselves with drugs. But still, despite my parental fears
and susceptibility to scare stories, I feel that drug use doesn't make
a junkie any more than getting drunk makes an alcoholic.

I worry more that there are so many children who have lives so utterly
lacking in hope or promise that the junkie way doesn't seem such a bad
idea. It's easy for middle-class parents (and there is no shortage of
middle-class children on drugs) to worry over what a mess their
offspring are making of their lives, how they're squandering their
potential, but there is a whole class, or underclass, out there who
are, fairly understandably, trying to block out the fact that they
have no chances, no recognised potential.

But whatever one feels about alcohol or any other drug, it appears to
be the case that the desire for intoxication is innate in humans. Any
primitive society investigated by anthropologists depicts peoples who
either danced themselves into whirling states of frenzy or who ate
berries calculated to induce hallucinations (or both). Both my
children, from the age when they were barely stable, used to twirl
themselves around until they fell down helplessly dizzy. I agree, just
because something is innate doesn't make it good, but whatever,
prohibition can never be the answer.