ADVICE ON DRUG CONTRADICTORY

Despite huge scare stories in the press, deaths related to the use of
illegal drugs are tiny in comparison to tobacco and alcohol. And young
people know this from their own experience, writes Observer columnist
NIGELLA LAWSON in London.

A MONTH or so ago, following Julie Burchill's piece in the Guardian on her
earlier, admirably unrepentant, extravagant cocaine use, British columnists
queued up to reveal the exciting details of their own lives in the drugs
fast lane.

Some had experienced a wild old time, others no more than the odd toke, blow
or snort which they now rather regretted. But all were now sure, however
good it might have felt at the time, drugs were as dangerous for them as for
less sensitive self-observers.

True, they were usually hard put to explain precisely why feeling good was
bad, but they were agreed 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 halfway to the truth, which is: most drugs are fun and safe. (Bear with
me: the qualifier is yet to come.)

Last week on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the United Kingdom deputy
government adviser on drugs, Mike Trace, turned up to talk about the number
of only-just teenagers using and even dealing in drugs. Mr Trace was
worried. Teenage drug use is growing and the kids have to be persuaded drugs
are bad for them, dangerous and they should leave them alone. It is a valid
point . . . at least if you're a grown-up deputy drugs adviser, newspaper
columnist, parent or anyone else who has blanked out 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 and even kill them. But that isn't
what they see. For all the warnings to young people 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 more than a handful of Ecstasy-victims are tiny:
only some 60 users have died in Britain as a result of taking Ecstasy since
records began.

In order to save young lives, maybe warnings should be issued not to fly,
not to eat nuts, not to get stung by wasps, not to play by railway tracks or
do any of the things which kill more than the half dozen teenagers who each
year die in Britain after taking Ecstasy.

If teenagers go to a different sort of club - the sort where alcohol rather
than drugs helps the night along - there's more likelihood they'll see the
effects of the intoxicant of choice: punch-ups, loud-mouthed drunken
oafishness, blood, vomit and 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 soccer was a case
in point. The Dutch police at Eindhoven turned a blind eye to cannabis
peddlers. 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 combating 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 latest available known drug-related deaths in the
United Kingdom: 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 figures 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 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
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 and 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 they have no chances or 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 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.