MAKE DRUGS LEGAL AND REGULATE LIKE MAD

One of the worst things about parenthood is the instinctual wisdom
that some day, somehow, somewhere, something will go wrong with your kids.

If you're lucky it will be a broken arm playing on the jungle gym or
the adventure course. If you're really lucky, it will be that they
get dropped by their intended date before the big ball. And if you're
ultra-lucky, it will be that they fail their driving licence and so
void any future discussion as to vehicular independence.

Or you could be like Al Gore or Paul Holmes or any number of normal
parents everywhere, and have a kid who gets hooked on the wrong
crowd, at the wrong place and ends up charged with having the wrong drugs.

No parent wants a dopehead for a son or daughter. But the reality is
that many middle-aged and middle-class mums and dads are living
exactly that reality. That no matter the private schools and piano
lessons, the overseas and ski trips, their child has opted to be obliterated.

They expected this behaviour from the brown kids who went to the low
decile schools and whose idea of travel was a bus into town. And they
worked to insulate their kids from exactly those people who they
perceived as druggies or dropkicks.

So why has the kid been caught with cannabis? The daughter potted
with P, or the son with enough illegal pharmaceuticals to be indicted
for supply?

There can be only one of two answers.

Bad kid. Or bad parent. There are no other options and neither
provides a palatable reply.

Kids do drugs for the same reason that Ed climbed Everest: because
they are there.

Indeed, humankind has a long and rich tradition of getting off its
face and using narcotics as a way of distancing itself from the
drudgery and the humdrum of the everyday. This is why we use alcohol
as we do - an attempt to alter our consciousness.

There is then this societal hypocrisy that booze is OK but drugs are
bad. Drugs are bad only for the same reason alcohol is appalling - if
the user allows the influence to dominate their life or distract from
their normal responsibilities. At that point all mind altering
substances become dangerous.

There is, of course, another reason that kids do drugs. It is the
same rationale that their parents used when dabbling with marijuana
or scoring the occasional tab of LSD. They want to know.

Curiosity is the natural condition of youth and risk-taking
automatically attends curiosity. In other words, most drug-taking
represents a phase in human development.

Unless and until some bad experience recoils the adventurer - or the
next step seems so desperately dangerous - kids will keep on
questing. Most will eventually discover that society's chosen poison
is sufficiently safe and sufficiently available to satisfy and satiate.

Which is why all us old fogies tend to thrill over a new pinot - noir
or gris - or go all goony over a gratuitously good gewurtz. It is the
discovery mixed with the mind-fonging qualities that will guarantee
us a good time.

It would be nice to dismiss drug-taking as just a developmental
phase, but it would also be true. Most kids grow out of it. Indeed a
career, your own kids and a mortgage tends to reform the most
hedonistic among us.

It does not help that we ban some drugs that we should not. Ecstasy
is an outstanding mood alterer but does not induce violence,
window-smashing or the terrorising of suburban streets. That's what
alcohol is for.

Similarly, party drugs containing BZP are not going to sack western
civilisation. They are relatively mild stimulants that allowed a
measure of societal control until Jim Anderton went on his wowser crusade.

One might even argue that the legalisation of cannabis for personal
use would admit a degree of regulation wholly lacking under present drug laws.

Most kids have worked out this logic for themselves. Just like their
parents did when they passed through the same developmental phase.
And so the law is drawn into disrepute, and criminal gangs are
bankrolled by nonsensical legislation, gifting them a fairground
attraction to introduce the true nasties like P.

Of course, there are addicts. The kids that once hooked, stay hooked.
With respect, they were always going to be. They possess those
personalities that can't self-discipline and can't discern. The
personality of their parents tends to play a primal role: they are so
often addicted to their own chemical vices - cigarettes, medication
or alcohol. Short of excising the familial genes, or discovering God,
these kids are in for a world of hurt.

And because we wish to prevent that hurt, society gets actively
involved. We ban, we educate, we detox. It makes not a jot of
difference. Even the media madness that accompanies a Millie Holmes
or an Al Gore Jr outing, only entertains but never illuminates.

Prohibition did not work with alcohol. It won't work with drugs.
Instead we need to separate the good from the bad, the less harmful
from the pernicious, and then regulate, regulate, regulate. Besides,
anything the government is involved in is always boring.

Take the fun and frisson out of dabbling with drugs. Make them legal.