So it’s OK to raid the drug barons, but not their middle-class clients?

Without the demand from the more affluent areas of our cities, the thugs who prey on people in more disadvantaged communities would have a much harder time

BOTH the Taoiseach and I got into trouble last week. His was more visible than mine and, to be honest, I think he had no defence. The main thing we had in common, I suppose, is that we got into trouble over the expression of an opinion.

I’ve heard it said more than once, since the Taoiseach suggested he can’t understand why people who give out about the state of the economy don’t commit suicide, that we’re all being too hard on him.

I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but I work day in and day out with people who help families come to terms with the trauma of suicide.

And for every family that has been affected, suicide can be a wound that takes years to heal, a mystery that is never resolved, a book that can never be closed.

For loved ones, and perhaps especially for children, the one big question behind a great many acts of suicide, the question to which only one person can ever know the answer, is why?

Children often answer that question in their own way. It’s my fault. If I was a better son, my dad would still be here. If I only watched out better for my brother, he would never have killed himself. If I was good, my mummy would never have gone away.

That’s the open wound for many children. Their instinctive reaction is to blame themselves and to carry that burden unspoken, although it needs to be screamed out, for years. In that context, casual, flip references, as if suicide was a joke, can be the equivalent of a knife in that open wound. Of all people, our Taoiseach really ought to have known better.

My offence was of a different character. I was a panellist on John Bowman’s Questions and Answers, and one of the topics under discussion was the incredible amount of hard drugs that had been found floating off west Cork.

The panel, which included Enterprise, Trade and Employment Minister Micheál Martin, all more or less agreed that it had been luck rather than anything else that had enabled these drugs to be discovered, and that it was never going to be easy to put the resources in place to ensure foolproof detection on the south-west coastline.

The discussion moved on to the harder question, in many ways, of what should we be doing about the prevalence of drugs, and especially hard drugs, in our community. I offered the opinion that cocaine had become a middle-class fashion and that the time had come when the gardaí were going to have to carry out raids on polite dinner parties in Foxrock and other leafy suburbs.

Nobody demurred on the programme, and the point was made by other contributors that the burgeoning demand for cocaine was fuelling a market that was becoming steadily more vicious and depraved.

To my surprise, however, I was accosted several times over the following days, and got several letters, accusing me of “going to the right” on the subject of drugs.

One person even said I sounded more right-wing on the subject than Michael McDowell, and that people like me, if I was serious about addressing the issue, should have the courage to advocate decriminalisation instead. In all the conversations I had, decriminalisation was seen as the more enlightened approach.

I had a gut reaction to a lot of those comments. “Come with me”, I wanted to say, “and let me introduce you to some of the families that have been destroyed by hard drugs. Not necessarily the addicts themselves, although they can be pitiable. But meet some of the kids who’ve never known what it’s like to be parented. Meet some of the mothers who struggle with addiction themselves and still try to carry all the burdens of being a mother on her own. Meet some of the people whose lives have been wrecked by the terrorism of their neighbourhoods — terrorism directly attributable to warfare over drug territory”.

I didn’t say any of that, however. In the first place, there’s probably an easy and thoughtless response to it. Maybe there are people who think that decriminalisation would solve those problems, too.

But the main reason I didn’t reply in that vein was that, until recently, I probably could well have argued for decriminalisation of drugs as a response to the growing epidemic.

Take it out of the hands of the barons, I can hear myself saying, and put it above rather than under the counter. That way you can regulate the distribution and supply, ensure that diseases aren’t transmitted among users, and even raise revenue to pay for healthcare and treatment.

If pressed, I still probably believe there is something to be said for that approach in respect of softer drugs, like marijuana and cannabis. I’ve never been convinced that use of a softer drug inevitably leads to addiction to a harder one. But in recent years I’ve seen at first hand the damage that cocaine and heroin can do to users and to their families, and I just can’t see an easy and enlightened way of solving those problems. The sale of alcohol has been regulated for years, and it has been a major source of revenue for the State, and that hasn’t stopped binge drinking and alcoholism, and all the death and destruction it causes.

I don’t honestly believe that it’s fair to pretend to people who are dependent on a drug that is destroying them that we can help them by enabling them to buy it legally and pay tax on it.

THERE is no way through an addiction of any kind that doesn’t involve the withdrawal of the substance to which the person is addicted.

And there is no way that we are going to persuade people who now use cocaine for social and recreational purposes to stop doing it with some kind of educational or awareness campaign. Doing a line or two of cocaine at a party might seem a very trendy thing, and even harmless.

And it’s true that for a great many people, experimenting with cocaine will not lead to addiction and ruin.

But every party into which cocaine is introduced helps to fuel a market that depends utterly on addiction and ruined lives. Without the demand that comes from the more affluent areas of our cities, the thugs who prey on people in more disadvantaged communities would have a much harder time.

And if the fear of discovery and public humiliation could be a spur to persuading people that some other form of social entertainment might be safer, how would that be a bad thing? I had one other thought in relation to the angry reaction I got. I suspect a lot of it had to do with my reference to the leafy suburbs.

If I had said the gardaí ought to be breaking down the doors of the drug barons in their less salubrious addresses, rather than the doors of their middle-class customers, I don’t think anyone would have reacted at all.

If that’s right, I wonder what it could mean?