Drugs may become the greatest blight on Ireland since the famine

Most people probably do not realise that tea and coffee are drugs, or that nicotine or alcohol are in themselves even more dangerous drugs.

Marijuana is certainly less habit-forming than alcohol or tobacco. There is a need for a proper and informed debate about legal and illegal drugs

THE cocaine problem was highlighted this week by the death of Kevin Doyle (21) in Waterford, where another young man remains critically ill, and this was followed by the still unexplained death of the model Katy French (24) who had earlier admitted to taking cocaine.

Those deaths are tragedies for the families and a grim reminder that this is a problem that could affect the household of any teenager or young adult.

Those who take cocaine do not die because they awere bad, but simply because they were young, adventurous and maybe a bit foolish. But who was not all of those things in their early 20s? Their deaths are a sad reminder of these dangerous times and the need to tackle the drug scourge in an intelligent way, learning from the mistakes of the past.

Little over a fortnight ago the big drug controversy was over Justine Delaney Wilson’s claim that a minister had admitted to her he had snorted cocaine. Initially she said she had the confession on tape.

One should really be amazed if no current minister has ever tried cocaine. It seems the stuff is so popular among a trendy set around Dublin that at least one minister inevitably would have tried it. What was surprising about the allegation was not that any minister would have been foolish enough to try it, but any of them could be so stupid as to admit it on tape.

Every politician knows what happened to Richard Nixon when he taped himself, and most Irish politicians remember what happened to Brian Lenihan when he admitted on tape that he had tried to influence President Hillery not to dissolve the Dáil on the night that John Bruton’s budget was defeated in 1982.

Lenihan later denied he made the call and protested his honesty, but he was clearly lying to somebody. Maybe he was ill at the time he told the story to the UCD research student on tape, but he also denied on air that he was ill or under the influence of strong medication when he gave the interview. In the end there were just too many contradictory denials.

It was like another former Fianna Fáil minister who protested his honesty by saying he never told a lie in his life. That was the biggest lie of all because he was insulting everybody’s intelligence.

Back in March 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for the White House for the first time, he got himself into trouble by appearing to contradict earlier assertions that he had ever broken any drug laws.

“I have never violated the drug laws of my state”, he had declared on running for governor of Arkansas. “I never experimented with drugs in Arkansas ever since I have been an adult”, he added in 1991.

Of course, the media realised his denials were couched to obscure the possibility that he drank alcohol underage, or that he had smoked elsewhere, such as in England where he went to university, or in Texas where he was the co-ordinator of the presidential election campaign of Senator George McGovern in 1972.

A reporter put the question directly to him in a TV interview in March 1992: “Have you ever broken a state law with regard to drug use and have you ever broken an international law, for example, when you were a student in England?”

“I have never broken a state law”, Clinton replied. “When I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two and didn’t like it and didn’t inhale and never tried again.”

That was like saying that he never drank alcohol; he just smelt it.

While Clinton was in Texas there was a plentiful supply of marijuana from across the Mexican border. A survey at the university I was attending found that about 80% of the senior class admitted to having smoked marijuana back then, even though the penalty at the time for possession was two years to life in prison.

It was a ludicrous penalty, totally out of proportion with the crime. The law was eventually struck down after a black man from Houston was sentenced to 30 years in jail for possession of a small amount of the drug for personal use.

Most people probably do not realise that tea and coffee are drugs, or that the nicotine in tobacco or the alcohol in beer or spirits are in themselves even more dangerous drugs. Marijuana is certainly less habit-forming than alcohol or tobacco. There is a need for a proper and informed debate about legal and illegal drugs.

The events of the past week are a reminder of the dangers and the need for society to face those problems. As a 19-year-old everyone I knew had violated the drug laws in Texas. On one of my first nights there I asked some students where was the nearest bar.

They were highly amused; it was a great laugh that the Irishman was looking for the nearest bar. It was only then that I learned there were some places in America where they had never repealed prohibition. When they talked about “a dry county” in Texas, they didn’t mean it was dusty. They meant there was still a prohibition on the sale of alcohol. The nearest bar was about 30 miles away, across the state line in Oklahoma.

The attitude towards alcohol among young people bred contempt for the drug laws. A few years later, when marijuana became popular — especially among returning veterans from the Vietnam war — that law was treated with utter contempt, too. Even the threat of life in prison did not deter the great majority of university students. Of course, the argument was used back then that marijuana, or cannabis, could lead to harder drugs. It undoubtedly did prompt some people to experiment stupidly. But alcohol had led them to cannabis in the first place.

MANY younger people were warned off cannabis on the grounds that it was a deadly addictive drug, but when they found this was a gross exaggeration, some made the tragic mistake of thinking the warnings about other drugs were just so much nonsense. We’ve made the same mistakes.

Some young people experimented without really knowing what they were doing. A garda superintendent told about a massive drug haul some years ago. He said the packages were laid out on a table and one had been opened and it contained white powder.

He put his finger into the powder and was about to put it in his mouth when a colleague shouted at him to stop, that the pure drug could kill him. He was just doing what the cops always do in the movies. In the movies, however, it is probably only sugar.

Unfortunately, many young people do not know what they are doing when they copy others and take drugs. The whole thing reminds me of the story of a baboon that was given a marble. He looked at it inquisitively, examining it carefully. Then he smelt it and tried to bite it. When that proved futile, he deposited it in his rear end.

That, in effect, is what many young people are doing with drugs. It is not funny; it is tragic and the consequences are blighting society. The ultimate impact could be every bit as disastrous as the blight that caused the Great Famine. Instead of the recent babble about an annual famine memorial day, we should face up to the current blight in our midst.