This week a London court confirmed a very long jail sentence on one of Dublin's major drug dealers, Tommy Mullen. For those whose lives have been blighted by Mullen's cynical and cruel career in the heroin industry, this was some small satisfaction.

The human cost of making people like Tommy Mullen rich was brought home by the death toll from the circulation of contaminated heroin in Dublin. Perhaps more shocking was the way they highlighted the "normal" death rate among heroin-users. The usually invisible background levels of squalid catastrophe were briefly illuminated by an added tinge of horror.

At the same time, too, there were disturbing reminders that such high-profile triumphs for law enforcement as the jailing of Tommy Mullen do little to alter the underlying reality of drug abuse in Ireland. The European Union was presented this week with a report suggesting that 13 gangs controlled organised crime in Ireland, much of it fuelled by the drug trade. When one drug boss is jailed, another steps in. This cycle will continue so long as there is a demand for the products these gangs peddle.

Two stark facts emerge from these disparate but related events. One is that even the prospect of a terrible death does not deter addicts from feeding their habit. Asking users to stop using heroin, as the Minister of State, Eoin Ryan, who co-ordinates the National Drug Strategy, did yesterday is like asking bees to stop making honey.

The other is that the drug war has been lost. Whatever the Garda or the international law enforcement agencies do, the demand will always be supplied. That the heroin on the streets in Ireland is cheaper and purer now than it was 10 years ago tells us what we most need to know about the success or failure of the drug war.

Anyone tempted to believe it can be won with more laws, bigger police forces and more prison cells needs only to look at the US, where phenomenal levels of spending on the drug war and extraordinarily harsh laws have failed to stem the supply of illegal drugs on the streets.

Together, these facts raise fundamental questions about drug strategies in Ireland. At the very least, they demand a rational and well-informed reappraisal of how this society deals with substance abuse. That rethink has to start, not with how right-thinking people would like things to be but with the uncomfortable realities of how they are.

It may well be that, if the State had responded differently to the beginnings of the heroin crisis in working-class Dublin in the early 1980s, the drug culture would not have taken hold. But as the official Drugs Task Force report acknowledged in 1997, "For a decade or more, this State failed to tackle effectively the spread in the illicit trafficking and pushing of opiates, the destruction of the lives of individuals, the havoc wrought in communities".

That neglect was disgraceful, but its consequences cannot quickly be undone. The drug culture that was allowed to grow then has set down deep roots. It will be a fact of life for a long time to come.

It no longer makes sense, moreover, to see drug abuse as a weird affliction at the fringes of society. One of the few certainties about the American presidential election this year, for example, is that the next leader of the world's most powerful nation will be a former abuser of illegal drugs.

The Republican candidate, George W. Bush, had a serious cocaine habit for a long period. The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, like the majority of people of his age and class, was for a time a frequent smoker of cannabis. If the president of the United States is a reformed drug-user, how can we pretend that junkies are social freaks?

It is becoming clear, too, that in all parts of the State large numbers of young people, who function perfectly well as decent members of society, use illegal drugs like cannabis and ecstasy, at least occasionally.

Their parents, of course, tend to favour legal drugs like alcohol. Few medical professionals or social workers would argue that the damage to the health of individuals, families and communities done by alcohol addiction is significantly less than that of heroin or cocaine addiction. What we have, then, are huge numbers of recreational drug-users, some of whom go on to become addicts. In such a situation the real question is not "How do we cut off the supply of drugs?" It is "How do we stop recreational users from becoming addicts, or, if they do develop addiction, how to help them out of it?" When that kind of question is asked, the focus shifts from law enforcement to public health.

In many respects, that shift has already happened in the State. For practical purposes, the ordinary use of cannabis has been effectively decriminalised, largely because strict enforcement of the law would overwhelm the judicial system. The provision of treatment, though still inadequate, has increased hugely throughout the 1990s.

With the use of methadone maintenance and needle-exchange programmes, the State itself has taken on the role of supplier to many addicts, recognising that if people are going to use narcotics, it is best they do so safely and without resorting to crime to feed their habits.

THE logic of this new emphasis, however, still comes up against the narrow limits of official thinking. International drug strategies are still heavily influenced by the militaristic rhetoric of the American drug war in which all the disastrous consequences of Prohibition in the 1920s - the rise of vicious gangsters and the creation of a huge market for dangerous, uncontrolled alcohol - are taken to new heights.

This rhetoric makes it difficult for those who actually work with addicts to be heard when they argue for "unthinkable" policies. In recent years, for example, Father Gerry Raftery of the Franciscan Justice Office and Father Sean Cassin, a member of the National Drugs Strategy Team, have argued for new approaches, including the provision of heroin to addicts on prescription.

Father Cassin argued before a Dail committee: "We're not in favour of anybody using or injecting drugs. But today some 10,000 injecting drug-users are going to take heroin. They're going to inject it and find or rob or steal the materials necessary to inject it."

Given that reality, he said, the State should adopt the Swiss strategy of prescribing heroin for addicts.

Such a policy would go a long way towards preventing the kind of disaster unfolding among heroin-users in Dublin. It would also be a far bigger blow to the drug-pushers than anything the Criminal Assets Bureau, for all its good work, can deliver. By choking off the demand that delivers the inflated profits created by an illegal market, it would hit them where it hurts.

By being ready to think the unthinkable, Irish society might begin to create a situation in which far fewer families had to bear the unbearable.

fotoole@irish-times.ie