Another drugs haul the other day, another triumph for the drugs squad, and another set of headlines about "the evils of the drugs trade"; the same again tomorrow, and the day after, writes Kevin Myers.
The idiocy of our drugs laws is matched only by the idiocy of the refusal of our elected representatives to discuss them intelligently - an idiocy mirrored by our media's fulminations on the subject. Instead, most voices in Ireland can be relied on to enter a denunciation sweepstake, thundering on about how drugs ruin lives, squander fortunes and lead to prostitution, mental illness, crime and misery.
Which is true. But not as much as booze. Drugs don't kill nearly so many people as alcohol does. Drugs don't bring as much poverty as alcohol does. Drugs don't cause as much mental illness. Drugs don't cause as much misery. And worst of all, unlike cigarettes and alcohol - serial killers both - drugs don't raise a penny for the Exchequer.
Last week, a medical report declared it had found proof that long-term psychiatric damage can be caused by cannabis use. Well, fry my gizzard. Anyone in Coolmine or the Rutland Centre could have told you that years ago. All recreational drug use can inflict long-term damage to mental health. This is so obvious it's barely worth saying. Drugs, like alcoholic drinks, are mind-altering substances; and you can't repeatedly alter anything, be it the bumper on your car, or the rules at breakfast, without very possibly changing it forever.
So nobody's saying that drug-taking's a good thing. It's not. Often enough, it's a bad thing; and usually a really stupid thing. But it's not as bad as banning all narcotics, and thereby handing a monopoly on drugs supply to criminal conspiracies.
We've seen the folly of this policy come to sumptuous fruition in the numerous sink estates around Dublin, where whatever authority the Garda once possessed has passed to ruthless, armed gangs of drugs-dealers. They now murder rivals with utter impunity, as drugs consumption among young people has soared beyond control and beyond counting.
The majority of young people over 16 have taken ecstasy. The same for cannabis/marijuana. Vast numbers have taken cocaine and heroin derivatives. Every single consumer of these drugs, without fail, has enriched a criminal gang. Every single consumer - and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people here - has freely become a participant in the culture of murder in which these gangs operate. And this is because the State, with unerring ineptitude and arrogant stupidity, has chosen to provide the underworld with a monopoly over the supply of recreational drugs, the most profitable consumer item known to mankind.
The primary victims of heroin abuse are working-class teenagers. Because of the criminalisation of heroin, which means that supply has been surrendered to the very worst elements in society, the price of what should be a ludicrously cheap drug is instead ludicrously high. Many girls are drawn into prostitution to pay for their habit. If they're lucky, they get to work in massage parlours, where they're safe from pimps and violent clients, and where they're paid according to a tariff.
The response of An Garda Síochána under the wretched, unlamented Commissioner Patrick Byrne, was Operation Gladiator, a disgraceful campaign to close the massage parlours, accompanied by the odious and triumphant approval of tabloids. The result: teenage junky-hookers were back on the streets. Not one single woman TD has had the courage to speak out about this immoral and irresponsible assault on her fellow women - because, of course, they're whores, and middle-class women tend to despise prostitutes, and with a pitiless venom.
These poor girls are caught both ways; but still, if they're thrown into clink, that'll be just fine, because Ireland's jails are our narcotics capitals. Getting heroin or cocaine in our jails is just like getting rice in a Chinese restaurant. The Department of Justice effectively has established a franchise on the biggest round-the-clock smack-houses in the country, having already carefully steered the participants there from early adolescence onwards. What an achievement.
Moreover, our drugs policy has not merely been catastrophically counter-productive, but actually cruel. Many people with cancer or MS can get relief only from cannabis; yet there is no lawful supply of what for most of us has been an entertaining and pleasurable drug: and in my youth - though no longer - I could emphatically have placed myself in that category.
Our ban on drugs is prudishness turned into ideological policy, all out of fear of being labelled a sinner. By such cowardice did we once ban harmless erotica, homosexuality, condoms, divorce - and down the decades we were promised by our fire-breathing Hierarchy that certain ruin would follow if we legalised them. But ruin does not come from liberalisation; it comes from prohibition.
Opiates were lawful in 19th-century Ireland, not just in the form of laudanum but also in many commercial medications. Sherlock Holmes broke no law when he took cocaine. Variants of most of the drugs which young people take illegally across Ireland today were legally available over the counter in chemists' shops a century or more ago - as indeed, were condoms; and all were outlawed in the 1920s.
Our drugs laws are not just crazy. They're actually wicked. They have created a criminal cartel, which manages to be both uncontrollable and yet Garda-protected, one which coolly divides up monopolies and murders opponents. Hundreds of lives are being ruined each year: and from Dáil Éireann, the merry jig of righteous and cowardly inertia.