WE KNOW something odd going on when a convicted criminal embarking upon five year jail sentence applies to a judge to have his sunglasses and his mobile phone returned to him by the State.
As it happens, Brian Cooper from London got his mobile phone, but the weather did not justify the glasses, said Judge Kieran O'Connor. So now poor Brian has to sit squinting in the sun in Mountjoy Jail, ringing his friends to complain about the sunny Irish weather.
Why is this man in jail? Because he was making the drug ecstasy. He is a pharmacist and was involved in the industrial manufacture of a drug our incredibly bright politicians have told us should be illegal.
Everybody knows that this drug is dangerous, and nobody is going to say it is good for you. This is true for all drugs - codeine, aspirin, tea, alcohol, tobacco; all of them will, if taken to excess, damage you. However, none of these last drugs has been illegalised. The drug ecstasy is illegal.
If you are a teenager, you know the answer to the question which follows. Have you any teenage children? Do you know any teenagers? You have? You do? Good. Look them straight in the eye and ask them: Have you or any of your friends ever taken E?
If they look you straight in the eye and say, no daddy, or no, you repulsive old gobshite, or whatever it is your children call you, either they and their friends are a) part of the 10 per cent of Irish teenagers who have not dabbled in drugs, or b) liars.
Complete Failure
Now I do not applaud Brian Cooper, him with the phone but without the sunglasses there in the clink on the North Circular Road; indeed I do not. But why precisely is he in jail? Why have we erected this vast punitive system around certain outlawed drugs when the clear evidence is that the system is a complete failure?
For it is not a question of approving of teenage tastes in these matters, and is certainly not a question of approving of the criminal conduct of Brian Cooper, the cool dude with the shades and the mobile. But it is a question of asking why on earth we insist on criminalising behaviour in which the vast majority of young people insist on indulging.
Such criminalisation is self defeating. It engages the majority of young people in a vast conspiracy to violate the law, if only for the kick of living in the penumbra of lawlessness.
The law and its enforcers are reduced to trawling around a vast sea of fish, hauling in some minnows and the odd fat salmon; but most of the vast numbers of fish in the sea remain untouched.
It is absurd, but that is not its main vice. Much of what we do is absurd. No matter. The criminalisation of drugs has simply handed the control of drugs to criminal cartels.
What we know is that young people will be taking these drugs, for reasons which remain unclear to me; if they do insist on consuming heroin, should not the supply be regulated by the State, as tobacco and alcohol are, rather than futilely outlawed?
Curious Pastimes
No doubt the reasoning for heroin consumption is bizarre, incomprehensible. So is much of human behaviour, such as driving bright red cars or having unprotected sex with strangers, or inhaling the smoke from the controlled combustion of certain American plants, or imbibing liquids made from decaying fruit or grain.
Should we be sending people to prison because they indulge in these curious pastimes? Should we he handing over control of red sports cars and sex with strangers to gangs of Colombians with sunglasses and mobile phones?
The entire history of drug enforcement since it was invented by the Americans in the last century has been one of failure Vast fortunes have been accumulated by different criminal outfits. Activities in which everyone was a consenting adult and no third party was offended were transformed into violations of the law, with vast punishments.
This had two effects; it forced the transaction underground and made it far more expensive. People who became addicted to drugs were forced to pay blackmarket prices; and accordingly had to raise the money by further criminal acts.
The Americans pioneered this perfectly splendid system; and bless my soul if we didn't all emulate them The Dutch tried to break their way out nonsense but they could not, succeed alone. All they achieved was to attract every druggy and deadbeat from neighbouring countries; and the French complained that their glorious jeunesse were being corrupted by these Dutch treats. So the availability of heroin.
Now we see our own Dick Spring polishing up his political armoury in time for his presidency of the European Union, calling for greater powers of search to tackle the drugs problem.
Naturally, the politician's instinct is to acquire more power to deal with a problem rather than to get rid of the problem altogether by actually diminishing his powers. No politician will say, `Get theehence, power. I renounce the and all thy pomps. No indeed not.
Greatest Penetration
And it was almost superbly elegant that Dick Spring's brand new spanking plans to acquire more power for himself and the other European state leaders should have been announced at the same time as proposals for dealing with poverty and social exclusion.
Here, what is this? Some vast joke in had taste? Poverty and social exclusion are the very areas where drug addiction, and its close relation, violent crime, have made their greatest penetration in this splendid regime of criminalising narcotics consumption.
In Ireland we have the added dimension of the IRA, which organised the recent and largely uncondemned lynching in Dublin of a junkie dying of AIDS. It was yet another murder without political consequence for the political colleagues of the IRA.
As we know too well, who Adares, wins. And meanwhile, the jails are brimming with cool dudes with mobiles and, in this weather, shades, man.