Sir, - As a parent of curious, healthy teenagers, I hope any readers who found themselves nodding in agreement at D.K. Henderson's paean to the glories of Jesuit indoctrination (Cannabis Expulsion Case, December 17th) went on to read Joe Humphreys's more considered and insightful assessment of the double-think and hypocrisy that surrounds our attitudes to drink and to drugs in general (An Irishman's Diary, same date).
Mr Henderson might ask his doctor, or a local garda, or for that matter the National Advisory Committee on Drugs, for a breakdown of the deaths, assaults, motor accidents, house fires, sickness, absenteeism, child and spouse or parent abuse, and the ongoing expense to taxpayers created by the legal and increasingly available (no small thanks to our current Minister for Justice) drug of choice of our own generation - alcohol.
If Mr Henderson finds the scientific evidence difficult to digest, he might resort to several presentations by young people themselves, over the years, at the Young Scientists Exhibition.
Cannabis has been used as a recreational drug for millennia across a variety of cultures, with little documentation of anything like the damage associated with alcohol.
Is it not part of legal culture that a law not supported by the general public brings the law as a whole into disrepute? My conviction, for what it's worth, is that the continuing disinformation being pumped out on this issue is in the interests of one group above all others - the alcohol barons who oil the wheels of our increasingly dysfunctional society.
The bleakest effect of this ignorance is that many disaffected youngsters, on finding how innocuous the demon cannabis actually is, jump to the false conclusion that all psychoactive chemicals have been propagandised out of all proportion.
We owe the next generation more honesty and courage than we are displaying on a raft of issues, not least this central one to their unjust criminalisation, before we are deserving of their respect. - Yours, etc.,
Damien Flinter, Church Hill, Clifden, Connemara.