Recreational drug users do not like to admit that they are helping to fund criminal gangs, writes Shane Hegarty
Last weekend, a lot of people will have smoked a joint or snorted a line of cocaine or popped an E, without stopping to make the connection between that and a man slumped dead in a car in Clontarf. Comfortable in the belief that their closest link to gangsters is their Sopranos DVD, some of them might even have discussed the recent gangland killings.
There are plenty of, what one commentator tagged, "average, middle-class, drug tourists", those who indulge regularly in recreational drugs, or who did so in their youth and have either given it up or still enjoy the odd joint if the kids are staying over at grannies.
They don't see themselves as connected to the wider drug problem and certainly not linked to the gang wars. The feuds belong to a world far removed from them. Those criminals are fighting over the drugs that go to the squalid inner city flats, that feed the zombified junkies roaming the city.
The middle classes, though, buy their cannabis, not from a threatening figure in an alley, but from their good mate who they've known since college. They'll wonder if their T-shirt was made in an Indonesian sweatshop or if their coffee is Fair Trade, but they'll buy and take their drugs without too much thought.
They certainly won't pause to dwell on the link between a couple of joints over the weekend and a man driven to the Wicklow mountains to have a bullet put through the back of his head.
They know, though, that the dope trade is not controlled by free-living hippies trying to keep the 60s spirit alive, nor are ecstasy factories run by enterprising chemistry students making extra cash. Unless they're picking their own magic mushrooms, it's likely that they'll have to enter an economic chain that takes several detours to the criminal gangs.
The drugs economy is not something that comes with audited quarterly figures, but it's likely that if every recreational dope smoker was to put down their skins tomorrow, it would take an enormous gouge out of those gangs' profits.
If every social cocaine user was to pass on a line, it would not put an end to the drugs trade, but it would do it far more damage than any Garda raid has managed.
When it comes to drugs, it appears that the Irish keep up their hard-won reputations for excess. Surveys tell us that one Irish person in six has smoked cannabis and that 5 per cent of 15-34-year-olds say they have taken cocaine.
The United Nations World Drug Report 2005 places Ireland in joint third place, out of 30 European countries, for cocaine use and in joint sixth place for ecstasy use.
What has been caught often gives us a good idea of what has not.
The total value of Irish drug seizures in 2004 was €50 million, but the flow of drugs on the streets, in the colleges, schools, pubs and around the dinner party tables suggests that far more wasn't.
In fact, so much cannabis found its way through last year that the street price purportedly fell by almost a third. The drug entrepreneurs become enormously wealthy on the back of it, not least because it is a solid industry.
It boomed when the rest of the country did not and it will be buoyant after the rest of the economy sinks. And inner-city heroin addicts alone are not funding it.
Recreational drug users know this, of course, it's just that they don't like to think about it too much.
Drug use has become so commonplace among the middle classes that many see it almost as a right. For some, that might be true. It is patently ridiculous that cannabis, by being categorised as a schedule one drug, is considered in Ireland to have "little or no use in medicine or industry" when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Even Teagasc trials have concluded that hemp fibre could be cultivated successfully, while its medicinal properties drive chronically ill people to break the law in order to take advantage of it.
An exaggerated fear of the drug, though, can lead to a politician losing his senses, such as when Bertie Ahern described marijuana as "the most addictive drug of all".
Actually, we have reached a point at which even politicians can admit to drug use without fear of too much damage, as long as it was in their youth, and depending on what drug (cannabis is acceptable, cocaine a no-no). The Dáil benches are yet to be warmed by the ecstasy generation, but they will be, even if ecstasy gives the user an appreciation of mankind considered unsuited to becoming a politician.
The argument for legalisation is heard occasionally, even if the practicalities of such a move are much more difficult to articulate than the theory. Too often, though, the recreational drug user is willingly distracted by the failings of the law.
Prohibition allows criminal gangs to exploit a hungry market, but it should not abdicate their customers from personal responsibility, especially when their drug use is motivated not by addiction but by straight-forward self-indulgence.
Middle-class drug use helps fuel the drug gangs, and their feuds. It is too easy to blame bad law, to argue that just because something is legally wrong does not mean it is morally wrong.
It makes it easier to divert one's conscience from the reality of the drug trade and how, when an assassin pulls up beside his victim's car and pulls the trigger, he is not doing it because of some ideological debate over the inadequacies of the law.