The Coke Joke

international | crime and justice | opinion/analysis Wednesday December 12, 2007 12:17 by World Weary

Criminalisation is not working and never will work

If Katy French had grown up in Finglas or Ballyfermot or Clondakin or Lucan or someother place that the politicians in the Dail and establishment who live in leafy afluent parts of South Dublin do not know exist and was working in a supermarket when she died from using cocaine her death would have been mentioned in a tiny paragraph in the newspapers and would not resurface until months later the coroner would rule the fatalily was the result of death through misadventure. If Katy French had not died this past week the deaths and hospitalisation of a number of young men in Waterford and in the Midlands from drug use would hardly have earned a mention in the mainstream broadsheets.

The truth is that a significant number of people ar every level of society are using drugs.
Some of the judges, barristers, gardai and politcians who are pontificating about this "scourge" are using drugs themselves as are their children.
The beautifully manicured girls sahsaying down Grafton Street and the howyees in their pyjamas wheeling their baby buggies around the ILac centre are just as likely to use drugs as anybody else.
I don't use drugs, I don't smoke and I don't drink but a good number of people I know would consume drugs without a thought in the same way it is taken for granted that on a nightout a person has a drink or goes out for a fag.
And really and truly nobody thinks that its anybody elses business. No big deal.
Everybody knows somebody in their neighbourhood who is driving a flashy car or has made lavish home improvement but it is not clear where their income is coming from.
The schoolkids are being told that drugs are wrong by school teachers who are snorting coke themselves.
Priests and clergy sermonising are taking the stuff too.

Drugs kill people but more people are dying from alcohol and cigarettes.

Drugs are criminalised but even when these laws are enforced they barely make a dent in the drug trade.

Worldwide hundreds of billions of dollars is made from this global business which has been gifted to a small fraternity of individuals with the result that drug prices are artificially inflated and huge resources are available to corrupt governments.

The root of conflicts in the Carribean, South America, Afghanistan and South East Asia is drugs.

The anti-drugs crusade is founded on hypocrisy and has failed utterly and indeed has made the problem worse.

There are no good options - legalising drugs will remove the power money and influence from vicious criminals only for multi-national drug corporations to take over but continuing the criminalise this trade is a denial of reality.