LET’S be honest here – many of us have tried illicit drugs. We’ve been to college parties where a joint was passed around, and we’ve taken a drag. Maybe even inhaled.

In my case, it was about 45 years ago, give or take, and cannabis did very little for me.

It didn’t deepen my appreciation of music and it didn’t supply any cosmic revelation. It just made me a little more introspective, so I decided on the spot that my drug of choice would remain a legal one.

Alcohol made me more sociable in situations in which I was shy. It swept away teenage inhibitions, sometimes saw me on the wrong side of garrulousness, had my teetotal mother and father occasionally wondering where they went wrong, but it never took a hold of me.

Nonetheless, proponents of the legalisation of cannabis maintain that if alcohol were invented today, it would be banned tomorrow since it becomes addictive for many, and has reprehensible societal impacts that run the gamut from domestic abuse of spouses and children, impaired sexual behaviour, and reckless driving that too often leads to fatalities of the innocent as well as the guilty.

Legalisation of illicit drugs is for another day, and I suspect a long time away. Many states across the water, and many countries in Europe – including the Netherlands, Czechia, Germany and Malta – have relaxed laws that allow consumption, and the cultivation of limited numbers of plants, for personal recreational use, but I can’t see that catching on here just yet.

It certainly won’t in this house, since I have what appears to be a tremendous skill when it comes to killing indoor plants of any description. If I needed it for medicinal purposes, it’s legal here on a five-year test programme and with strict controls.

What we are talking about now in this country is decriminalisation for personal possession, but not just for cannabis. Instead, the Oireachtas Joint Committee (so named because it comprises both senators and TDs though, under the circumstances, they could have thought of a better name) has recommended that all drugs be decriminalised.

All drugs. That means everything from amphetamines, LSD and ecstasy (also known as MDMA), to cocaine, crack, and heroin, as well as cannabis (for which read marijuana, which I’m so ignorant of that I didn’t until now really understand the difference).

As you no doubt know, the traditional means of curtailing the use of such drugs, including imprisonment, simply doesn’t work. Ireland is the second-biggest consumer of MDMA in the European Union, after the Netherlands, with roughly one in ten 15- to 34-year-olds admitting to taking it at some stage. 

Cocaine is everywhere, from chichi dinner parties in south Dublin, where people will happily swap stories of the scumbags who import and deal it without ever making the connection that they actually created the market, to every town and village in the country.

When 20%, one in five, of male GAA players say they know of a teammate who has a problem not with performance-enhancing drugs but with so-called recreational ones, as was the case in a survey of members last October, you know they are a serious problem nationwide.

Decriminalisation can work – and it can’t. Portugal is always held up as an example, and the experience there has been positive. Instead of treating personal possession and addiction as crimes, both have been treated as medical issues since 2001.

When an individual is caught with narcotics, he or she is referred to Dissuasion Commissions – panels of legal, health, and social work professionals who assess the user’s risk and provide guidance or treatment options without imposing jail time – and the results have been reductions in sentencing, and significant drops in addiction and in drug-related HIV; when users know they will not go to jail, they are more likely to use injection centres and clean needles.

The experience in the US, though, is that there has been a rise in drug use where decriminalisation has occurred; "without severe penalties and just a slap on the wrist, why wouldn’t there be?", the logic goes.

Indeed, not everyone agrees. A Citizens’ Assembly, having listened to the experts for and against, concluded this was a good move, and recommended it, though I still have a huge problem with a Citizens’ Assembly. We have a democracy, so why we’re basing the law on the recommendations of 100 unelected people will never not be baffling to me, even if I agree with them on most things.

The Irish Medical Organisation is less enthusiastic. The association president, Matthew Sadlier, said the IMO would be ‘very cautious’ about any change. ‘Saying that we should deal with drug use as a health-led approach is a bit like saying, instead of stopping people smoking, we’ll just increase cancer treatments,’ he told David McCullagh on RTÉ Radio yesterday.

This is too momentous a decision to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Before we decriminalise everything, let’s start with the minor drugs and see how the curve evolves.

Let’s get those Dissuasion Commissions established beforehand and let’s resource them properly; we have a great habit here of being reactive rather than proactive.

Let’s also do as Portugal did and commit extra resources to policing an Atlantic coast that’s wide open to smuggling from South America; killing the head of the snake is more effective than playing around with the tail.

Finally, though, can we have a few more guards on the streets? Having been to Lisbon, I’ve been randomly approached to buy heroin. I always say no, naturally. Someone a lot more gullible or impetuous might not, though.

The law may change, but not, I hope, to the one of unintended consequences.

Some like it hot – but I’m under a blanket

IF anyone else rhapsodises about the current snap of good weather, he or she had better watch out. It may indeed be sunny from dawn to dusk, but here at least it hasn’t exactly been warm enough to sit out.

Friends up the road live in a house that fronts onto the sea, so it acts as a wind-breaker. Mine sides on to the local beach 250 metres away, and the result is that both gardens, front and back, act as a wind tunnel for the northeasterly that seems to blow constantly.

About the only positive is that I haven’t had to top up the oil because it’s warm enough indoors. Outside, well, while some of you are at the beach, I’ve never got so as much use out of the blanket. In a heatwave.

Kids dream of being under the influence

IT’S easy to scoff at research in the US that revealed 60% of children aspired to be online influencers when they grow up. The study, by the University of Wisconsin-Stout, canvassed children in that country and in Norway (why?), and found they see their future on YouTube or TikTok.

This contrasts greatly with my generation, whose enthusiasm was a little more likely to be inspired by the moon landings, or the Mexico World Cup in 1970. Before you laugh at kids today, though, bear in mind that we’re telling them non-stop that AI is coming for all the jobs of old, and half of them will be redundant for life, not just at the end of it. 

Against that backdrop, I think taking a video of yourself unboxing the latest iPhone is a smart move, in every sense.