All in all, another triumphant few days for our drugs policies: three young women jailed, five children left motherless, a young man dead, and another in a coma. And we can only speculate as to how many other women slipped over the precipice during that same period, from being casual drugs-users to being addicts, and are now on the road to prostitution.
do not know which is more perplexing: this insistence on trying to impose insane and unworkable drugs laws; or the almost total silence which shrouds the catastrophic consequences which result from them.
Yet we all know the truth. Our drugs laws have created an entire underground monopoly for the criminal classes. At least 60pc of the male prisoners and almost 100pc of female prisoners in Mountjoy Jail are there because of drugs-related offences, and 90pc of planned murders share a similar background.
It is insanity. Utter insanity. This is a land-war in Asia, a kindergarten battle against a tsunami, an argument with an intergalactic comet. We cannot win. We know this. Victory is impossible, and the longer the war goes on, the deeper its defeats reach into our society, spreading corruption, misery, murder and accidental death; meanwhile criminalising entire groups of people who might otherwise never come into conflict with the law.
Three such people were this week sentenced to absurdly long terms of imprisonment, bringing ruin on their young lives, though, one hopes, temporarily.
They are Nicola Duggan, Vivienne O'Donovan, and Niamh Tracey, all aged 27, of Cork. I do not normally refer to people convicted in our courts by their first names, but I will here, because I wish them well.
They are simple people who have been caught in the abominable trap which lies between popular custom and the criminal law.
Nicola was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, Vivienne to four and Niamh to three, for the "crime" of transporting cannabis worth €120,000 from Dublin to Cork. Two of them have never come to the notice of An Garda Siochana before -- which is more than you could have said of me at their age -- and the third had a single insignificant "previous".
These are perfectly shocking sentences, more appropriate to a crime of violence than to couriering a drug which is almost universally used amongst the young, and one which I smoked many, many times when I was in my twenties.
To be sure, it is irrelevant that these three women are mothers, for we cannot have a system which declares in advance that mothers who break the law will be treated more leniently than non-mothers.
Yet nonetheless, there is something perfectly grotesque about a judicial process which will rob five young children of their mothers for so long, over such a relatively trivial offence.
Trivial offence? Carrying drugs worth €120,000 a trivial offence? Yes, actually; because the cannabis is only that absurd price for two reasons. The first is market demand (ie popularity); the second is that the supply is restricted by a preposterous and unworkable criminal law.
Basic economics: demand naturally strong, supply artificially restricted, therefore price sky-high. The real price of the cannabis, determined by production costs alone, would probably be in the region of €1,000. So, we can say that the criminalisation of this almost universally used drug amongst the young has increased its market value 120-fold.
So how immoral, stupid, silly, outrageous, demented and wicked does a system have to be before you change it? And this is before we get to poor Kevin Doyle, the young lad who died the other day from a cocaine overdose.
The drug which killed him is so popular that its supply simply cannot be prevented by law. So the criminalisation of cocaine usage simply means that there can be no regulation over its manufacture, distribution or content.
And this is one of the key points of our absurd laws on drugs. The grass -- marijuana -- of my youth grew naturally in a warm climate and was lovely stuff: mild, intoxicating, happy-making.
The cannabis on the market now is force-grown in greenhouses, and is far richer in toxic, dementia-inducing TCBs than the natural stuff. Instead of policing this range of related drugs, as it does paracetamols and aspirins, the State has stepped back and handed the entire affair over to the criminal gangs of Moyross and Coolock, with entirely predictable consequences.
Yet far from the media addressing this really serious issue, we get the utterly silly, infantile and self-righteous hysteria over which Government minister allegedly took cocaine. Does it really matter? Is it not far more important to get rid of these crazy laws which have done so much damage to our society, and in their stead, introduce a system of drugs-regulation, just as we have for alcohol, cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals?
This might mean that some drugs are outlawed, just as wormwood-absinthe and poitin are: but the existence of cheap, controlled drugs will drive the bad drugs from the market-place.
And then we shall be spared the utterly disgusting, obscene sight of young mothers like Nicola, Vivienne and Niamh being imprisoned for years and years in jail, merely for the victimless crime of transporting cannabis.
