None of this would have happened if drugs had been legal. Of course, there are some who actually want what crack has to offer. If they resolutely refuse all help offered they should be allowed to smoke themselves to death - if legal, crack would be a very cheap drug to produce, and they could be offered the powerful sedatives needed to keep them on an even keel. They would not cause much harm to anyone except themselves. But most of the people who got sucked into crack use would not have been. If drugs were legal their effects, side effects, and long term effects would have to be printed on the packets. The recreational drug market is a huge one, and if legalised the big pharmaceutical companies would pour in billions to develop new lines which mirrored the desirable effects of crack but minimised the undesirable ones - most people do not want to destroy themselves, it would not be a difficult choice. It is absurd of us to have denied ourselves the benefits of scientific advances in an area so integral to so many people's enjoyment of life - intoxication. The other side of the coin is that there are worse drugs than crack out there waiting to be discovered, and if drugs remain illegal they will be discovered and exploited by organised crime. Our government is involved in a project seeking to destroy the worlds opium and coca crops throu' some form of biological warfare - this is an insane policy, for should they succeed new, and almost certainly nastier, laboratory produced drugs would emerge to take its place. From a purely pragmatic point of view, prohibition has been a disaster (and it always will be - we cannot even keep drugs out of maximum security prisons), and as one cannot have principles without pragmatics, perhaps we should put the social effects of prohibition as the evil above all others; even so, for any lover of liberty it should be a glaring wrong.

The right to intoxicate, or not, as one wishes is as fundamental a right as the right to worship, or not, as one wishes. In other words: it is as wrong for the state to seek to control a person's determination of their consciousness as it is for it to seek to control a person's determination of their beliefs. The only reasonable response to the existential questioning of the last hundred and fifty years is a profound tolerance of those who are not hurting others. This is as deep a tenet as the twentieth century has managed to articulate (for all its being first mouthed in the mid-nineteenth century). Yet this tolerance develops a blind spot when it comes to drugs. Western governments happily shout at other regimes about their intolerances, but will not themselves tolerate drug users walking their streets. Altho' they justify their stance by saying that prohibition is essential for society's survival (the opposite of the case), the root reason for their and their peoples' support for prohibition is a deeply ingrained Puritanism. Drugs, the feeling goes, are about pleasure and nothing more, they are decadent and lead to decadent behaviour. And they are dangerous, but not in the way that other pastimes are dangerous. If one dies attempting to climb Mount Everest (as one in four people who attempt to do), one is judged some kind of hero and one's death something noble (unless one is the parent of young children). Seeking pleasure and self-knowledge throu' climbing mountains is a fine thing to do. But if one's death has come about throu' taking ecstasy (for one in five million trips are fatal) and seeking pleasure and self-knowledge throu' intoxicated dancing and conversation, one's death is a sordid tragedy and those who aided you must be hunted down and imprisoned. In the modern world one can devote one's life to any number of fatuous activities: driving motorbikes at insane speeds round a winding track, jumping from bridges with a piece of elastic tied to one's ankles, fasting and self-mortification, but one is not allowed to sit down with a few friends and enjoy a smoke of good ganja or take an E at the weekend and dance and talk the night away.

This infringement of our liberty should be a source of outrage in the modern world, but it hardly raises a murmur. The powerful know that they will not be touched and are frightened of stirring up the proles with mood rousing drugs. Even liberal commentators who use illegal drugs, or who have friends who do, keep quiet - their liberal instincts swamped by a puritan guilt which whispers that drugs really are bad, all right for them and their friends perhaps, but not safe for the uneducated masses. But altho' there is not much outrage, their is a huge reservoir of sullen resentment at prohibition building up amongst users and a corresponding contempt for the state which enforces it (imagine how you'd feel if New Labour under Jack Straw banned alcohol as part of their fourth term 'moral regeneration' programme). The illegal drug business is so enormous because so many people take them. The vast majority are people who would otherwise be law abiding; they do not like being made outlaws of and the law falls into disrespect - once again prohibition is feeding the breakdown of civil society. And altho' there may not be much outrage, there is some, and it is justified. There are those serving prison sentences for supplying drugs who are criminals who saw a chance to make money and went for it; others are moral people who believe in the virtues of their drug of choice and sought to do good while making a living - they are prisoners of conscience as much as anyone incarcerated for worshipping the wrong god. In the modern world people must be free to do anything apart from hurting others.

Drugs must be legalised, all of them, but what will this mean for us? For drugs are a powerful element in the shaping of our world, and will continue to be so - legal or illegal, for better or for worse. The only human society never to have used intoxicants was the Inuit before Europeans turned up with alcohol (which quickly spread throu' and devastated their community). Drugs are an integral part of human society. Not everybody wants to use them, but in every human society there are many who like to intoxicate - and whether it is for spiritual or hedonistic reasons, intoxication is a natural process that we should seek to make as safe and worthwhile as possible. The intoxicants that matter at the moment are psychedelics, stimulants, analgesics, and alcohol. But an intoxicant works upon uniquely functioning consciousnesses throu' individual physiologies. This means that the same drug can do different things to different people, or to the same person at different times, and similar effects can be produced by different drugs. However, one can divide the subjective experience of modern day intoxication broadly into the psychedelic, the stimulated, the analgesic, and the drunken.

Modern gatherings of the young can sometimes contain a strong spiritual and mystical element, and psychedelic drugs are usually a part of this (even if only in the form of cannabis). The West has not known anything like it since the classical mystery religions - Dionysus has added new ornament to his crown of vines and is dancing the modern world. As with all drugs, tho', the benefit cannot be achieved on its own. It is a painful truth that our level of existence is characterised by the downward pull of the bad: if we make no effort, we descend. Drugs can make you worse without your trying, they can only help you get better if you put in the right sort of effort. Given this, psychedelics are doing good and have enormous potential to help us feel more at one with each other and our world, and with the right science there will be many more tickets to new and fascinating worlds for those who like to explore.

If the psychedelic effect is visionary - a change in the way one sees the world, then the stimulant effect is somatic, a change in the way one relates to one's body. When stimulated, the whole body -including the brain- is stimulated. Those mental functions which require raw propulsive energy are energised. One is confident and enthusiastic - even nihilists become enthusiastic, about their nihilism. Different drugs stimulate different parts of the psyche. The enthusiasm generated by cocaine can easily be directed inwards leading to egotism and egoism - people with heavy habits often behave despicably; but there is probably no reason why this has to happen. One possibility is that cocaine will become popular as a mild stimulant - that many will end up taking it in doses equivalent to those ingested by the Indians who chew coca leaves in South America - then it would indeed be similar to having a cup of tea; as for heavy use, the sort of thing we see today where for many people it is a primary drug of choice, I think this will fade when science and legality increase the range of more wholesome alternatives.

I see ecstasy, with regard to its immediate effects, as largely a force for good in the modern world, on the whole it helps bring people together and makes them more tolerant; if they like this effect and use it to help bring about changes in their day to day life, it can help make them a better person. Whether there is a long term price to pay for this is still an open question. Of course, it is also a potentially dangerous drug in the short term, as the tragic case of Leah Betts has come to symbolise. In seeking to apportion blame for Leah's death it is worth considering one's response upon hearing, say, of a terrible bus crash in a poorly run third world country: one does not blame the activity of travelling in buses, but the poverty of the country which means that vehicles are not roadworthy and traffic regulations not enforced. It was ecstasy's illegality which killed Leah Betts. She took an extra-strong tablet - a friend had advised her to take only half, but she had already taken ecstasy a few times and the pill looked just like the others, she didn't worry about it. If ecstasy was legal it would come in measured amounts and people would know the safe dosage. Few activities are without risk (last year forty anglers were killed in pursuit of their hobby), but legal ecstasy use would not be high in the danger league. Further, stimulants are an obvious case where science could quickly vastly improve the quality and range of choice available - once again we are depriving ourselves for no good reason. My own experience of the ones currently available is that the inevitable low that follows the high means that if used at all, such use should most definitely be the exception rather than the rule. -Many people use stimulants every weekend; such use is liable to make for a fairly miserable early to mid-week, a price too high for a joyful weekend if one would otherwise be content. The problem is those for whom their drug high is their only happiness: for such people stimulant use might seem rational - I would say, tho', that it is providing only a short term solution and will in the long run make the person's problems worse; they need to find out and deal with the source of their misery.

Analgesia is the most boring of intoxications, unless one happens to be in pain. I include in this category tranquillisation -the deadening of anxiety- along with straightforward pain reduction -where pain (mental or physical) is deadened or made less important, both involve a shrinking of awareness, a numbness: from heroin to valium, a part of oneself is taken out of account. For most of us this holds little attraction - the best i have got out of even the strongest opiates (tho' one must take into account different physiologies) is the agreeable sensation of being wrapped in a warm inviolable blanket of comfort. A pleasant enough experience, but largely useless unless one wants to go to sleep and, anyway, if one is well that is more or less what one experiences when dropping off to sleep (imagine drowsing in a big comfortable bed with not a care in the world). There is a huge exception to this, tho' - those who are in pain. Imagine that you have had a pointed stick, invisible to others, digging into the small of your back since you were a child. The pain has been constant and you have learned to live your life around it, twisting your body to accommodate. Further, you are ashamed of this pain and, as its cause is invisible to everyone apart from you, you seek to make it invisible to yourself - you lie about it to yourself until the lies succeed and it fades from view, all anyone can see is the contortions you have built into your body to compensate. This is analogous to the way some people carry severe spiritual and emotional wounds, the contortions of the body standing for personality defects such as rage, depression, self-hatred, and obsession.

For these people, a powerful analgesic like heroin will take the pain away for perhaps the first time in the life they remember. For some, their first experience of heroin is the first time they have not despised themselves since they were children: the rush of self-affirmation and self-reward which floods from this contrast constitutes the 'raptures' of the heroin high. For the undamaged, analgesics offer nothing more than a pleasant door to sleep and wasting time: occasionally useful, but in a good world there would be no demand for them outside of medical treatment - the spiritually healthy do not seek to cut themselves off and hide from the pain of life, they hold onto it as a means of growth and of curing the cause of the pain (for, of course, analgesics do nothing about the root problem, and after (at most) a few months the pain is as bad as before - nothing has changed except that the user has become an addict).

Drunkenness is unlike the other forms of intoxication because it is tied specifically to one drug, and the effects of that drug can be analgesic, stimulative, or even psychedelic. If a person is tired, alcohol can throw them into a deep sleep; if they are excited, alcohol can give them the energy to dance all night; Bacchanalian rites transform it into a gateway to esoteric vision; and if one has to have a limb amputated, it is better than nothing. It is also the West's drug of choice throu'out history. We were born in classical Greece and the Greeks liked to drink; since then every Western culture has embraced alcohol to its heart (with the short term and disastrous exception of the U.S. earlier this century). From the elite's consumption of vastly expensive wines and spirits to the dosser sucking on his can of 'extra-strong' beer (beer more analgesic than any other form of alcohol, a drink designed for impoverished alcoholics), every level of society has its tipple. Most people reading this article will have been drunk at least once - for some it was frightening and horrible, and thereafter avoided if possible; for others it was wonderful at the time, but the after effects -embarrassing memories as well as a damaged body- have led them to leave it behind; some indulge, but not too often - 'everything in moderation, including excess'; others indulge too often for their mental and physical health; and for an unhappy few it has become an addiction that is destroying their lives.

So far, i have offered pragmatic and moral reasons for the legalisation of drugs (prohibition makes things worse, people must be free), i have made comments showing partiality to certain forms of intoxication, and i have suggested that some drugs may be having good effects in the world; but i am not arguing that it is clear that intoxication is a good thing - those good effects which i have argued can come from intoxication might always be achieved more effectively within sobriety. It may be that the puritans are right, not necessarily in their explanations of why they are right, but in their grasp of a deep underlying law of sentience, similar to some basic law of physics, which says that there can never be something for nothing, and that spiritual progress and pleasure and happiness are maximised only when there is no intoxication. The Puritan might point to the after effects of intoxication: pain from alcohol and analgesics; a negation of energy with stimulants -fear where there was confidence, exhaustion where there was energy; the possibility of a loosened grip from psychedelics. The puritan might be right, but i see no obvious reason why: the existence of after effects reflects a physical reality -chemical reactions have taken place and the body has to readjust, energy has been used and has to be replenished; there is no reason to suppose that it points to a moral reality (tho' it does perhaps indicate the value of sensible intoxication). We have immeasurably improved our lives throu' our ability to artificially (with tools) determine our external environment, why should not similar benefit accrue to us throu' our ability to determine our inner world? The only difference is that until very recently our understanding of the physical basis of our inner world has been non-existent, and we have had to rely on the tools provided by nature or discovered by accident - this is one thing that makes the potential of science within drugs so exciting: it has hardly begun. All morality is a matter of pragmatics, what works; this is hard to see in the case of a brutal dictator who appears to be enjoying a serene retirement (for we cannot see the devastation within), but it is easy to see in the case of drugs: if the right drugs work for us when legal, if they help make us better and happier, then they are a good thing; if they make the world a worse place, then they will have been shown to be a bad thing. It is an entirely empirical question - there can be no appeal to first principles. If they are a bad thing, once we treat ourselves with enough self-respect to let ourselves decide freely, we will realise this and stop using them, or we will not and we will destroy ourselves. But this hardly seems likely to me: humanity is full of the life spirit, treated with respect we will make the right decision. Considering the evolution of life across the universe, one can speculate that at a certain point in any life form's ascent it has to pass certain tests, one might call them the Tests of Technology, the tests that come when a life form has attained a degree of power over nature. The first obvious test for us came with discovery of nuclear weapons - for the first time we had the power to destroy ourselves; so far we are just about passing this one. Another equally serious test comes when a life form understands its structure well enough to be able to artificially induce absolute pleasure and self-affirmation in itself - here the species must decide whether to move on or remain in solipsistic masturbatory bliss. We are close to this point, the point where we are at last free to determine our future and have to decide what we want. I am confident that we will do the right thing, for the rewards of a truthful loving life ever looking outwards are infinitely greater than any solitary, inwardly focused pleasure could ever be.