Here we go again: another round comprehensively lost in the battle against the drugs dealers and their clients - the plain people of Ireland, writes Kevin Myers.
And instead of lying on the ground, wondering whether to take the count and rethink our policies from the bottom up, we're already staggering to our feet, lips like bloodied, swollen cauliflower ears, mouthing our traditional heroic bluster about being tough on crime. Then, wallop, and we're on the canvas again, with several solar systems circling over our foreheads.
How long has this stupidity to go on before we acknowledge that we cannot win? This is a war against popular will, and is thus simply unwinnable. Every single register tells us the same appalling story of abject failure by the State. Gun crime up. Drug usage up. Drugs prices falling. Arrests down.
I don't use the word "war" as a metaphor. This is a real war, with many deaths a year, and hundreds if not thousands of lives ruined right across society. But the highest casualties are among the illiterate poor, in their sink estates outside our cities or in their city-centre hovels. No warning from the State about the evils of drugs will reach their ears; and even if they did, such people no more associate the State with goodness or wisdom than they do a guard-dog in a scrap-yard.
Theirs is a sub-section of society ungoverned by law and untempered by justice, in which drugs are something teenagers just naturally do. That being so, shouldn't the State perform some useful deed for them for the first time in their wretched lives, and, say, monitor the drugs they're going to take, as it does all lawful drugs, and so protect them against exploitation, contamination, death? The State does the opposite. It hands monopoly control of the drugs industry to armed criminal cartels. The price of their produce - heroin, cocaine, ecstasy - is driven by the laws of a corrupt marketplace, so that they are unnaturally high - so high that even literate, well-educated teenagers couldn't afford them, never mind the dysfunctional detritus at the very bottom of the ladder.
They turn to crime, and if they're good, they'll prosper. They'll enter a gang, learn the rudimentary skills of violence and terror, and become a professional gangster. If they're bad - and most of them are terrible - they're soon arrested and imprisoned. If they're men, they go to that criminal hellhole of Mountjoy Jail, which in addition to being the most disgraceful prison in western Europe, is a temple to the most gross sexual discrimination. Female prisoners have rooms with showers; male prisoners share brutish and confined Victorian cells where they have to endure the disgusting indignity of slopping out.
I have never understood why no male prisoner in the 'Joy has sued the state at the European Court of Human Rights for the violation of his human rights and for the sexual discrimination which are institutionalised in the jail. No doubt the inmates are too socially, politically or legally illiterate to do so; and a goodly number ease the burden they present to the State by thoughtfully topping themselves, of course, without a word of indignation or demands for an enquiry from the Dáil, never mind from those muppets on the Council for the Status of Women.
The State can feel properly proud of these young men dangling from a doorway, their feet quivering as they breathe their last. Raised in State-created slums; educationally deprived in State-neglected schools; lured into a drugs world over which a criminal cartel has been granted a State-protected monopoly; incarcerated in a filthy dungeon by the State; and allowed to hang themselves there, with not a single State employee ever being punished for his or her moral delinquency throughout this melancholy chain of State-created tragedy.
There's a route for drug-addicted girls largely not available to boys. Prostitution. And there the State is awaiting them, yet again. The scandalous Garda campaign to close down massage parlours (many of them run by honest women) and flush girls out to practise on the street, where they are easy prey to male pimps, was one of the most inexcusable and barbarous State policies of recent years. And of course, the girls, one way or another, inevitably end up in jail also. At least their mothers can now visit just about the entire family in the one extended visit to the 'Joy.
Meanwhile, the laws of natural selection being their most savage in the malodorous cellar of society, the crooks who have prospered in the noxious stew there are in a class of evil all of their own. Ferally intelligent, murderously ruthless, and terrifyingly single-minded, these men could scare the daylights out of a swarm of killer-bees. The State has effectively handed them control of housing states across Dublin, Limerick and Cork - and not just in narcotics, but in all categories of crime. And, through its ludicrous laws and its prissy, sanctimonious heartlessness, having created this social jungle, the State then expects gardaí to impose the rule of a law which is quite meaningless to its illiterate and alienated residents.
We cannot win the drugs war. We've had offensive after offensive, battle after battle, and all we've achieved is the criminalisation of ever larger swathes of society, creating gangs which are now more powerful, better armed, better led, and worst of all, more lethally ambitious than ever before, spreading their corruption in every direction. We should accept defeat now; but instead, we continue to fight a war in which our enemy grows stronger the longer it continues. This is criminal madness.