Here! What is this? Some sort of vast joke, operated at huge state expense with no other purpose than to show how gullible and stupid the Irish people really are? Or can it be that with truly grave mien and solemn countenance the prison service has declared: drugs-free areas are to be introduced in our jails over the next three years? Slip me a joint, warder, and give me that one more time. Jails with small, drugs-free areas? Far out, my main man.
Yet are not prisons the areas which uniquely fall under the Government's all-surveillant authority? So even in its almost unfettered sovereignty, the State cannot keep illegal drugs out of its jails, the very best it can hope for apparently being that a third of "prison spaces" - whatever that means - will become be drug-free in three years' time.
Narcotics war
So here we are, after more than three decades of the narcotics war, with the prison service announcing - doubtless with a trembling voice, a Tricolour waving against a rising sun, even as the sombrely proud tones of Mise ╔ire surge over a glittering sea - that, far from the Irish Government succeeding in banning drugs from Irish life for all time, it now hopes - merely hopes, mind you: let's not get too giddily optimistic about this - to reduce drug use in Irish jails to just one-in-three spaces some time in the distant future.
Are we meant to laugh at this exercise in stupendous folly? Are we meant to slap our thighs at the huge practical joke which has been played on us over the years? Are we meant to join in the chorus of laughter which should surely be ringing from the Department of Justice and our various prisons, and choke with hysterical amusement at the complete failure of government policy? For laughter is perhaps the only response to this tragedy; all else fails.
Consider how many millions and millions of pounds have been spent combating drugs, and the thousands of lives that have been ruined by the poverty, hepatitis, criminality, murder, overdoses and AIDS which resulted. This State embarked upon a drugs enforcement programme which lived up to its name only in that it granted a drugs monopoly to criminals, who then enforced a programme of high drugs prices. No venture, none whatever, in the history of this State, is so marked by the criminal stupidity, the otiose sanctimony and the pathological denial which have underwritten our drugs laws.
And now we have set new goals for ourselves:- one "space" in three in our prisons to be drugs-free. Majestic! Per ardua ad astra, or something on those lines, ending, of course, with an increase in drugs-use, more dead bodies crumpled in shop doorways, more delinquent children and more teenage girls selling their bodies - which is actually quite marvellous, because the State can then arrest them and fine them for soliciting in public.
Annual statistics
And if they work in brothels, well, thankfully, the morality police of An Garda S∅ochβna can prosecute their operators and close the houses down, so driving the girls out on the street, to the pimps, sleet and rain - where of course they deserve to be, the little trollops: what they really need is a good flogging. Meanwhile, the arrest and successful prosecution of pathetic girl-junkies can be trumpeted in some forthcoming set of annual statistics by some forthcoming Garda Commissioner as proof of how we're winning the war against crime.
The real purpose of our drugs legislation, like all attempts at social engineering, is to make its implementers feel morally superior. This is law-making at its most systemically amoral: for how else can you describe laws which are are passed for the gratification of those who pass them, even as their effect is for plain people who intend no crime against others to suffer? In other words: law as crime, the crime being prohibitionism.
We've long had the model for prohibitionism in the US. The cult of prohibitionism is so powerful there that the adult daughter of the President was fined $750 and made to perform 36 hours' community service merely because she ordered wine in a restaurant, so murderously virulent that US forces authorised the shooting down of a plane in Peru recently, killing three US missionaries, merely because it was suspected drugs smugglers were aboard.
Prohibitionism in Ireland in Ireland is milder, but it has nonetheless created and it protects a legal and social structure which benefits only the criminal monopolies which have seized it from within. The power of those monopolies, paradoxically yet predictably, now reaches right into the innermost sanctum of state authority - its prisons.
Chronically dysfunctional
That a prisons spokesman should mouth mere pyschedelic gibberish - that our aim is to reduce drugs dependency in our jails to 66 percent by 2004 - and call it policy shows how chronically dysfunctional anti-narcotism has now become.
A house less cretinous, less cowardly, less bereft of wit, principle or duty than Dβil ╔ireann would by now have started considering how to start decriminalising almost all illegal drugs; it would be considering how to define categories of narcotics - heroin, cocaine, cannabis - for consumer consumption and protection, in the way that paracetemol, cognac, whiskey, aspririn, cigars, cough mixture, poit∅n, sedatives, wine, tranquillisers and beer - all of them lethal in sufficient quantity - already are.
Nothing, of course, will happen. Instead, we will wait to do this until our British or European masters have done so. As always.