Hugo Rifkind and I were born in the same year,
and, although I have never taken any illegal drug, this article certainly took
me back. It should be read with some Britpop on in the background. Or maybe something by the Spice Girls.
However, working as I do with undergraduates (albeit now informally, for health reasons), I am afraid that it is simply out of date.
Among the younger generation, a very few people take a large amount of drugs, but everyone else never touches them. The people who might occasionally have had a spliff or two at parties no longer exist.
Illegal drug-taking has never been normal, and it is now very abnormal indeed. But we have a rising generation the overwhelming majority of which is not prepared to be bullied into silence.
By no means only on this issue, with any luck. It will be fascinating to watch all of this pan out over the coming decades.
Illegal drug use has become a small and declining minority interest. But one that does an enormous amount of social harm.
Like so very many expressions of the "free" market, which cannot exist in general but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography, just as, for example, there cannot be the unrestricted movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour, i.e., of migrants.
Or, in either case, vice versa.
However, working as I do with undergraduates (albeit now informally, for health reasons), I am afraid that it is simply out of date.
Among the younger generation, a very few people take a large amount of drugs, but everyone else never touches them. The people who might occasionally have had a spliff or two at parties no longer exist.
Illegal drug-taking has never been normal, and it is now very abnormal indeed. But we have a rising generation the overwhelming majority of which is not prepared to be bullied into silence.
By no means only on this issue, with any luck. It will be fascinating to watch all of this pan out over the coming decades.
Illegal drug use has become a small and declining minority interest. But one that does an enormous amount of social harm.
Like so very many expressions of the "free" market, which cannot exist in general but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography, just as, for example, there cannot be the unrestricted movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour, i.e., of migrants.
Or, in either case, vice versa.
Your university email address still works. You must know that as you will have got my email to it.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes.
ReplyDeleteAlthough apparently I have not been in the online directory for years, putting me in some extremely grand company. Make of that what you will.
But it is linked up to the Hotmail one, so you may as well cut out the middle man.
We'll see how it goes, but I am still around. When, that is, I can get around.
Now, on topic, please.