Legalising drugs the solution to all our problems !

Date Published: {J}

The economy has four burning engines and is spiralling towards the ocean. The passengers – that’s us, folks – scream and pray, the grim-faced crew wrestle with the controls. Now is the time for determined action.

So they have a cabinet reshuffle – one in which no one actually loses their job. A couple were even promoted! The radical strategy for saving the country from disaster it seems is to take the team who got us into the disaster and play musical chairs with them. I won’t call it rearranging the seating plan on the Titanic that would dishonour the memory of many brave maritime event organisers. If this shower tried that they’d get tangled in the f*****g deckchairs.

Meanwhile the solution is staring us in the face. What have been the two biggest problems of the last week? Head shops and public servants. Right now, the quickest way to get an Irish passport is to join Mossad. In a move apparently calculated to make the nation gather them into its arms – and choke them – the CPSU are making the public miss holidays, family events and business appointments abroad. People have put up with a lot before, but that was on the understanding that if the worst came to the worst they could at least get out of the damn country. And it’s not just passports – this same union also plays a part in administering the new, reduced rates of social welfare. I notice they didn’t take action over that pay cut.

I’m not suggesting we get rid of them – just make them do some proper work. We’re going to need a lot of trained labour because of this head shop thing. What the hell are we thinking, talking about closing them down? We should nationalise them.

Look how much money is in the illegal drug industry. Every few months the Guards net a haul that’s worth half a billion or something. It is vast! And yet here are the head shops offering a legal, cheaper alternative. Nobody wants them shut down more than the criminal gangs of course, and you can be sure that they are behind at least some of these ‘community-based’ attacks. If we close the shops, the money being spent there will go straight back to the illegal drugs network – who of course will be selling stuff that’s even more dangerous and uncontrolled.

What we should be doing is selling these things ourselves – taking all the tax and all the profit. The State already makes a literal killing on alcohol and tobacco, why not on the drugs that younger people like? And in regulating it we can use the same sort of forthright labelling we use on cigarettes. Only more so. ‘This product may damage your hopes’; ‘Smoking this will cause you to talk tedious bollocks’; ‘Not recommended for women intending to become pregnant’, ‘Not recommended for women not intending to become pregnant’; ‘This will pretty much kill you where you stand’ and so on. Then if people mess themselves up they really have no one but themselves to blame. The country gets a huge amount of new money, and the drug gangs go out of business.

There, our problems solved at a stroke. Why am I not Taoiseach yet?