Drugs question

THE number of middle-aged users of ecstasy in Australia is rising sharply, as those who started using the drug at dance parties in the 1980s and '90s begin to enter their 30s and 40s.

Ecstasy is the second most commonly used illicit drug in Australia after cannabis, with the number of users rising steadily over the past 10 years.

But underlying the trend is a dramatic increase in the number of older adults using the drug - particularly Generation X, born between 1964 and 1981.

...

Report author Dr Rebecca McKetin said it was clear from the results that Generation X was continuing to take ecstasy as they aged because there was little evidence people began to use ecstasy after the age of 30, or that former users returned to use once they had stopped.

''The increase in the number of older ecstasy users is explained by ecstasy users who started using in the '90s, when the drug first became popular, and who have continued to use into later adulthood,'' she said.

But... but... but how is this possible? Surely if the horror death scare headlines were right they should all be dead by now. Yet if it's not the instant danger that kills more or less on the spot as we were all told (my parents bought The Daily Mail regularly) then why is it illegal?

Losing the sarcasm, it does make me wonder about the future. Alcohol is a harmful drug that is accepted and legal partly because taxing it is a revenue earner for governments and partly because nearly everyone in those same governments uses it. Perhaps as Gen X ages and some of its E using members become politicians themselves there'll come a time when a government will ask why a drug that is widely used, non-addictive, can be taken for years and doesn't turn users into slurring, staggering, vomit fountains with hair trigger tempers, and has been used regularly by some of the people actually in the government, needs to be banned when alcohol isn't.

Or perhaps the fake charities will have banned tobacco and reintroduced Prohibition by then and we'll all be concentrating on the fallout from that backwards step instead of liberalising drugs.