Illegal drugs are not harmless. They reduce your mental capacity and can cause serious physical and mental health problems. Only someone with no understanding of simple logic would be duped the arguments of the pushers and their doped-up hangers-on in favor of wasting money on these harmful substances.

You probably know that heroin can do horrible things, but may be under the illusion that so-called "soft" drugs are OK, perhaps because you have tried them and are still alive and reading this article. You are quite wrong.

Here are just a few points to demonstrate what I mean.

Cocaine is responsible for more emergency room visits in the United States than any other illegal drug. It harms the brain, the heart, the blood vessels and the lungs. It can cause sudden death. It has lots of other effects, too, including impairing your sexual function. So think before you snort.

Marijuana/cannabis is not, repeat not, harmless. Smoking it can affect your lungs, just like smoking tobacco. (And yes, I am in favor of banning that, too, so don't call me a hypocrite.) There is plenty of evidence that heavy and/or continuous use harms your performance at school and your subsequent career. The evidence that it leads to mental conditions such as schizophrenia, paranoia and psychoses is not conclusive, but doesn't that warrant the use of the "precautionary principle" we hear about all the time from, for example, the proponents of action to mitigate climate change?

In fact, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that marijuana does cause mental problems, enough to convince me that it isn't worth the risk.

And I tend to believe the evidence of my own eyes. My father was prescribed sodium amytal for depression. That prescription drug changed his personality and ended his employment forever. When I suggested the doctor prescribed an alternative, this distinguished medical practitioner said that I didn't know what I was talking about. A few years later, the National Health Service itself stopped doctors from prescribing sodium amytal because of precisely the harmful side-effects I had noticed. Many other anti-depressants are also dangerous drugs and shouldn't be used.

"If you can remember the 60s, you weren't there." Piffle. I was there and I remember a lot, including the damage done by drugs to young people who couldn't withstand the pressure of the pushers.

No, I didn't inhale. I didn't smoke marijuana. I didn't snort coke. And I didn't inject heroin. Sorry, folks, if that contradicts your cozy media-hyped stereotype of a young person in the 1960s, but it's true. And I wasn't alone. Read, for example, the memoirs or newspaper biographies of Jack Straw, who was in the year below me at Leeds University.

A false distinction is made in most "developed" countries between different classes of illegal drug: "hard" and so-called "soft" drugs. Druggies will scream and shout if you don't agree with them that taking "soft" drugs does not lead to taking "hard" drugs. They will do this even if you said nothing. They are wrong.

I have seen a youngster's life totally destroyed as he moved from marijuana to heroin and then to methadone, the prescription version of heroin that the foolish National Health Service in Britain uses to keep heroin addicts doped up in supposedly controllable fashion. In the past, doctors have been caught over-prescribing methadone so their patients could make a living by selling it. I don't remember if they were all struck off the Medical Register. They should have been.

Another argument you will hear from the druggies is that "all journalists are alcoholics", so the media has no right to criticize drug abuse. The premise, of course, is incorrect, though there have been one or two notable journo drunks. Even if it were true, the conclusion doesn't follow from it, any more than you could dismiss an argument against alcoholism just because it came from a druggie. Ad hominem arguments are invalid.

Then there is the "love and peace" argument, whose proponents say that marijuana, especially in the form of ganja taken by Rastafarians, accompanies a peaceful outlook on life. Stopping people from smoking it may be a breach of religious liberty.

It may surprise such geniuses to know that there are people, like the Quakers, who are known for their pacifism but who do not, in my experience, damage their brains in this moronic way. The anti-war movement in the 1960s was not led by druggies, though there were some pantomime characters, like the Yuppies, who went along for the ride and enjoyed the publicity that their "lifestyle" guaranteed them in the gutter press.

I have no idea whether or not medical marijuana is efficacious. If so, it may be prescribed in the usual way, as long as there are safeguards against abuse. I do not, though, accept the argument (usually from people who hate the monarchy) that it must be OK because Queen Victoria used to take it regularly.

If countries that pretend to uphold the law against drug abuse really did so, the suppliers would have no market. That could save thousands of lives in some of the world's poorest countries, where violent drug lords rule the roost. Be brave, say no to drugs.

The author was a student in the 1960s and a lecturer in the 1970s and 1980s before becoming chief economist, Asia, for the EIU in Hong Kong in the 1990s. He has always actively argued against the use of so-called recreational drugs.

(HK Edition 01/13/2014 page9)