Our fatal error to think drugs were so cool

THE most moving thing I read last week was Cosmo Landesman’s terrible account of the death of his son Jack, a victim of cultural and moral revolution. This passage should be incised deeply on huge stone slabs in the centre of every city: ‘Before Jack’s death, I’d never questioned my liberal belief that recreational drugs were a valid and safe form of pleasure. People like me, who as teenagers grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, saw drug usage as a harmless rite of passage. Back then, any talk of the damage that drugs could do was dismissed by us as “tabloid hysteria”.

‘So when it was the turn of our children to experience drugs, there was no need to worry. They’d be fine. We thought we were so smart and cool about drugs, but we were just naive, arrogant and ignorant.’