IT WAS just like any other drug bust on a Friday night. Police had been watching a suspected drug dealer and arrested him in the middle of a transaction.

The collateral damage was his alleged customer, Matthew Chesher, 44, the chief of staff to a NSW minister who was arrested and charged last week with possession of ecstasy.

Chesher, the balding, bespectacled husband of NSW Education Minister Verity Firth, with whom he has a four-year-old daughter, resigned from his job -- as he should.

But immediately the drug liberalisers and harm minimisers poured out of the woodwork, lamenting the "tragedy" of Chesher's arrest and the damage to his promising political career.

"For many weekend users, popping an 'e' is no more unusual than cracking a champers," cried the fashionable letters to the editor, snorting lines of outrage, rather than cocaine.

How "absurd"! It was a "mere $20 tablet". Everyone uses drugs -- doctors, lawyers, journalists, public servants, politicians, simply everyone! Haven't the police anything better to do?

"For many people life is quite stressful," said Dr Alex Wodak, Australia's pre-eminent pusher of the drug liberalisation line, as president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, the International Harm Reduction Association, and director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital. "A brief chemical vacation is one of the ways many people cope with the vicissitudes of life."

Wodak, of course, along with Victorian counterparts such as Professor David Penington and American allies George Soros and Dr Ethan Nadelmann, has made it his life's work to overturn Australia's successful drug prevention strategy.

He once told hippies at a "Mardi-Grass" festival in Nimbin that marijuana should be sold in packets at the post office. He knows his audience.

He and his fellow travellers this week seized on the arrest of Chesher as proof that decent middle-class lovers of "recreational" drugs are unfairly penalised and therefore illicit drugs should be legalised. But the opposite is the case.

Ecstasy is illegal. Buying it can get you arrested. That's a fact. It's also a fact that its very illegality adds to the drug's allure. The procurement, preparation, secrecy and risk of illicit drugs are half the fun for "recreational" users.

But when you are a privileged middle-class adult holding a prestigious position on society's ladder of opportunity, then you are expected to behave with commensurate responsibility, in part because you serve as a role model for those climbing the ladder below you. Theodore Dalrymple's Life At The Bottom tells of the awful consequences for the underprivileged of society's jettisoning of values.

In the less salubrious echelons of society, drugs are no "brief chemical vacation" -- they destroy what little chance people might have to rise from the underclasses.

But listening to the outrage over the issue, you would think "recreational" drug use was a sacred right. The hypocrisy of this position is increasingly difficult to stomach.

Being closet conformists, many "recreational" drug users would be right-on folk who drink fair-trade coffee, and subscribe to the No Nike Sweatshops-No Mulesing Wool-Greenpeace-PETA school of thought.

Yet here they are, enthusiastically fuelling the most exploitative murderous criminal enterprise in the world.

For instance, the Mexican drug cartels, which have killed 35,000 people in the past four years, wouldn't exist if it weren't for the snorting, smoking, injecting classes of the First World. Charlie Sheen singlehandedly must support an entire Tijuana cartel.

The right-on folk are so concerned about sheep farming that their fashion retailer of choice rejects Australian wool, under pressure from animal welfare activists PETA. Yet when Mexican police and civilians are beheaded, tortured and mowed down by machineguns to feed wealthy drug follies, they turn a blind eye. It's time they took responsibility for their vices. If we are to feel guilty eating chocolate supposedly made in West Africa by exploited children, then drug users ought to hang their heads in shame.

Forget "blood coffee" and "blood diamonds." How about "blood cocaine"?

That point was made by Colombia's vice-president Francisco Santos Calderon two years ago. "Every line of cocaine that a European [or Australian] snorts is soaked in blood. We want European society to understand that it is helping to destroy the Amazon, that it is helping to kill people."

And if you don't care about people, what about the environment? Every gram of cocaine, he said, equates to the destruction of 4.4sq m of Colombian rainforest. Stick that in your nose and snort it.

Perhaps anti-drugs campaigners should follow PETA's playbook -- or employ Sea Shepherd style activists to prowl nightclub toilets and shame drug users out of their recreational porcelain perusal.

The dealers might prove to be more of a handful than Japanese whalers and Australian farmers, however.

The other thing drug legalisation activists are always telling us is that the war against drugs is a hopeless failure.

But evidence shows the opposite is true. The war on drugs is working, with illicit drug use by young people declining for several years. In particular, cannabis use has halved, reflecting greater community awareness of its potential long-term devastating mental health effects.

The Australian Secondary School Students' Use of Alcohol and Drug Survey showed the use of all illicit drugs plummeted from 18 per cent in 1996 to 8 per cent in 2005. The percentage of 12 to 15-year-olds who had ever tried cannabis fell from 28 per cent to 13 per cent.

The latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's National Drug Strategy Household Survey found 62 per cent of Australians aged 14 or older have never even experimented with an illicit drug of any kind. And just 13 per cent of Australians have used drugs in the last year.

In the so-called ecstasy generation, aged 30-39, a whopping 94 per cent of males and 97 per cent of females do not partake, despite the disproportionate and alluring publicity accorded to party drugs. Illegal drug taking is a marginal activity.

So where is this supposed demand for drugs that is so overwhelming we have to change laws to suit the minority who want an alternative form of mind altering?

Where is the justification for increasing the numbers of drug users which even the drug liberalising lobby admits will occur under a more liberal drug-taking regime?

The very illegality of illegal drugs actually stops people from using them, no matter how peculiar such a law-abiding attitude may seem to the chattering classes who control the drugs conversation. Most people do not go out on Friday night to score.

Originally published as Every toke, line is hypocrisy