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I can only imagine what NSW Crime Commissioner Michael Barnes might say if he were to stumble across images of today’s sweet festival. Since the middle of March,Barnes has beencastigating successful Australians for glamorising drugs. “Upper-middle-class young people wearing business clothes and drinking red wine think it’s great to post pictures of people doing lines,” he complained. “That makes it extremely difficult to convince other people that it’s a bad thing to do.”

For a moment there,I wondered whether Barnes’ heart was really in his job. His problem is not that the people doing the lines are sustaining harm,but that some people do drugs while continuing to live fun and productive lives.

When drugs do severe harm to the people using them,they are not glamorous. Barnes needn’t worry that ice addicts posting pictures of their scabby,toothless faces or reels of themselves sitting in dirty urban gutters setting their own hair alight (yes,I’ve actually seen that done) will glamorise methamphetamine. There’s nothing tempting about addiction,except to those people who are looking to fill a hole in an unhappy life.

Even 1990s heroin chic was more spectacle than aspiration. The yuppie set did not rush out to contract a habit that would end with a needle hanging out of their arms in public toilets. They wanted the good times,not the bad times,and that should be a recognition that is useful to the Crime Commissioner and,indeed,give us all hope.

The red wine that Barnes’ young people drink in the pictures isn’t considered a problem. A bottle or two,now and again,doesn’t make a dysfunctional drunk.

And so you’ve also got to wonder about the outrage over thedrug scandal now rocking the AFL. Apparently healthy,fit,young players are shoving a portion of their salaries up their noses in powdered form for recreational purposes. In a heart-warming mark of gender equality (someone notify the Workplace Gender Equality Office and the Bureau of Sarcasm) the AFL women players are now also getting in on the act. Truly,“sisters doin’ it for themselves”.

But they’re not ending up like former player Ben Cousins,who became addicted to ice and spent time in jail before getting his act together. They’re still match-fit. It seems that lots are having a bit of powdered fun and keeping their lives nicely on track.

Similarly,it seemed strange that whenTheWall Street Journalrevealed billionaire Elon Musk’s history of drug use,nobody asked whether it had in any way impeded his performance as an entrepreneur. The clearest argument that it hasn’t or doesn’t is that he continues to be one of the richest people in the world. If Musk admitted he was microdosing on chocolate,instead of ketamine,LSD and magic mushrooms,there’d be an update on the Nobel Prize study to correlate chocolate use with the concentration of billionaires in an area. But it’s not permissible to correlate Musk’s preferences with being the type of person most likely to electrify the world and explore Mars.

In any case,correlation is,as they say,not causation. Studies that try to show chocolate is a health food succeed only in showing that it causes happiness. There is little evidence that mind-altering drugs make people more creative,though creative people seem to often be attracted to mind-altering drugs. And there is no evidence that recreational cocaine makes people sports stars,though if taken immediately before a game it mightenhance performance on the field.

Casual users indulge in these substances because they’re fun,just as health nuts fast for the euphoria or immerse themselves in ice water for the post-plunge high. These supposedly healthy pursuits also tax the system in ways that can,occasionally,lead to death:it seems both kinds of icecan kill. But the NSW Crime Commissioner isn’t condemning the orthorexics (people obsessed with eating healthy food) or the health cultists for glamorising their punishing routines.

The commissioner points out that “there is no fair-trade cocaine”,but that’s a problem that chocolate has been grappling with,too. In many source countries,child labour is still used to harvest the crop. In response,chocolate companies are being required by consumers and shareholders to audit their supply chains. That’s not possible,of course,when it comes to cocaine. The supply chains are “dripping in blood”,asthe commissioner says,as a direct result of criminalisation.

Because that’s the nub of the wowser’s paradox:tolerating a little bit of harm prevents much greater loss. The wowsers just have to learn to live with their haunting fear that someone,somewhere,might be having a good time.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at award-winning campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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