Sitting on the balcony above a bar the other night I inhaled a waft of somebody else’s second-hand air that took me right back to the Swingin’ Sixties of my youth…

To the fun evening when mine was the only white face in a Caribbean night club in Leeds and I was several times offered but always declined an ‘exotic’ cigarette. A merry memory, nevertheless.

Then, right on its coat-tails, a less than merry one when I had to report on the death of a doped-up teenager who launched himself out of a third-floor window in Newcastle upon Tyne in the belief that he could fly.

Only days later, closer to home, a call from a student in the flat above me who asked for my help because police had found her boyfriend in a dazed state, wandering along the High Street, insisting that he was Jesus, and had put him in a cell ‘for his own safety’.

On medical advice he was transferred to a mental hospital, where he stayed for some weeks, before being sent home, under care. His university career was over.

It was the era of weed and pot, of grass and hemp or ganja, spliffs, joints, roaches, Mary-Jane or just plain dope.

Everybody – at least, in the student area where I lived – was doing it. Except me (easily identifiable as the only person around not dressed in denim or fake fur).

I couldn’t even sample the girls’ delicious-looking fruit Christmas cake because they had baked hash into it.

“How can you write about it,” a member of the Fine Arts faculty asked, “if you refuse to try it?” And I had to explain to her that I wrote about rape and murder, too.

They had started, most of them, as an experiment or out of curiosity and they also heard (wrongly) that it sharpened the brain a bit at exam time.

Generally, though, it made them silly, and sometimes stupid. Dope was the right word for it, and for them.

A generation that cares about nothing- Revel Barker

And that was before they graduated to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide a synthetic chemical) one drop of which, usually taken on a sugar cube, produced changes in perception and mood along with visual hallucinations and distorted ideas of space and time. That was the stuff that caused people to believe that they could fly, like Superman.

Realising that LSD was dangerous, some of them took to heroin or cocaine for a better kick than plain old hemp.

What worries me here and now is that the government thinks it is okay to smoke dope, only not okay to sell it. So, they are actually encouraging kids to grow their own. I find it unbelievable, no less.

Our government thinks this will reduce drug trafficking, which is illegal, but which would be stopped if people stopped buying it. And it thinks it is tough on kids to get a criminal record for maybe a single case when caught using it. And that’s why it wants pot-smoking to be taken off the books as a crime.

The real and cynical truth is that the government wants to capture the kids’ vote: the opposition – that bunch of old fogeys – is against it.

Otherwise the government is putting the cart in front of the horse. If it wants to stop drug dealing, they should tell the cops to get out of their cars and back on to the pavements and ask who is selling and where.

For at the moment the police are confused about whether to bother with drug offences, if the courts are getting the message about drug use being okay, and not taking drug dealing seriously.

Policemen (and MPs, for that matter) can ask their own children.

Any new recruit to the police force, if he is streetwise, will know where to buy hemp and even ‘white powder’. A kid came into the bar where I was drinking the other day and asked that very question; he was directed to the next pub along the street.

While I know that some posh rich people snort coke, and some derelicts steal in order to inject heroin I will forever associate dope with the hippy culture.

If that’s the way the government wants to lead or allow younger generations to go, there’s no point in talking about climate change and saving the earth for the next generation, because it won’t care.

If we are going to encourage a generation that can’t hold a job, or can’t finish one, that doesn’t uphold common standards, that doesn’t know right from wrong, that takes what it is given and demands more, while making no contribution: a generation that cares about nothing…

What am I saying? Would we notice any difference?