Channel 4's recent series The Drugs Laws Don’t Work was refreshing – common sense at last on the issue, presented prime-time on the most persuasive of media – one which has, previously, studiously avoided dispassionate discussion on the matter.

The level of discourse on the issue of drug use has been abysmal in these islands; as if any admission that the law was an inappropriate tool to deal with issues of mental health and alienation would open the floodgates to chaos and insanity.

Military metaphors have crippled the debate – tackling the misery of addicts has nothing to do with victory or failure. Fear and misunderstanding are rife; to show compassion is to be soft, weak, in grave danger of demoralising the brave boys in blue who are out there waging the War On Drugs. Perhaps, sometimes, melancholia is the only appropriate feeling when seeing how the weakest are victimised and criminalised in our culture.

To summarise: heroin should be available on prescription to those who are addicted to it, to prevent them having to lead a life of crime to support their habit. Taken properly, uncut and with clean needles, it is a far safer drug than methadone. It is also a far more satisfying fix – and this, of course, is one of the main reasons it is resisted.

We cannot be seen to dispense pleasure to junkies – it is, morally, far easier to insist they take a third-rate replacement that often has debilitating side-effects. It’s quite a sadistic principle, and very ugly, in my eyes. Compare it to the multi-million pound industry that is based on the peddling of a highly toxic drug, alcohol, and the hypocrisy is staggering; not least because of the huge revenues that governments accrue through its sale in taxes and duty.

Addicts need support to understand the reasons why they have taken such extreme measures to escape from feeling, and to deal with the bitterness and rage and grief they are hiding from. They usually bear deep grudges against those who have hurt them, most often in childhood; society seems unwilling to give space to hearing what those grudges are.

Like perverts, addicts have distinctly raw, challenging, uncomfortable messages for society; and as long as they are diverted by their constant hunger for release, their words stay stuck in their bottles, unread. It is in the interests of those who support the status quo in our culture, the tight-lipped anally-retentive stiff-upper-lip brigade – to keep addicts and their howls of pain silent, marginalised, criminalised, and to brand them Public Enemy Number One.

Time and time again in my counselling work, I am shocked by the damage inflicted on children, by their parents and teachers and priests. Each time I hear another horror story, I inch a little bit more towards the position that, in general, we treat animals better than children. When those children grow up, having learned to keep their feelings secret, drugs (of all kinds) seem an attractive, almost inevitable option.

There is a great collusion afoot among educationalists; teachers do not want to really explore how unhappy their pupils might be at home, for they do not want to get involved, to be seen to be meddling, and they get no thanks for it if they do encourage a child to speak out.

To wish for an end to prohibition on drugs is not to be in favour of drug-taking. On the contrary, I am desperately concerned about the long-term effects that ecstasy, in particular, produces. There is an entire generation that has been mashing their braincells every weekend on e, severely depleting their precious serotonin. When they reach middle-age, depression will be so rampant that I can see it seriously affecting the way we function as a society.

The original impulse to take ecstasy, to experience the feeling of bliss that Hollywood dictates we should feel in our lives, and to obliterate any feeling of loneliness, is understandable; but the trouble is that the emotional rollercoaster that follows a weekend on e – the ubiquitous midweek swoop into depression – compounds the misery, and leaves one worse off than before, and more likely to wish to escape again as soon as possible.

I would not wish the hell of depression on anyone; and I cannot but wonder if my occasional experimentation with ecstasy, once I had turned 30, triggered my onset of clinical depression years later; or at the very least, deepened the intensity of my moodswings from periodic angst to something far more debilitating.

I’ll never know for certain, and it’s probably a case of my seeking something to blame for my problems; but I am sure I will never touch e again; and if anyone reading this is considering taking ecstasy for the first time, I can only beg you to consider what price you might be paying later on.

Compared to opiates like heroin, made from poppies for centuries, ecstasy is a terrifyingly new drug, largely unresearched and untested, and we do not know its long-term effects. I fear the worst.

We give so little space in our culture for melancholy, for reflectiveness, for retreat. Our society is based on expansion, growth, material "success". Positive feelings, directions, opportunities. Not a bad thing, in itself; focussing on the good things in life is an essential requirement to stay sane. But I object to how little room there is for accepting, even tolerating, the bad things.

Instead, we go into panic when we bear witness to those of us who are failing to progress, who seek desperate measures to feel positive about themselves through addiction. We cannot tolerate listening to their stories, indictments against the way we raise our children; we prefer to judge their adult choice to seek an escape from their pain, and brand them criminal. It’s too easy.