The first reports had a familiar ring of doom to them. An Irish girl, Michaella McCollum Connolly, aged 20, had suddenly disappeared.

The word that she was missing surfaced first on Facebook. Michaella, a student of photography at Belfast Metropolitan College, with family connections in Dungannon in Co. Tyrone, had travelled to Ibiza in June, to work as a nightclub hostess. Michaella, who has the looks for the job, had worked in a similar role in clubs in Belfast.
She had been in the habit of ringing her family every two or three days, her sister Stephanie confided in a Facebook post. However, they had not heard from her in nine days and were concerned. The friends she had made in Ibiza had not been in contact with her either.
As a parent or family member, inevitably you fear the worst. The thought that the next time the phone rings it will be the police informing you that there has been a tragedy is a horribly invasive and persistent one. But paranoia is impossible to avert. The waiting is a form of crucifixion. You only want the phone to ring if there is good news. And yet you need it to ring...
When news did come through about Michaella, it was not as bad as it might have been. But it was very bad nonetheless. A statement appeared on the website of the police in Peru, which revealed her whereabouts. To her parents I’m sure it felt like the end of the world. She had been arrested at Lima International Airport, along with her traveling companion, 19-year-old Melissa Reid, who is from Scotland. The police stated that they had found more than 11kg of cocaine hidden inside packages of food in the girls’ luggage. Michaella has an Irish passport.
The girls are, of course, entitled to the presumption of innocence: it would not be the first time that drugs were planted on innocent people. They have stated that they were coerced by gangsters. But if they did travel to Peru and picked up a consignment of cocaine to take back to Spain, then they were simply following a familiar, well-trodden route. A huge proportion of all drug arrests at Lima Airport involve people travelling to Spain.
In recent years, Peru has accelerated past Colombia as the biggest producer of cocaine in the world. The value of the crop to the Peruvian economy notwithstanding, the punishment for drugs offences in Peru is harsh, with sentences of between eight and 15 years for possession of cocaine. For those caught with more than 10kgs, sentences range between 15 and 25 years. Both Michaella and her companion are accused of having been in possession of just under 6kgs.
Police in Lima are known to target people travelling to Spain, using sniffer dogs to examine baggage as people queue for flights. There is also a practice among drugs suppliers of sacrificing mules, by informing on individuals carrying relatively smaller quantities of the drug, creating a distraction which enables a larger shipment to get away.
Most couriers do it for the money, and for the adventure. They are told is is safe – and paid somewhere between €6,000 and €12,000 to make a run, which can seem like an attractive proposition if you believe, as many young women do, that you can charm your way out of any situation.
But, in truth of course, the payment is horribly small given the risks. And so it is still hard to conceive that a bright and vivacious young woman like Michaella could make the mistake of agreeing to act as a drug courier and go to a place as unfamiliar and potentially fraught with danger as Peru to make the pick-up.
But what does it tell us if she and Melissa Reid did?
First, that there is a widespread acceptance of the use of cocaine as a recreational drug among young people in Ireland and in Spain alike. For the vast majority, there is no moral dimension involved. Nor, apparently, is there a serious concern with it as a health issue: most people assume that, like the ‘affluent’ rats in the famous Rat Park experiment, they will be able to successfully manage their drug consumption. And most of them do...
Cocaine is routinely consumed socially here. Most of the time, people decide on the basis of their own personal experience that it is not a big deal. The only real immediate threat generally comes from the law.
If Michaella is tried and found guilty and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, is there a reasonable, sane person who would claim that this is anything other than a crazily disproportionate sentence for a 20-year-old who commits a first offence of this kind?
People are innocent and inexperienced at that age. Lots of 20-year-olds do crazy one-off things and get away with it. Either way, it is completely wrong that an unlucky few should be scapegoated at the altar of a law that is completely out of sync with accepted social behaviour among the ordinary young citizens of Europe, and indeed the US.
No one with a semblance of compassion would want to see Michaella McCollum Connolly and her friend go to jail – even if they did attempt to bring cocaine to Spain. And while I am at it, why should the people of Peru have to pay for the upkeep of prisoners over an extended prison-stay, at a cost not far off $1 million if the sentence is long enough? And how can this cost be justified against the fact that cocaine use is so commonplace in the western world? None of it makes any sense, for what is seen by most people as a victimless crime.
Almost certainly, the natural generosity and empathy of Irish people will generate huge sympathy for Michaella. But we have to go further than merely identifying with an attractive young woman and concluding that it would be brilliant if she were allowed home. We have to follow the logic of that feeling through, and begin to agitate for a change in the laws that make it possible for someone like Michaella to be placed in this kind of appalling position.
All intelligent analysis confirms that the so-called War on Drugs inflicts far more damage than the drugs themselves. It is time to tear up that crazy, outmoded rule book and start afresh by legalising, regulating and taxing the use of narcotics. Far from making the problem worse, it would break the causal link between drugs and serious crime – and in doing so collapse the numbers being sent to jail all over the world. It would also liberate countries like Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico from the scourge of widespread paramilitary level gangland violence.
And you know what? It would also, almost certainly, make drugs less attractive in the long run to young people who are drawn to them now, at least in part, because of the glamour associated with their forbidden status.
So let’s start with a diplomatic campaign to free Michaella McCollum Connolly and go from there. In terms of public understanding, it could be a game-changer. It certainly should be...