Yo, kids, this morning’s anti-drug message is brought to you by ISIS

In the beginning there was the war on drugs, and then after that hadn’t been won, there was the war on terror, which isn’t going terribly well either. And now everything has become very complicated because it seems the terror and the drugs have joined forces.

Reports suggest that ISIS is feeding its foot soldiers with an amphetamine called Captagon, and there’s evidence to back this up. Last November Turkish anti-narcotics police confiscated a staggering 11 million pills that they say were on their way into Syria.

Apparently, if you take Captagon you feel invincible and wide awake and strong. And the effects are even more pronounced if you don’t drink, which we must presume applies to the ISIS mob. In fact, you feel so awake and so invincible that you will happily strap some dynamite to your chest and then blow it up.

Well, now, I’m sorry, but how do the ISIS top brass make this sound attractive to their men? ‘Come on, comrades. Take one of these pills and within the hour you will be human wallpaper.’ If I were sitting there cross-legged on the floor, I’d put my hand up and say, ‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d rather not.’

I see this problem with all drugs, in fact. Because who looks at someone who has ingested cocaine and thinks, ‘Yes. I’d like to be boring and self-obsessed, so I will have some of that’? And who looks at people who’ve smoked weed and thinks, ‘Yes. I want to find toothpaste funny and I want to be so hungry that I’ll eat a sherry trifle sprinkled with frozen peas, so pass it over’?

On a recent trip to Burma I was taken to a party in a remote mountain village where everyone had taken something called yaba. Roughly translated, this means ‘madness drug’. It is made from a mixture of caffeine and methamphetamine and was originally given to horses that were pulling heavy carts.

But then one day someone thought, ‘I know. I’m going to put one of those horse pills in my mouth. And then I’m going to swallow it to see what happens.’ What happened is that he turned, immediately, into a swivel-eyed lunatic. He became a rampaging bundle of taut sinew and spittle, massively angry about absolutely everything and extremely violent.

If you see someone who you think has taken yaba, here’s a tip. Don’t spill his pint. Especially if you are in Burma’s Shan state, because here he will be furious – and armed with an AK-47.

Now, you would have thought that if you’d been in a bar, watching someone banging their head on the wall and shooting anyone who looked at him funnily, you’d think, ‘Crikey. I must remember not to take what he’s had.’ But no. They didn’t. For some reason they thought it would be fun to shoot their mother for putting too much milk on their cereal and tucked in.

I’ve never tried a Quaalude, but those I know who have done talk about it as though it’s some kind of perfect nirvana. They go all dewy-eyed and misty about ’Ludes in the way that you and I go all dewy-eyed and misty when we recall childhood picnics and first kisses.

And I struggle to see why, because I’ve now seen The Wolf of Wall Street, and Leonardo DiCaprio made it very clear that actually Quaaludes cause you to crash your Lamborghini and roll around on the floor with what appears to be cerebral palsy. This looked a pretty good anti-drug message to me.

However, anti-drug people think they know better and are forever showing us pictures of dead drug runners in Colombia and comatose teenagers who’ve eaten some dodgy ecstasy at a nightclub in Preston. Obviously, this isn’t working. Then you had Nancy Reagan with her famous ‘Just say no’ campaign, and that didn’t work either, because what teenager would take a lecture from a woman who looked as if two crows had crashed into her face?

The most recent anti-drug push in America was even more hopeless. It used emojis, which, Grandad, are those little pictures you put at the end of a mobile-phone message if you want your text to be billed as a picture and you don’t care because your parents are picking up the tab.

To you and me the anti-drug message just looked like gibberish. There were pictures that included a ‘donut’, a bee and a man putting something in a wastepaper basket, and none of it made any sense. But to a teenager the message was very clear. And what it said was: ‘I do not have to be trashed to have fun.’

Amazingly, earnest charity people thought kids would see this and think, ‘Ah. Whoever wrote that and put it on a billboard in Times Square understands my language, so next Saturday night, instead of smoking a joint with my friends, I shall go to the library and read some Hugh Walpole.’

There was another emoji ad that – if you were under thirty – said, ‘I’m tired of drinking to fit in.’ I’d love to see them run that in Newcastle.

Except I wouldn’t, because it would be pointless and stupid. As pointless and stupid as showing kids how they will look if a drug takes hold of their life.

Because teenagers don’t think much past tomorrow afternoon, which means they simply cannot see the possibility that one day they’ll be turning tricks in a back street for a rock of crack.

‘It won’t happen to me’ is what kept everyone sane in the trenches. And it’s what keeps the lavatories packed at most nightclubs.

Far better, surely, to show them the Quaalude scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. To show them what drugs do in the here and now, not in twenty years’ time and not to some lowlife in a cartel on the other side of the world.

And I can think of no better place to start than Captagon. ‘Take this and you’ll be overcome by a need to go to a shopping centre and explode.’

7 February 2016