As a result, his views on drugs are worth listening to.

He comes to the subject with no ideological baggage, armed only with what was always his greatest weapon, that common sense.

Last weekend, Byrne told Eamon Dunphy on RT� Radio that trying to control the drugs problem was a "hopeless task" and that fresh thinking was required.

"It's a major chasm for me that we should seriously consider legalising drugs. It seems to me that, in no other area of human endeavour have you tried to cure a problem for 40 years by doing exactly the same thing and finding out it doesn't work, " he said.

He doesn't claim to have easy solutions. There aren't any. But he is correct in recognising that the so-called war on drugs is at the dull end of the intellectual spectrum. It's a war for numbskulls. Everything is reduced to good and evil, right and wrong, what's legal and what's a crime against God and man.

The first casualty of this war is language. 'Drugs' is a term used by the ignorant and the opportunistic to cover a multitude. The teenager experimenting with cannabis is bracketed with the bored executive powering a nose of cocaine, and the desperate junkie railing against the odds, unable to handle the card that fate has dealt.

These stereotypes have nothing in common, yet all are classified as either the enemy or casualties in the war on drugs.

Ignorance about drugs has flourished in this war. Last year, while sentencing a minor criminal for possession of a relatively small quantity of cannabis, a judge in a provincial town told the defendant that he was 'a dealer in misery'. A what? The only misery that moderate use of cannabis inflicts is on those who have to listen to some of the gibberish stoned people sprout.

Concepts of crime and proportionality have been turned on their head in this war. The advent of so-called mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences is an American front in the war which has been adopted here. Anyone caught with Euro13,000 worth of drugs - any kind, from cannabis to heroin - is to receive 10 years in prison, except in exceptional circumstances.

A burgeoning market has ensured that drugs are common currency in crime, whether it be petty crime or highly organised and violent crime.

The rules of this war now place a petty criminal, somebody like a broke and frightened single mother, on a plateau with violent and ruthless thugs when it comes to paying for the crime.

The petty, non-violent criminal, say, storing a quantity of cannabis in his or her home for Euro400 or Euro500, is now likely to get a longer jail term than a rapist, violent child abuser or somebody who beats another to death. And experience in the US has shown that none of this will make the slightest bit of difference to the laws of supply and demand that govern the market.

Mood-altering drugs have been with us since Homo sapien emerged from the jungle longing for a break from the monotony of evolution. They will be with us until the ozone layer disappears and the planet goes up in smoke. Most societies have legalised one of the most dangerous and popular of these drugs, alcohol. Legalising others would present some problems, but fresh thinking is urgently required.

There is a problem with heroin that is almost entirely connected to socio-economics. There is a growing problem with cocaine that is an unfortunate by-product of affluence. Cannabis, and, to a lesser extent, ecstasy, reduce the war on drugs to a war on youth. Young people always have and always will experiment. Criminalising them does not work.

Unfortunately, what works or doesn't isn't necessarily the driving force of public policy.

What makes people feel good or righteous about themselves often is. It's a pity that a few more of society's pillars don't have the common sense or courage of Gay Byrne to state the bleedin' obvious.