The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Cocaine users are destroying the rainforest – at 4m squared a gram | World news | The Guardian.

Am I alone in reacting to this story with a smile? Not that I am pleased that the rainforest is being destroyed, you understand. I smiled at the thought that so many of the people doing the damage are the very urban Guardianistas who do such unremitting ideological damage to our society. The idea of the British Left being denied its recreational drugs because of "green guilt" is appealing and not merely because misery-mongers don't deserve any pleasures. Many of their wilder ideas in the last 11 years must surely have been conceived while high. Surely only cocaine could have given them the misplaced confidence in their abilities, which has been so devastating? After all traces of cocaine have regularly been found in lavatories off the corridors of power.

Being an optimist by nature, I briefly nurtured the hope that the Left without cocaine might be less of a threat; that it might even return to its former ineffectual, beer-addled tedium. Then the horrible thought dawned that the comrades might switch to LSD. If they did, presumably our society would progress beyond an increasing resemblance to Orwell's "1984" towards Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"

Perish the thought.