When I was a younger man, taking drugs* was something you did by and large in the privacy of your own home. It was often a quiet, personal experience that you would maybe share with friends whilst listening to Waiting For The Sun. Of course, that's if it was marijuana. If it was acid, you'd end up listening to The Grand Wazoo, staring at the patterns of your carpet for four hours before running headlong into your friend thinking he and you were a pair of cars playing chicken. Each to their own.

Nowadays, we have this...:

...and this:

Now, I am well aware that drugs have been evolving ever since the Mesopotamians tripped balls on ergot infected grasses about 12,000 years ago. We've certainly come a long way, and I am no one to judge how people go about getting their kicks, but nowhere in the history of drug-taking have I recalled drugs making people look like such berks.

The first, and most ridiculous looking, is the rehashed version of a nitrous oxide party. Rather than finding Leslie Phillips rollicking around a 70s hospital ward and having a gay old time sticking it to the sour old matrons with some laughing gas at a dance in Doctor In Clover, you'll find the aforefeatured amiable chaps slunk around a field or a dingy club blowing up balloons and sucking the life out of them with more veracity than a Chinese production line.

Continuing the comparison with a large industrialised nation, it is also extremely wasteful. It is all-too easy to find evidence of the existence of these nitrous oxide inhaling morons for littered everywhere will be discarded balloons and small metal capsules that hold the "hippie crack" gas. After a bout of heavy inhaling/exhaling it looks more like the aftermath of a fight between an army of clowns as some incontinent silver Rodents of Unusual Size. Marijuana is smoked into virtual non-existence, cocaine disappears up your nose and is possibly the most environmentally friendly of drugs, and, I'm not saying heroin is good, but at least you can reuse the spoon! The next ridiculous craze (for want of an accurate term) feature downloadable drugs.

The latter image is, hard as it may be to believe, not a music fan listening to the death of music via the strains of Poker Face, but rather an even more pointless and unimaginative funereal dirge known as Binaural Beats. Basically, it's sensory deprivation for the ears. However, I start to smell bullshit when I hear about people giving these i-doses (as they are known) names like 'marijuana.drg', 'cocaine.drg' and yes, even 'heroine.drg'. That's right, drugs nowadays have file extensions!

"But wait!" i-dosers (as they are known) will cry. "It's scientifically legitimate! It's all about neurophysiological frequencies and how they affect the brain!" "Yes," we will reply. "And what else?" "And it's like taking a really awesome acid trip or doing some mind-bending coke!"

Pictured: Science!

And that's when you begin to smell the bullshit for you see, you do not feel the effects of such drugs, or any other drugs in fact. I am not discounting binaural beats as being completely ridiculous, for they can indeed have a pleasing, relaxing, and most importantly de-stressing influence on a very occupied brain. But to claim you can "get high" or "trip out" on a succession of beats, long, droning, pointless beats, makes you look as ridiculous as, well, someone rapidly inflating a deflating a balloon in order to get high. If someone tells ever tells you that they tried i-doser and had an awesome acid trip, ask them exactly how long they stared at the grain on the chair leg, blown away by its intricacy and perfectly mathematical symmetry.

Of course, the vast majority of the media (read: Daily Mail), being the bastions of sense and reasoned social commentary, have reacted to this farce by decrying "PARENTS, WELCOME TO YOUR NEW NIGHTMARE!" where kids"CHANGE THEIR BRAINS IN THE SAME WAY AS REAL-LIFE NARCOTICS!" The media even managed to get a rise out of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, but then, it was Oklahoma after all, and they are want to panic.

Of course, drugs have been evolving for thousands of years, and there is nothing to suggest that this is nothing but a natural progression of the drug culture. After all, kids have been listening to shit music and looking like retarded Scott Pilgrim characters for years, so it makes sense that their drug-taking should reflect that.