Nothing will fill a parish hall or school hall quicker than a talk about drugs. Tell parents at a school that there is to be a talk about drugs and they will be hanging out of the rafters. Tell them there is to be a talk about tobacco and they will not turn up. Tell them there is a talk about alcohol and they will probably turn up in reasonable numbers. Drugs can produce a response like no other issue. I want to talk about the drugs of choice of the people of Ireland and the ones that are killing significant numbers of people, the first because of its inherently insidious nature and the second because of the extent to which we have become a society of abusers.