Before their cosy domestication in our kitchens and cafés, tea and coffee were both used exclusively to keep the mind alert and focussed for prayer or meditation. At the opposite end of the experiential scale, alcohol clouded the mind while arousing the passions, letting loose the unflinching warrior within to confront the hostile world outside: a disturbing primal scene re-enacted almost nightly on our city streets, especially at the weekends.

Today, 80% of all violent crime is alcohol-related. So just because such intoxicants have lost their inherent mystery over the years, it doesn’t make them less of a dangerous drug. At the same time, many of those substances that we do treat as dangerous or antisocial are historically embedded deep within our earliest culture. How else could the tobacco industry get away with unthinkable profits and enormous political sway by selling something that is so harmful it kills an estimated 4.9 million people annually?

Buying illegal drugs effectively means putting your trust in some guy who thinks owning a gold-plated AK47 is the height of social sophistication and who doesn’t even know you exist: so just imagine how much he cares about your welfare. But is buying cigarettes really that different?

Some drugs will kill you, some will permanently mess with your head, and the ones that don’t do either still have the power to turn you into one of the most boring, untrustworthy and just plain annoying people on the entire planet.

So let’s get one thing straight: to argue that drugs rule the world is not the same as saying they ought to be decriminalized. Nor is it an attempt to present drugs in some less demonised form. The exercise of true power rarely has anything to do with established concepts of either legality or fluffiness. Drugs are mad, bad and dangerous to know, but they are also inevitable.

That’s why we don’t think twice about the multi-billion dollar industry that exists as a result of our insatiable appetite for altered consciousness. Drugs are to humans what fish are to chips. And that's why they rule the world.