Bloody drugs! Sorrow is sorrow, the loss of youth and talent is a blight, and kind words are most fitting for the dead. But all the same, as two families and countless puzzled children's TV viewers mourn the loss of Natasha Collins and Mark Speight, someone has to say it. Damn the drugs, and damn the culture that accepts them with a cheeky wink.

Ms Collins (verdict, misadventure) died scalded in a bath with her body full of vodka and cocaine, bearing physical signs of long use of the drug. Mr Speight, the fiancé who on that night had been - in the media's words - “partying” at home with her, and in the coroner's phrase “embarking on adventurous behaviour, ignoring the risks”, was by all accounts a kind and gifted man. He struggled on with his regrets and has now been found dead, hanged in a building next to Paddington station. Curse cocaine, curse the trade that feeds off poverty and crime, and above all curse the culture that sniggers about it and turns blind eyes for the sake of cool. While we're about it, call down brimstone on cannabis, too, bringer of psychosis and - according to yesterday's letter in The Times from the Pembrokeshire Coroner - ever more road deaths.

This should hardly need to be said, and there is graceless discomfort in writing it. But reading reports of this double disaster and skimming the chatter on the internet, it is plain that whenever someone does condemn recreational drugs and their users, they are drowned by indignant cries of “tragedy”, praise of the victims, and accusations of “judgmentalism”. There is much illogical blaming of other factors (such as the police who failed to find Mr Speight in time) and claims that unconnected “psychological problems” are to blame.

But look squarely at the facts: a couple of rich, successful, beautiful, highly praised people with plenty of friends and affectionate families and few very solid problems trashed themselves on cocaine and vodka regularly, and threw away their lives. Just as Pete Doherty, now in prison, tries hard to throw away his, and the wonderful singer Amy Winehouse threatens hers. Meanwhile, countless unnamed kids, who do have solid problems and certainly can't afford the Priory, follow their lead. Hoping to share their cool, they share only their doom. As shiny famous people career downhill, the rest of us watch and, far too often, giggle.

Defenders of drugs like to point the finger at alcohol abuse, which also causes physical and mental havoc. But at least with alcohol the hangover is quicker to come, the symptoms more socially embarrassing. And it is legal. Actually, I accept many of the arguments for legalising recreational drugs. If you had to queue up at the Tesco pharmacy counter behind coughing pensioners and hand over a chit from your GP with all the other losers, drug crime would abate and drug glamour would tarnish. And in the wake of this squalid disaster it is the thought of that glamour, the insider nod and wink around cocaine, that most enrages me.

Media people adore their own drugginess. Everyone, especially in TV, has seen performers, presenters and executives display bad temper on arrival, nip to the lavatories and return manically smiling and lightly sniffing. The euphemism “partying” is rife. When Sir Ian Blair complained about celebrity use of cocaine he was howled down. When the supermodel Kate Moss was photographed snorting it, it did her career no harm at all. Broadcasting organisations are too chicken to take a strong line with known users, rehabilitating them at lightning speed after the most gross incidents; managers are scared to be tough, possibly because so many of their own number are involved.

But the stuff is rubbish, horrible, disastrous. I speak as a paid-up child of the 1960s, reader of the Doors of Perception, flowers in the hair, all that. Forty years on, dispassionate observation of drug culture leads to one conclusion: it corrodes. The escape and inspiration are illusory, the damage real. And remember the many brave people who - without ever touching party drugs - struggle with the torments of naturally occurring mental illness or physical decline. It is an insult to their courage and endurance when healthy, privileged hedonists play ducks and drakes with their sanity, drugging themselves into sickness just because it felt nice at first. The insult is worsened by self-pitying interviews in glossy magazines about their recovery, furthering the illusion that regularly losing your wits on a cocktail of toxic substances is an amusing little phase everyone goes through, like getting a bit whistled at the office party and goosing your boss, or Bertie Wooster stealing a policeman's helmet on Boat Race night.

There are such peccadillos, and most of us remember a few. But the cocaine habit, the skunk habit, the greedy refusal to accept the ordinary joys of being alive and the ordinary frustrations and dry periods of creative work - that is something else. And while the drugs still are illegal, it is worth remembering that even if by lucky chance they don't kill you or send you mad, they will certainly have killed someone else on their way to you - a kid shot on his bike, a peasant farmer, an enslaved Colombian “mule” dying in agony as a condomful of cocaine bursts in her stomach.

We know all this. Yet we are scared to be “judgmental”. Even I, dull middle-aged trout with a decorous media career, know perfectly well that I have just offended several people I count and value as friends. I am sorry. And intensely sorry, too, for the Speight and Collins families. But it has to be said. Damn the drugs.

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