Why you should warn your children about Teddy Tablets – even if you spent your own teens high on ecstasy

How do we protect young children from the exact mistakes many of us made ourselves? The tendency must be to become so worried about our hypocrisy being exposed that we don’t say anything at all

Tough parenting did nothing to protect the children of the eighties and nineties from experimenting with drugs (Sunset Music Festival/Facebook)

Reports that drug dealers are selling ecstasy tablets named “Teddy Tablets” in order to appeal to the more juvenile audience are clearly horrifying. It’s not, however, hot news that the various bodies manning each murky stage of the drug supply chain are bleak, unscrupulous bottom-feeders. Working that out about dealer is a formative part of growing up.

Teddy Tablets also, it must be said, sound like a Chris Morris style anti-drugs spoof, dreamed up by a team of millennial wags hoping to fool oldies into making viral content by moaning. But then my generation is a bit paranoid. We took a lot of E in the nineties, which probably didn’t help, and now it’s up to us to communicate a sensible approach to drugs to our young people. God help us.

Back then, there were no Teddy Tablets – although teens were flogged pills printed with Mitsubishi logos with their oh-so-sleek connotations of aspiration. Or Doves, for peace, because, well, I love you man. Or Dennis the Menace, which came in a startling black and red caplet to lure teens with a connotation of badness and tenacity.

But Salford Police’s warnings about Teddies make the reality of a new pre-teen drug-taking demographic seem clearer. In a way, we should have foreseen this. In the era of the ‘Young Fogey’, in which larger proportions of twenty-somethings are rejecting booze, cigarettes and lying in a heap all weekend gurning in favour of more fruitful pursuits, there is a grim inevitability that dealers need to market to a less sage clientele.

Drug dealers are rarely damp-eyed humanitarians. If Young Fogey 20-somethings are determined to staying in with their parents of an evening, saving up house deposits, preserving their beautiful Instagram-friendly complexions, watching Bake-Off on iPlayer and juicing kale, then a new market for drugs must be found.

And 11-year-olds, dismal though it sounds, must be perfect. Here’s a demographic who’ve yet to begin worrying about mortgage ladders and how diligent they sound on their CV. They’re a group yet unswayed by the ‘cult of wellness’ and don’t fret much over toxic substances entering their bodies.

No 11-year-old cares if photos emerge the following morning looking saucer-eyed, because they don’t have a boss and they’re not on Facebook anyway. They aren’t addled by liberal guilt over who muled drugs into the country, because they don’t know where anything is past the local park. Though nightclubs have become unfashionable among the 20-35s crowd, getting wasted in a caravan behind your parents backs, while you’re supposed to be at the cinema, never, ever goes out of fashion.

The most difficult part of the Teddy Tablets moral panic – for it has all the makings of one – is how the nineties and noughties party-goers can speak to their children about drugs. How do we warn of their implications? How do we protect young children from the exact mistakes many of us made ourselves?

Now I am older, wrinklier and less able to dance at Space in Ibiza without frightening teenagers, I abhor the idea of young children taking mind-altering substances. I shiver at the idea of under-12s so much as meeting a drug dealer. But still, I laughed like a drain at Alan Partridge’s Scissored Isle when Partridge took the “ecstasy pellet”.

It was a perfectly pitched scene, mocking both moral panic and a typical harmless drug experience. Attempting to ingratiate himself with the youth, Partridge “nibbled a pellet” and embarked on the night of his life. Following this relatively harmless evening of making an utter gibbering berk of himself, Alan washed up at work the next day puce-faced and gasping for water. Many in their thirties and forties, watching at home, would understand Alan’s plight only too well.

In the age of Teddies, the modern grown-up must face a conundrum. We know that to go in swinging hard at children about the terribleness of Class A and Class B drugs does nothing other than make them sound raffishly brilliant. We know that as our parents did it in the eighties, and made very little impact on 5,000 people standing in a field every weekend watching Eat Static.

The tendency must be, I suspect, to become tongue-tied, to be so worried about our hypocrisy being exposed, that we don’t say anything at all. But speak to your 11-year-olds you must.

It will be awkward, no doubt – but if you don’t, whoever has the Teddies might.