For the non-religious, for whom there is no holy telephone, Easter can still contain a moral lesson. Chocolate is the apple from the Garden of Eden: each bite contains the knowledge of what is good and also harmful. It teaches us about the wowser’s paradox: we rarely get good without evil, or joy without sorrow. Eradicating all harm leads to loss.

The cocoa bean is a stimulant; it temporarily improves memory and reaction time. It increases electrical activity in the brain and creates a sense of euphoria. We love to imagine that something that feels so good must do good: one much-cited study finds that places with high chocolate consumption have the highest number of Nobel laureates.

Studies that try to show chocolate is a health food succeed only in showing that it causes happiness.Credit: iStock

A reasonable conclusion from scrolling through Instagram today would be that chocolate is unalloyed bliss. As an expression of love, we even give it to our tiny children.

But sadly, in reality, too much chocolate is bad. Over time, persistent chocolate over-use can cause the sensual padding and jolly rolls of a healthy body to become a little overstuffed, taxing the heart and other essential organs and depressing the soul. It’s a drug, of a kind, and though we celebrate its abundance, we know we have to take it in moderation.

I can only imagine what NSW Crime Commissioner Michael Barnes might say if he were to stumble across images of today’s sweet festival. Since the middle of March, Barnes has been castigating successful Australians for glamorising drugs. “Upper-middle-class young people wearing business clothes and drinking red wine think it’s great to post pictures of people doing lines,” he complained. “That makes it extremely difficult to convince other people that it’s a bad thing to do.”

For a moment there, I wondered whether Barnes’ heart was really in his job. His problem is not that the people doing the lines are sustaining harm, but that some people do drugs while continuing to live fun and productive lives.

When drugs do severe harm to the people using them, they are not glamorous. Barnes needn’t worry that ice addicts posting pictures of their scabby, toothless faces or reels of themselves sitting in dirty urban gutters setting their own hair alight (yes, I’ve actually seen that done) will glamorise methamphetamine. There’s nothing tempting about addiction, except to those people who are looking to fill a hole in an unhappy life.

Even 1990s heroin chic was more spectacle than aspiration. The yuppie set did not rush out to contract a habit that would end with a needle hanging out of their arms in public toilets. They wanted the good times, not the bad times, and that should be a recognition that is useful to the Crime Commissioner and, indeed, give us all hope.