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5 Sep 09 | Re: Govt going the wrong way

Really good piece by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian yesterday about the laughable ‘war on drugs’. He describes current drugs policy in the UK and USA as “immoral idiocy ... gloriously, crashingly immoral ... the politics of stupid ... a total failure ... the greatest sweeping-under-the-carpet of our age”. He is so right.

Of course the sensible thing would be to legalise at least some drugs, even if it was just to see what happened. I had always assumed politicians knew that, and that the reason it wasn’t done was simply that public opinion was felt to be against it, due to ignorance. Yet the British government is actually trying to go the other way - they are currently looking to make illegal some forms of herbal high, which if you don’t know are those sugar and caffeine pills that people wearing Peruvian rugs sell at music festivals to about two dozen people a year. It’s one thing to have a failed and failing policy and not want to admit it, but it’s quite another to seek to extend that policy into other obscure areas that almost nobody has even heard of. Woo, vote Labour.

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