There are times for a dignified silence

You would have thought Jacqui Smith would be a little bit too busy preparing her excuses - sorry, reasons - for her expenses fiddle, but yesterday she still found time to comment on Professor Nutt's comments that ecstasy was no more dangerous than an addiction to equestrianism.

Now, far be it from me to make a scientific comment, but having had the numbers of deaths caused by ecstasy rammed down my throat (what was it, 30 last year?), compared to deaths involving horses (ah, wait, something like 100, yes?), I wonder if he might have a point.

Unity has made this point before over on the Ministry of Truth. The Drugs policy in this country is a shambles, despite all the evidence suggesting that prohibition doesn't work, the government continues to pursue it. I think most people fail to realise is that doctors prescribe drugs daily which have side-effects and can be fatal or damaging if taken in large doses. Paracetamol is available over the counter, for heaven's sake, knock back enough of them and you'll be getting your stomach pumped in no short order.

Would regulation and legalisation allow for the purity of a substance to be defined? Probably, yes. Would that make it safer? Undoubtedly. A big problem for heroin users, for example, is when the quality changes and suddenly they've taken twice as much as they're expecting. Make it legal and you can bloody tax it. Since cigarettes and alcohol are already such an earner, why not diversify?

So, I have to ask, why are drugs like tobacco and alcohol legal, substances such as oxycodone and diazepam available on prescription, yet a drug that literally does as it says on the tin - ecstasy - is illegal? The argument that it is dangerous doesn't hold any water, and when new studies keep suggesting that it is no more dangerous than alcohol (which is proven to cause long-term damage, unlike ecstasy), you start to wonder why the establishment is so keen to ban it. Don't they like people having a good time? When people have died, it's been as a result of dehydration or in some instances over-hydration. Most happy clubbers I've seen are smart enough to have a bottle of water in hand.

In the case of disco biscuits, the same counter-argument as for marajuana applies - we don't know the long-term implication because it hasn't been around for that long. Well, newsflash, we prescribe drugs daily where we *do* know there are long-term risks, some are pretty serious, yet we prescribe them anyway.

Fact is (oh, how I hate myself for saying that), there is a huge culture of drug-taking in Britain. There are kids out at the weekend on coke, speed, ecstasy, ketamine, a good few cooking up GHB (which *is* filthy fucking stuff), and there are a lot of them. I wouldn't even dare to put a finger in the wind guess on the real numbers, but how many of the clubbers at Fire in London do you think aren't on something? Ever been to The Arches in Glasgow on a Saturday night? And how many deaths are we hearing of every week?

Just because it wouldn't be a drugs-prohibition-related-rant without at least a mention of Holland. Hash legal. Are there hundreds of stoned Dutchmen on the streets? Err... no, actually. Plenty of stoned Brits over for the weekend, but it's pretty harmless. Back over this side of the stream, as Unity pointed out in his article, the police actually quite like (relatively speaking) dealing with people on pills, as for the most part they're too loved up with the world to be any hassle. It's the drunk ones that cause the issue.

Trying to crowbar myself back on track here, there was something Freebee Smith spewed in her denunciation of Professor Nutt that just irritated me:

"For me that makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of drugs, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of ecstasy and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of drugs."

Seriously. She erodes her own moral authority and thinks she can take the high ground? The serious problem in her eyes is that people take drugs. The serious problem as I see it is that we spend so much time telling people what not to do that we don't think that maybe, just maybe, the majority of people are smart enough to make their own decisions. It's just like tobacco, or the codeine your doctor is prescribing you. If you know the risks you can make an informed decision.

At the end it all boils down to one question. Why do people take drugs? To enhance the way they feel. But you don't like people feeling good, do you, Jacqui.

Educate and inform, don't command and control. Let us choose for ourselves.