A sp(l)iffing idea.

The question of drug-taking is in the news again, thanks to one of the proposed Conservative leadership candidates not being prepared to come clean on whether he had or hadn't. I find our attitude to drugs most confusing. My understanding is that the number of crimes committed specifically as a result of someone being under the influence of drugs is - if we exclude alcohol (which most strangely doesn't count as a drug) - very small. What tends to be referred to as "drug-related crime" refers almost entirely to crimes committed by people after money to feed their habit, and turf-wars between drug-dealing gangs. In other words, the main problem as far as society is concerned is not to do with people taking drugs, but with the practicalities involved in them getting those drugs, and yet all our laws seem designed to make the problem worse by making the supply more restrictive. If our laws were based on logic rather than on hypocritical bigotry we would, as a first step, make drugs readily and cheaply available thus virtually eliminating drug-related crime as defined above, and then, but only then, if thought appropriate, we could embark on an education programme designed to try and make drug-taking socially unacceptable - though why we should when we place no restrictions on the consumption of alcohol, escapes me. And let me make clear that I have no axe to grind - like Bridget Jones I regularly exceed my daily alcohol unit intake - v.v. bad.