It may explain soaring hard drinking among the very young if they think whatever is legal is safer than everything that is not. Downgraded to a class C drug, police would not be allowed to arrest people found with small amounts during street searches. The calm, rational and liberal tones of this report are just the kind to make Jack Straw reach for his revolver. He eats reports like this for breakfast. But he will seize another opportunity to draw plaudits from the forces of conservatism as he kicks it out of the arena.
Drugs policy is the ultimate political football, no interest in facts, only in political symbolism.
Only consider the ravings of William Hague last month when he called for seven-year sentences for supplying cannabis and life for giving ecstasy to a minor. Politicians are contemptible on this issue, a shame since it makes the young so cynical. But if the government had a sudden Damascene conversion, it still might make no difference. The ill-conceived new mutant House of Lords precludes any kind of liberal reform ever passing its doors. With 91 hereditaries still in place and a promise by Tony Blair not to pack the chamber with Labour appointees, we now have reinvigorated muscular Lords as mad and unrepresentative as before but with twice the oppositional vim.