There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."?  On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it, "the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront".   Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager combatants.   Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads, playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas 50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't know about you, but that petrifies me."   We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of drug-testers.   But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh. Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified, is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma.   Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled. Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the doors of   London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara, Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates.   A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit,   which will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise.   When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial prohibition, than a futile and costly "war".   Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told   Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates, half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying out alcoholics in a brewery.   The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners, models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures - doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war, he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance. The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann Widdecombe. Enjoy