The whole of the British at least licensing system for alcohol is aimed at harm reduction as much as anything else, from tests of quality and strength to give people an informed choice, to laws relating to serving people who are already drunk.

What is immoral is that whatever the disapproval of drug use may be the way that is carried out by creating an underground black market full of criminals means that more people die and are harmed by the effects of that unregulated trade, especially with addictive substances. You cannot simply stop something being addictive by banning it and when those addicted people go to find a source they find an invariably dangerous source.

As to the law, of course cannabis was only banned in the early twentieth century, like cocaine and opium only a few years before that.

Most of these bans had their roots in racially prejudiced moral panics...Opium in the west because it was feared that Chinese immigrants to the US west coats would use it to stupify western women into bed, cocaine because it turned black men into fiends in the south and similarly cannabis because it made black workers in the south lazy.

All these substances and especially their natural source plants have been in use since the dawn of time not merely for medical use, but in religious rites and for recreation and socialising.

What happened? The use of such drugs spread from the upper classes where it was okay, certainly tolerated and often celebrated, to the working classes. Opium addicts in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly society ladies.

So, unless you are going to carry on the work of the temperence league and finally get rid of alcohol too, it is simply disingenuous to carry on the current prohibition of many other natural substances, especially considering the additional harm that that puts people in.

So it should be no problem making alcohol, a far worse drug, illegal then?

I just do not accept that it has been tried properly. But I still return to my question...how many must die and suffer just because of the way the law makes any of these drugs far more risky than they would be in a properly regulated market aiming at harm reduction. It is simply immoral, nannying, demonising.

Indeed I am disputing the causal link on cannabis. The same data used by the New Zealand research can be read either way. Why should we accept unquestioned the one over the other?

As to ecstacy - I've never seen any research that says it alters your synapses. I appreciate that it works by flooding seratonin transporters that can then shut down, either for a while or permanently.

But why is that any different from what alcohol does day in day out to millions of people?

As I say - the important bit is the last paragraph. If, as I assert, it is the very nature of prohibition that harms more than the drug itself it is the law that is immoral, not the drug. Most of these substances have been in use in some form or another by humans since the dawn of history, for medicine, recreation, religion and so on.

I have used ecstacy, though not usually with any intention of getting mashed and dancing (I don't know of any clubs with sufficient damage insurance!). But it is great for loosening the tension when, as someone with low self confidence and low self esteem, you can find yourself in what would otherwise be terrifying social situations.

If one person can coose any one of a variety of types of alcohol in the knowledge that they are regulated well enough for them to be able to make an informed choice, why cannot anyone else do the same for their substance of choice?

Crack of course is a variant of cocaine - usually indulged in by multiple-dependent folk who get hooked on whatever comes available or is pushed on them by greedy dealers.

I would posit that if you legalise the base substance and regulate it like alcohol, it would be possible to wean people off the artificially enhanced varieties.

The analogy would be like with alcohol where full strength spirits were legal but for a long while (maybe this is urban myth) potcheen (sp?)/absinthe and things like that remained illicit.

LSD I'm not so sure about. I am told that LSD is a naturally ocurring substance and occurs, of all places, in the little blooms that you get on the top of a good pint of real ale! It's also similar to mushrooms, used for millennia of course as part of religious rites in many parts of the world.

As I said - I'd go one further...

How many peoples' lives are to be ruined and lost in that futile attempt?

How many people are to be killed by the state's inept attempt to do what is utterly futile?

How many more people are seriously harmed in that attempt than would be harmed by allowing them a well informed choice in a market made as safe as possible by regulation?

And when are they going to really acknowledge that far more harm is done by the drugs that are legal presently than could be reasonably predicted in the case of some of the drugs that aren't if they were regulated and legalised and the criminality taken out of their supply?

The increase in the strength of drugs is also a side effect of prohibition, just like the strength of alcohol went up during the US prohibition.

The 'War on Drugs' is responsible for far more suffering and criminality than any other policy (including the funding of public enemy number 1 - terrorists). It is immoral on those grounds and it is also immoral on the grounds that it takes away the right of the individual to do what they like to their body.

Perhaps legalisation isn't on the cards now, but in the long run its the only solution.