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I don't want to be flippant or dismissive about this news:

Cocaine floods the playground: The Times

...because it is very serious in many ways, including many that are not being questioned in this latest bit of moral panic on drugs, but I thought it was an interesting contrast with some of the policies of South American leaders and would be leaders who want to feed coca to school children for the good of their health.

Now, it should be said that, as President Morales of Bolivia claims, himself a former coca farmer, coca is not the same thing as cocaine, just the raw material and one that in its natural state has claims to many therapeutic benefits. In fact I suppose it's rather like castor beans, which can make beneficial castor oil or terrorist weapon ricin depending on what you do to it. And these kids are breaking the law and putting themselves in danger as a result (though less from the drug itself than from the system for policing it and the underworld that controls it as a result).

But we must use these examples as reasons for opening up the debate, increasing peoples' understanding of the issues around controlled drugs.

The Coca-Cola in the schoolyard vending machine we're now so concerned about after Jamie Oliver started its long history as an extract of coca leaf, and now threatens our children's health in its own insidious way. We should not let President Morales and putative president Ollanta Humala of Peru be drowned out by the paranoia of narcotics nutters in Whitehall or Washington. These countries have millennia of experience of beneficial use of coca. If we're going to be a global village, we need to understand them.

And Transform seem to have a less panic driven response.

Whilst I might be happy about the ACPO drug idea, two other news stories today provide yet more evidence if any were needed of the creeping surveillance we are being subjected to. First, from the Oxford Mail comes a story that Thames Valley police are going to start setting up airport style metal detector arches in places like shopping centres at random to try and catch people with knives.

I know, I know - the police are our friends, and if you've got nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. And it's voluntary - but you watch their reaction if you turn around and try to find another way into the shopping centre or wherever.

Well bollocks to that. I don't want them going through my Anne Summers shopping bag turning out that shiny new metal vibrator I bought for Christmas because it sets all the bells in the shopping centre off! Or whatever.

And then there's a story that they're going to be using hand-held fingerprint scanners on people they stop for whatever reason. We're told they're not going to be storing the data they collect.

Yet.

We're told that it's voluntary.

At the moment.

But we also know that it's linked to a database of about 12% of the population already with fingerprints on file for whatever reason, and we also know that most people simply do not know their rights to refuse such things as "voluntary" stop and searches, so how will they be properly empowered to refuse this advance of the big brother state?

Just beware of sleeping at night - you might wake up with a bar-code tattooed on you some night soon!

Pissed as I have been for most of this afternoon and evening, I have retained the mental capacity to register a phone call this evening from a colleague I've been working with on community land trusts for the past three years telling me that we are now properly registered as an Industrial and Provident Society known as Oxfordshire CLT Limited.

For some reason I feel a little like a new mother must feel before the gas has worn off! We now have this little legal entity, ready and waiting for any of you Oxfordshire landowners and local authorities to do business with. The best present I could have asked for at Christmas!