In strict logic, the case for the legalisation of all drugs, not just cannabis, is overwhelming. Most harm caused by drug use is to the users themselves and, therefore, in a free society, no more the business of the state than other people's liking for, say, jumping out of aeroplanes. The state's concerns should be to keep drugs out of the hands of children; to minimise the inconvenience and danger caused by drug users to other members of society; to ensure that consumers are fully informed about the strength, purity, contents and risks of any particular preparation; and to provide adequate treatment for addicts. All these aims may be as easily - and, in the case of the last two, more easily - achieved when a drug is legalised and properly regulated. This is exactly how we treat alcohol - whose risks, according to medical opinion given to the newly published inquiry for the Police Foundation, merit inclusion among class A drugs, alongside heroin and cocaine, above Ecstasy and LSD (at present also in class A) and well above cannabis (at present in class B). Further, the merit of a legal drug is that it can be taxed; alcohol, despite its social and health costs, brings in substantial revenues to the Exchequer. Illegal drugs, by contrast, generate revenue only for the black economy.

Worse, illegal drugs, as America discovered during Prohibition, breed more crime, for two reasons. First, the suppliers, in the absence of conventional regulation, fight their battles for market share through violence and extortion, causing fear and misery to the residents of areas in which they operate. Second, illegality allows suppliers to charge a risk premium which forces up the price and leads the more dependent users to theft in order to finance their habit. It is estimated that at least a third of current British crime and half of American murders are drug-related.

Against all this, it may be argued that our drug laws provide one of our few effective forms of overseas aid, since poor farmers in countries such as Colombia make a living from a trade that would otherwise be controlled by western multinationals. But leave that aside. The criminalisation of drugs was largely a 20th-century development - half the population of Victorian Britain was doped on some form or other of opium - created by a combination of total war and factory labour, both of which required the population to obey orders and retain motor control. Now that both are almost obsolete, our attitudes to drugs look more illogical than ever. Attempts at reform by worthies such as Viscountess Runciman, Simon Jenkins and Sir Bernard Williams - all members of the Police Foundation inquiry - tend to introduce more illogicality. Why, if we are to take a more relaxed attitude to possession of certain drugs, should we take a more severe one, as the inquiry seems to recommend, to their supply? Why, if cannabis is to be moved to class C, the least dangerous drug category, should we be further de-regulating alcohol, which the inquiry puts two categories higher?

But law is rarely a matter of logic. Some change, however small, is better than no change. If we are indeed concerned to keep people off heroin and cocaine, we are foolish to waste police time on cannabis which, Runciman concludes, "by any of the major criteria of harm - mortality, morbidity, toxicity, addictiveness, and relationship with crime - is less harmful . . . than any of the other major illicit drugs, or than alcohol and tobacco". It is even more foolish to put the markets in all these drugs on the wrong side of the legal fence, so that dealers who supply cannabis are also likely to supply the harder drugs. Government ministers, however, rejected Runciman's conclusions instantly, even though the inquiry's research shows that, even among the over-45s, fewer than 40 per cent think that cannabis is harmful. Further, even the Daily Mail, house journal of Middle England, now wants "a frank and open public debate".

Britain and America have the toughest anti-drug policies in the western world and the biggest problems with drug addiction and crime. These facts show that the "war" against drugs, with its preposterous tsars and police swoops, is a hopeless failure. But they do not, as some members of the Runciman inquiry suggest, show cause and effect. They show that inequality and poverty breed drug dependence. In the early 1970s, Britain had fewer than 5,000 registered addicts; now, it has nearly 50,000. The graph rose most sharply in the early 1980s and early 1990s, when the combination of recession and Tory policy ravaged the inner cities. The only effective way to wage war on drugs is to step up the war against poverty.

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