Ever since Home Secretary David Blunkett announced last week that cannabis will be reclassified from class B to class C, the Daily Mail has been running a campaign to make him reconsider. Every day they have been running headlines on how terrible life is in areas of Lambeth where “drugs usage is rife”. They completely ignore the fact that most of the crime surrounding drugs is caused purely because they are illegal. Today’s headline is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. They have a photo of three or four people enjoying a joint in a sunny park. An innocuous enough site you might think – but not to the Daily Mail as only yards away children play innocently unaware of the fiends in their midst. It’s all total nonsense, of course.

And here’s something that doesn’t change. Both politicians and the tabloids still have a knee-jerk reaction to drugs which make it impossible to have an intelligent conversation on the subject. In the ten years since I wrote this entry, cannabis has been reclassified back to class B and the government have sacked a scientific adviser on drugs because he insisted on giving them scientific evidence on drugs.