It's the roof, silly...

Cannabis use in the UK has fallen since the drug was downgraded to Class C in January 2004 . That's not an opinion; it's a fact compiled by the Government itself. Illicit drug use in Britain is down across the board according to the British Crime Survey. But why would this apparent paradox be so?

Maybe, and this really is an opinion, all the people who were going to smoke dope anyway are still doing so, but those for whom the illegal status was the thrill failed to see it in such a glamorous light once downgraded. So, if downgrading shook out the market, why the hell is the UK government trying to reclassifying cannabis to class B again in January 2009? Does this sound sensible to you?

Apparently, the proposed reclassification is required because "skunk" - the powerful herbal variety of dope - is prevalent in the market and the Government want to be able to go after the farmers. Well... why don't they? After all, this is a government that's good at applying laws incorrectly. It recently applied the Anti-terrorism Act to seize Iceland's assets!

More properly, why not simply split out skunk from the more traditional and milder resinous form of the drug and reclassify it in isolation? Or split out skunk farming? After all, if it's genuinely cause and effect that downgrading led to lower use, surely putting all forms of dope back up to Class B will increase it's overall use again. I'm so confident of this happening, I'm actually thinking of putting £10 on at Ladbrokes. The problem is, it's so obvious, I doubt I'd get anything better than evens.

This muddle smacks (if you'll pardon the expression) of a man who on a Bank Holiday Sunday hears a dripping sound in his attic. He tells his neighbour that he plans to call a plumber out to fix the header tank. The neighbour looks into the attic and tells him he needs to fix the roof because that's the source of the leak, not the header tank. No, demands the householder: a plumber to fix the header tank is what he wants. In other words, only a fool begins with a conclusion, but it takes an even bigger fool to stick with it.