Yet another attempt to inject sanity into Britain’s archaic drug laws has failed. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, last month accepted Lord Falconer’s modest proposal to decriminalise the possession of small amounts of cannabis. He was stamped on yet again by that citadel of reaction, the Home Office, and its boss, Yvette Cooper. Falconer’s distinguished group of lawyers, doctors and academics did not suggest legalisation. They simply argued that treating people using cannabis as criminals served no purpose. It confused soft drugs with hard, was racially biased in its enforcement, diverted police time from more pressing matters and denied help to those who needed it.

An old game of media interviews is to ask politicians if they have ever taken drugs. Prime ministers from David Cameron and Boris Johnson to Keir Starmer, as well as the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, have either admitted to taking them or refused to deny it. Politicians feel that what the middle classes do at university is harmless fun. If it happens on a council estate, however, it is a route to prison.

The reality is that the divide in Britain is not between those “in favour” of cannabis and those against. It is between those who care about the impact of criminalisation and those who don’t, a subset of whom merely want to sound macho. Decriminalisation in one form or another has been proposed for a quarter of a century. In 2000 the Police Foundation committee on drugs, of which I was a member, advised downgrading cannabis from a class B to a class C drug and in effect decriminalising it – but politicians never followed through. This was despite a

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