Just you wait until I grow up

When today's young get into power, will they pretend they never sniffed a line of white powder?

Another Cambridge May Week has rolled around, and I, like half of Cambridge, celebrated with a few tabs of Ecstasy and the odd line of coke. Oh please, spare me your false indignation. This is the casual tone in which most people of my age now discuss drugs. Those of you who thought Cambridge students still celebrated the end of their finals with a sip of Pimm's and a vigorous game of croquet have an even hazier grip on reality than your average LSD user.

It is time we admitted that this country is filled with drug-users. From the granny who sips cannabis tea for her arthritis to the management consultant snorting charlie in the toilets of Stringfellows, from the council estates to the grand estates, we are a nation of druggies.

We have to grow up about drugs, and banish the false rhetoric, misleading statistics and silly mythology of the well-meaning but dishonest anti-drugs lobby. All too often, we have allowed them to exhume the corpses of that tiny handful of people who have died using drugs. Their abuse of the memory of (amongst others) Leah Betts and Lorna Spinks is at best deluded, and at worst mendacious.

Let's face reality for a minute. Betts took a risk. It should have been an informed risk. Just as, every time you get into a car, you know you might be killed, so it is with Ecstasy. Spinks, who died at a Cambridge nightclub a few weeks ago, took the same risk. We hear about her; we don't hear about the quarter-million people (some of whom were my friends, in the same club that night) who had a great weekend.

Spinks died not because she took Ecstasy, but because she didn't take it properly. If a first-time driver whacks straight into a wall, we do not blame the car for the driver's death. We blame the lack of adequate instruction. Similarly, Spinks should have been informed that Ecstasy users should drink lots of water - as she did - but that they should also dance a lot, to sweat the water off.

If Ecstasy was sold legally, this information would be displayed clearly on the packet. As such, Spinks would probably be alive today. Prohibition - not Ecstasy - killed her. If we want more of our children to live, we must shift our spending on drugs information from hysterical scare campaigns to communicating information on how to use drugs properly.

It is argued that this would "legitimise" drug use and give young people the green light to experiment. But drug-use is already widely accepted by young people as just another fun leisure activity. A recent Home Office report found that six in ten people have tried an illicit drug by late adolescence (so have one-third of all 14-year-olds). More than a quarter of a million people take Ecstasy each week. That's the equivalent of every single person in Milton Keynes, every week. Even more smoke cannabis, and almost as many snort cocaine.

Those who shriek about the dangers of such habits fail to realise that the number of resulting deaths is so small that, when they do occur, they become headline news.

In response to these hard facts, the prohibitionists are still playing that same, scratchy old record. "Kids, please don't use drugs," they bleat. Why, they proclaim, children simply need to be told about the innate wickedness of these substances, and implored to develop the moral fibre to resist them. What they ignore is that every single one of those 250,000 people in Britain who take Ecstasy on a Saturday night have endured exactly those sanctimonious lectures in classrooms up and down the land.

And they ignore the lessons from the United States, which has pursued stringent anti-drugs policies relentlessly for decades, and which has been rewarded with millions of unnecessary deaths caused by poor education and the contaminants introduced into drugs by unscrupulous criminal gangs. The US Department of Health found last year that the result of its endless "crackdowns" was that 87 million Americans had used illegal drugs, and 971,000 regularly used crack cocaine. The intellectual poverty of the prohibitionists is so obvious that it no longer merits serious discussion.

In the light of such facts, a brave and sensible government could take us down the road travelled by the Netherlands. The Dutch have encouraged the use of EZ tests, which tell users whether their Ecstasy contains contaminants of any kind. They have told their police to concentrate on criminals who are harming other people, rather than cokeheads and dope- smokers. The average age of Dutch junkies is rising (it is now over 30). While that country's sane approach is successfully reducing the numbers of young people who use drugs recklessly, in Britain and the US, our puerile stance is directly creating junkies who are ever younger. The average age is now just 21.

Although they have not yet opted for full legalisation, the Dutch accept drugs as a fact of life. Other countries are moving in this direction, too. Following a series of Ecstasy-related deaths, the excellent Toronto Raver Information Project (Trip) was established. It set up information booths at raves telling people how to use drugs properly, and how to avoid health risks. This work ranges from the mundane (handing out earplugs, or encouraging ravers to use reputable and responsible drug dealers) to the more serious (arranging referrals for counselling and rehab programmes). There is not any research into their effectiveness yet, but, anecdotally, ravers in Toronto report a steep decline in the (already small) number of illnesses, deaths and unwanted pregnancies at the city's raves.

We, too, could adopt this rational approach - and sooner than you might think. The UK's prohibitionist consensus is beginning to crumble. Nick Davies, one of this country's most gifted investigative journalists, recently exposed the entire intellectual edifice of the political class (and particularly Keith Hellawell, the "drugs tsar") as a dishonest sham, in his television programme Drugs Laws Don't Work: the phoney war. Hella-well has since been humiliatingly sidelined by the new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and forced to admit that his earlier arguments about cannabis were false.

Our politicians are slowly inching away from the old platitudes, too. Mo Mowlam, the cabinet minister with nominal responsibility for drugs policy in the last cabinet, came out recently in the Sunday Mirror in favour of the full legalisation of cannabis. In Labour's first term, Mo was overruled by a twitchy home secretary, Jack Straw.

Sir Keith Morris, Britain's ambassador to Colombia from 1990-94, is another who has just called for the legalisation of drugs, arguing, in the Guardian, that the drugs war is "unwinnable and counter-productive". From 2 July, Blunkett has allowed experimental moves by the police in the London Borough of Lambeth (which covers Brixton) that in effect decriminalise cannabis. Those found in possession of cannabis will be given a meaningless "formal warning" and sent on their way. Tim Godwin, deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, tells us that if, when reviewed at the end of the year, the scheme proves to have been a success, it "may well" be adopted for the whole Met area. If cannabis is officially permitted in London in 2002 - as now seems likely - there will be irresistible pressure for the policy to be extended across the UK.

In practice, decriminalisation already exists - as long as you're rich. Do you seriously think that, whatever their choice of drug, any of the well-to-do students here in Cambridge would be prosecuted for narcotics offences in May Week? Don't make me laugh. Yet at a homeless hostel sandwiched between two Cambridge colleges, two workers faced years in prison just because they were convicted of turning a blind eye to drug use.

Providing a real choice on the question of drugs is also a prerequisite to tackling another major social problem in Britain: the disengagement of young people from politics. How many OAPs would participate in the democratic process if the entire political establishment had spent the last decade demonising Zimmer frames?

Paradoxically, this choice may be offered first by the traditionally authoritarian Conservative Party. Three of the contenders for the Tory leadership - David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Ancram - have called for a major debate on the legalisation of cannabis. Michael Portillo says the Tories need to adjust to what Britain has become, and appeal once more to young people. Well, here's his chance. He could make the drug laws his Clause Four, a symbolic repudiation of the Thatcher/Widdecombe years. We shall have to see if he has the spine. But if not the Tories, sooner or later, Labour.

Today, we only import high-quality drugs from the Netherlands; within a few decades, we will be importing their high-quality drugs policies, too. When the cabinet is made up of men and women of my age, claims that no one in government has had their nose touched by the odd line of white powder will become risible. They will not be able to support a law that they know a significant section of the population blatantly defies.

My friends are tomorrow's doctors, lawyers and, yes, prime ministers - and, boy, do they inhale. When tomorrow comes, their minds may be slightly fuzzier than today's ministers', but at least they won't be closed.