I still find it hard to understand the thinking behind the Home Office’s proposals to reduce the limts for drug possession, so that someone caught with as little as 5g of cannabis could be looking at prison for up to 14 years as a dealer. Who writes these proposals? A special committee of Daily Mail and Readers Digest subscribers?

I can’t help remembering what the late, great Bill Hicks had to say about the war on drugs – that someone addicted to drugs is ill, not a criminal, and you don’t cure sick people by putting them in prison.

I’m firmly against the idea on both moral and practical grounds.

The moral grounds are that I don’t feel that most drugs are inherently bad – OK in moderation but bad if taken to excess. Just like alcohol: another drug but one which, although causing more deaths, injuries and anti-social behaviour than all other drugs put together is deemed socially acceptable. Pure coincidence that the drugs which are taxed are OK, but the others are bad.

There are several practical grounds. The first one is the total lack of joined-up thinking. The Home Office is already considering releasing prisoners because of over-crowding. Criminalising a whole new chunk of the population does not look like it will help.

A second practical consideration is that a lot of drug-takers do not have much of a choice. Even if not addicted, they will know how much they want and how long it will last. Having never bought drugs myself, I am guessing a bit here, but I would have thought that the actual buying is the most risky part of the whole experience: that is where an average consumer is more likely to come into contact with a criminal. If I was buying drugs I would feel happier buying twice as much so I have to only make that transaction half as often. If you can only buy a couple of joints’ worth at a time you will have to be visiting dealers all the time surely.

Closely connected to that is the economy of scale. We buy baked beans, washing powder, tinned tomatoes, tea bags and toilet rolls in bulk because it is cheaper that way. The drug-takers most likely to turn to crime to fund their purchases are the poorer ones. Forcing them to either criminalise themselves or buy in smaller portions at a higher unit cost is not going to improve matters there. By the way, I don’t know how long 10 joints would last – lets be conservative and say a fortnight – but having a month’s worth does not seem excessive. At times I have had enough tea bags in the house to last me a couple of months without there ever being any suggestion that I was intending to deal in tea bags, and some of the booze-cruisers returning from France weighed down with crates of beer and wine and a few thousand cigarettes really are just stocking up for a few months.

In fact, I suspect a greater proportion of booze-cuisers are ‘dealing’ than those who have 10g of cannabis. (Yes – a couple of cartons of fags for a work colleague does count)

The whole thing smacks of a department trying to look tough by hitting out at the easy targets.