Which is not to say that democracy has no place within our decision-making process, merely that limitations should be placed upon it.

Whether it’s drug policy or — my current area of interest — sustainability, I do not believe that an elected government should be permitted to implement policies which can be clearly demonstrated to cause more damage than they prevent. Large groups of people can be manipulated into acting in extraordinarily destructive (and self-destructive) ways with worrying ease.

Now, we can all sit around a table and thrash out the definition of “damage” (though I’d suggest in the case of drug policy, it’s pretty self-evident that more social and individual harm is created by prohibition than is prevented by it). And in those cases where there is no clear evidence, or the evidence is in reasonable doubt, then the arbitrary preferences of the majority should probably be pursued.

I don’t accept that “morality” (more often than not, an inherited and unexamined value-system) should play a major part in the creation of social policy except in the sense that “social policy should not do more damage than it prevents” is itself a moral statement. However, it’s a moral statement based upon a demonstrable truth, i.e. that which harms our environment / society harms ourselves.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that such harm should be avoided and that those who attempt to inflict it upon themselves and others should not be permitted to do so. The use of drugs can — and often does — result in harm for the user and occasionally those around them. The criminalisation of drugs results in significantly more harm. Therefore, the criminalisation of drugs should not be a democratic decision.

I don’t want to get drawn into defending current drug policy (that’s really not a position that comes naturally to me) but I do want to question the idea that evidence alone can be a sufficient guide to any policy decsions.

Drug policy, like any other complex area of public policy, involves multiple competing goals – improve public health, reduce crime, reduce institutional corruption, reduce nuisance behaviour of various kinds. Scientific or and social-scientific evidence can tell us a lot about how different policies perform against these different criteria (and I think that we can agree that prohibition is a big fat wash-out on most of them) but it can’t tell us which is the most important or how we choose between policies that perform better on different criteria.

If we accept that policy should be made solely by technocrats then we are abandoning the real ideological conflicts that sit behind many areas of policy making. It might get us to the right place on drug policy, but we abandon any kind of visionary or transformative politics in favour of wonkish fiddling to meet an unquestionable set of goals that, likely, entrench many of our existing problems.

Campaigners for a change in drug policy (which includes myself) need to accept that the major stumbling block is public opinion, and attempt to change that by combatting the misinformation pumped out by mad Mel and her ilk. Nutt had exactly the right approach, and he suffered for it, but I don’t think that the solution is to put him in charge.

As it happens, I personally believe that drug prohibition is morally repugnant (I insist that my body is my own property and that drug prohibition asserts a government’s right to stipulate what I may or may not do with it, up to and including imprisoning me if I disagree).

So bringing morality into such an important policy area is extremely problematic and essentially boils down to “well, my parents told me it was wrong, so you’re going to prison” (morality is the internalisation of parental beliefs, and only insofar as parental beliefs reflect social norms, it is the internalisation of those norms).

If anything we should tie social policy (in this area and perhaps all others) to some objective evaluation of social harm. I would argue that the evidence available demonstrates that current policy does more harm than good.

Your position is basically an argument in favour of Sharia law in Afghanistan or Somalia.

Making drugs policy should involve scientific advice on the real impact of drugs, yes, but should also incorporate values and social norms which are not a matter on which we can ever take expert advice. And I think a postman or a cabbie are just as well qualified to comment about the moral issues around drugs – just not the scientific ones.