drugs are bad, m'kay?

Come on now, Melanie, you're not even trying:

Although some official figures seem to show that cannabis use is falling for certain age groups, others tell a very different story. The number of people who have ever used it is increasing; Britain has one of the highest rates of cannabis use in the world; and it is being used by younger and younger children - who don't even appear in the official statistics - and leading young people on to other drugs such as cocaine, whose use is exploding.

Assertions passing as fact, much? What other research? Do you have evidence that it's being used by younger and younger children, or did you pull that "fact" straight from your pundit-hole?

Phillips also accuses the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs of "ignoring the evidence of the harm cannabis does to the brain" - it's presumably a different group with an identical name which warned that cannabis use may worsen the symptoms of schizophrenia and lead to a relapse in some patients. It's a parallel universe Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, from a world where Melanie Phillips is both accurate and honest.

The main problem Phillips has with the ACMD is that it is "riddled with 'harm reduction' advocates who will die in the last ditch before admitting the harm that cannabis does." Except, of course, that they do admit such a thing - just not in sufficiently apocalyptic and terrifying terms as they're stuck with reporting actual research instead of Phillips' opinions which do not have to maintain a bothersome link to evidence. Such research suggests, "at worst, that using cannabis increases the lifetime risk of developing schizophrenia by 1 per cent."

It's true that the debate is ongoing, with different studies producing different results, a lack of evidence for direct causation and disagreement over whether cannabis use amongst people with mental health problems is a symptom of self-medication rather than a cause. But those kinds of details would interfere with Phillips' black and white reading of the research - subtlety is for people who are trying to enslave children into a lifetime of addiction.

The one-sided reading helps disguise the fact that Phillips' authoritarian streak is inconsistent. Though railing against "all drug use [as] totally beyond the pale because no society can tolerate the harm it does," she has nothing to say about alcohol, a drug which has a long association with violent crime and poor health. By pretending that there's no dispute over the relative risks involved, Phillips can declare "drugs" to be an absolute danger to life, limb and our culture as a whole.

Consequently, the possibility that a drug might be used in moderation - where those using it accept the risk to their health, as in smoking and drinking - doesn't appear in Phillips' rhetoric because that would be a sign of weakness, an admission that a person can happily smoke cannabis in their teens and go on to join the Cabinet without losing their mind and destroying their lives.