Meanwhile, what has been happening in the rest of the world? The countries that ratify the Treaty of Versailles dutifully enact anti-drug laws and now they have the obligation to enforce them. The League of Nations – the between-the-wars predecessor of the United Nations – sets up a body to exercise 'general supervision over the execution of agreements with regard to opium and other dangerous drugs.' By 1925 – ironically, the same year as the Canal Zone Report – there is a Permanent Central Board at the League of Nations to supervise and restrict the international narcotics trade. Great Britain, true to the obligations it assumed by ratifying the Treaty of Versailles, enacts its first Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920.

And yet, from the time when Harry J. Anslinger gets his federal anti-cannabis law in 1937, an unaccustomed silence descends on the world of illegal drugs. There is a noticeable gap in all the books on the subject. The newspapers find other things to write about, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics actually tells those fear-mongers who are still braying about the corruption of American youth to calm down. Anslinger now has all the legal powers he needs and he wants the American public to feel that the FBN has everything under control. After more than fifty years of often hysterical anti-drug campaigning, we arrive at a sudden hiatus. When World War II comes, first to China and Japan, then to Europe and finally to the United States, smuggling becomes infinitely more difficult because frontiers are closely guarded and coastlines are heavily defended. Although Chiang Kai Chek, in China, is still using opium cultivation to finance his war, there is a distinct falling off in public awareness of a drug problem and, seemingly as a result, a corresponding falling off in demand.

The period of World War II is characterized by an increase in the consumption of alcohol, tobacco and amphetamines and, as far as one can tell from the newspapers, magazines and newsreels, the opiates, cocaine and marijuana simply drop out of view. How much their use really declined, of course, we have no way of knowing, granted the extent of the disinformation that surrounds this entire subject. Certainly, the immediate post-war generations knew nothing about prohibited drugs. The subject wasn't mentioned on radio or television, there was nothing about it in the newspapers, and until the movie Man with a Golden Arm where Frank Sinatra played a heroin addict, there was nothing in the cinema either. There seems to have been a rise in the demand for heroin just before that film came out, in 1955, and shortly after that Congress toughened up penalties, bringing in the first mandatory sentences and the death penalty, no less, for supplying heroin to a minor. But this wasn't attended by a blaze of publicity, certainly not international publicity, and as far as most people were concerned during the 1940s and the 1950s, there was a lull in the Drug War. Indeed, it's probably safe to say that most of the teenagers who responded to that seminal rock hit by Bill Haley and the Comets – Rock Around the Clock – hadn't even heard of marijuana.

Then, in 1963, at about the same time as Kennedy's assassination, the war broke out again.

It might be useful to take a moment, here, to consider the overall patterns that emerge from the story so far. The first inescapable truth is that the drug war begins as a grass roots thing: at the very outset it's what the voting public wants. Because American democracy operates the way it does, politicians often have a hair-trigger response to the wishes of their electors, and anti-drug legislation is sometimes produced very quickly.

So why do the voting public want any anti-drug laws in the first place? Sometimes their motivations are religious, sometimes they are economic and sometimes a combination of the two. There is always a powerful element of intolerance involved – and an equally powerful element of detestation. There is always a very much disapproved of 'target group' – the Chinese in their 'pestilential dens', the 'cocaine-crazed African American', the 'flappers', the 'degenerate Spanish-speaking residents'. Later, when the Drug War breaks out again in the 1960s, it's the 'long-haired beatniks and hippies' with their blue jeans, their long hair and their guitars, and what older people think of as their alley-cat sexual morality.

And there are always two essential catalysts present. On the one hand there is the press – meaning not only the newspapers, but magazines, radio, cinema and, later, television. On the other hand are the activists – a small band of personalities who are either bitten by the crusader virus and devote themselves indefatigably to their cause – the Bishop Brents, the Hamilton Wrights, the Jennings Bryans – or people like Richmond P. Hobson and Harry J. Anslinger – the opportunists, who jump on the bandwagon and make it roll all the faster.

Neither of these catalysts – neither the press nor the activists – feel it is necessary to stick to the truth. Indeed, they make hardly any proper inquiry into what the truth actually is. Bishop Brent, in his self-righteous certainty, has a knee-jerk response that he's dealing with 'evil' and it never so much as occurs to him to pause and inquire into the real nature of opium smoking. He either doesn't discover, or, if he does, he makes no reference to the fact that opium smoking very rarely leads to addiction and that much business has long been conducted by respectable Chinese merchants over an opium pipe. Wright and Hobson turn exaggeration into a fine art, and Hobson and Anslinger have no hesitation whatsoever in lying to Congress and to the American public.

As for the press – even without Hearst and his need to protect the value of his pine forests – it's a fundamental rule that bad news sells papers, and 'ain't it awfuls' always increase circulation. There was no comparable 1930s press campaign in England, but in America the media had a field day of exaggeration and distortion.

For the role played by the media is absolutely crucial – all the way down the line. What starts as a complaint by a particular pressure group – the 'respectable' San Franciscans, the missionaries, the late Nineteenth Century unemployed in competition with the Chinese or the Great Depression unemployed in competition with the Mexicans – gets puffed up by the media until it appears nothing short of a real national crisis. So of course the public at large gets concerned, and of course the public is stampeded into wanting something to be done about it. And, in America, when the public at large wants something they often get it.

For public demand is a vast moving force in American society. The free market economy is as much part of America as motherhood and apple pie, and it decides the success or failure of anything and everything. A new bond issue, a new breakfast cereal, a new design of vehicle, a new chat-show, a new political candidate, a new freedom, a new restriction, a new church, a new ism – everything stands or falls on how the public respond to it. Which means, of course, that the media and the advertising industry are in many senses one and the same thing. Persuading the public to approve or disapprove of, to want or not to want something, has such monumental consequences in America that the business of persuasion has been taken very seriously indeed for well over a century – ever since the supply of manufactured goods began to outstrip the demand for them. The modern advertising industry was called into existence so as to ensure that demand kept up with supply, and although the public may be largely unaware of the fact, the Consumer Society was custom built so as to keep the wheels of the American economy spinning. This is why, more than any other people in the world, Americans are absolutely bombarded with advertizing – and why they are so susceptible to it. In California you can get half a dozen telephone calls a day trying to sell you something. About quarter of a pound of waste paper arrives through the mail, day in, day out, wholly devoted to marketing. Television programs are peppered with commercial breaks. The people of the planet's most successful ever nation are led wherever the media and the advertizing experts of Madison Avenue want them to go.

While much of this advertising is fair and honest, some of it is blatantly misleading and underhand. Particularly objectionable is the television advertising some politicians go in for at election time, where candidates throw an incredible amount of dirt at each other and tell the electorate whatever they think will win them the most votes. In particular, the way these politicians play on the fear of the electorate is particularly cynical. 'Get tough on crime' is an unfailingly effective battle cry at election time. It appeals particularly to an older generation made vulnerable by advancing years. These older people are a well-organized and increasingly large segment of the voting public. Promises to put more police on the streets, to build more prisons, to legislate for longer jail sentences – these pull in the votes from an electorate made anxious by the latest round of 'ain't it awfuls' about the War against Drugs. And, apart, perhaps, from the 20 million marijuana smokers and the other drug users, the unhappy truth is that present-day voters are no more aware of the realities of the Drug War than American voters have ever been.

The sad thing is that any politician who suggested there might be another way – that America might do more effective things with the billions of dollars it spends on its spectacularly unsuccessful war against 'narcotics' – would be drowned in choruses of accusation that he was soft on drugs. And in recent times this would almost certainly mean political suicide.

So, in this story where irony is piled upon irony, it is yet again ironic that those fundamental strengths of American society – a vigorous democracy, a free market economy and a constitutionally guaranteed free press – not only created the War against Drugs in the first place, but now make it virtually impossible to end. Until the public is at last given the truth and is gently and actively persuaded to take a truly intelligent look at the realities of this War – and in particular to peer behind the usually misleading 'ain't it awfuls' – America will almost certainly continue on the same unswerving course it followed for the whole of the Twentieth Century.

And, almost inevitably, along with America goes most of the civilized world.

In December, 1973, the Arab oil-producing countries decided to punish the West for its support of Israel in the latest outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They imposed a partial oil embargo on America, Western Europe and Japan, along with some shocking price-rises. In America, home-heating and transport were cut back, and over 100,000 workers lost their jobs. Electricity cuts were incessant, transportation became chaotic and we shivered in cold buildings. It was a similar picture all over the western world: although we didn't know it at the time, the Sixties had suddenly come to an end.

Those ten years between the assassination of JFK and the Arab oil embargo are a decade of staggering change and disturbance. A fascination with perception-modifying drugs is only one of the live wires that are twisted together in this flash-point of modern history. This is the time, for instance, when the contraceptive pill suddenly makes its appearance, coinciding with the time when the venereal diseases are at last brought under control. AIDS is far into the future. The two great disincentives to what used to be called 'free love' – the fear of pregnancy and the fear of disease – are suddenly not there any longer. Moreover, there is now a wholly new dimension to society, in the form of the 'youth-cult.'

Harry J. Anslinger later admitted that the 1960s explosion in drug-use took him completely by surprise. No one has been able to explain, conclusively, how it was that the smoking of cannabis suddenly swept the western world. Professor Musto reasons that the affluence most countries were enjoying at the time, which led to such a boom in consumer spending – spending on things designed to improve our levels of comfort – created a mood-change in Western society. Because the entire selling-industry was encouraging this focus on comfort, and, as often as not, on self-indulgence and instant gratification, it isn't surprising that we willingly experimented with drugs which offered an instant increase in our levels of comfort.

His reasoning is persuasive and he may very well be right, but in my view it goes further than that

Because of America's open-handed generosity at the end of World War II – that great out-pouring of dollars known as 'Marshall Aid' – the world economy recovers in record time. Throughout the 1950s there are extraordinarily high levels of employment. Youngsters leaving school have no difficulty in finding jobs, and levels of pay are such that many young people have money to burn. Collectively, these youngsters constitute an enormous new market, and a completely new industry grows up to relieve them of their spare cash.

They are encouraged to celebrate the fact that they are young, and to regard themselves as a class separate from the rest of society. It is from this point in history that the word 'teenager' comes into widespread use. Youthful musicians are quickly transformed into celebrities, as the movers and shakers of the free market economy create a new kind of Gold Rush. The electric record-player and the extended-play record, along with the cinema and television, introduce us to one colossal new personality after the next – every one of them a representative of a new kind of 'youth.' James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause suddenly acquires cult-hero status, and Elvis Presley rocks the world.

Without realizing the enormity of what they are bringing into being, the imaginative entrepreneurs of America and Europe create a completely new kind of citizen and a completely new political force. Young people are actively encouraged to see themselves as different from preceding generations. They are actively encouraged to adopt role-models who are openly rebellious and encouraged to challenge all the accepted standards of their elders and all the accepted ways of doing things. What starts as a lively commercial adventure, designed to exploit a rich new market, rapidly turns into nothing short of a social revolution.

While all this is happening to the young, moralities are also loosening up even among the older generation, and spicy scandals in the higher echelons of politics do nothing to curb the swiftness of change. By the time the Beatles burst upon the world, conditions are such that an explosion in experimenting with drugs is virtually inevitable. Quite apart from anything else, it's an outward manifestation of all the rebelliousness young people have been so actively encouraged to feel. It's a positive advantage that drug use is unlawful and the element of sheer rebellious disobedience makes it all the more fun.

So begins the great 'smoke-in' of the Sixties, during which millions upon millions of people discover for themselves what marijuana is and what it does to them. Those people in the 1960s who come to hear about Anslinger's campaign, and the outrageous things that were said about marijuana in the 1930s, fall about in contemptuous and disbelieving laughter.

This reduces still further the authority of the older generation.

When these young people start to be hauled up before the courts they are brought before judges who know virtually nothing about marijuana/cannabis, and when these judges start sounding off about the evils and the dangers of what they often refer to as 'this filthy stuff', the young defendants quickly form the view that these judges don't know what they are talking about. Their respect for authority declines still further. When they discover that some police officers aren't above perjuring themselves nor above stealing the dope for their own purposes, their respect for the law dwindles all the faster.

Apart from the fear of getting caught and sentenced, there were therefore few moral restraints on these new young people. The authority of the older generation is shot to pieces by the older generation's own ignorance, its own distortions and its own hysterical vindictiveness towards this new generation of drug-takers. When LSD becomes available, the mood of the times encourages countless young people to try the psychedelic experience. When the amphetamines reach a wider market these too are eagerly embraced. Although the overwhelming majority of youngsters are sensible enough to recognize the risks of getting involved with heroin, there is nevertheless an enormous increase in the use of this as well.

By the late 1960s there is a further reason for rebelliousness – VietNam. Although most of the free world sympathises with the United States and subscribes to the Domino Theory when the VietNam problem first begins, things take on a different complexion when Lyndon B. Johnson escalates the war for his own political advantage. With tens of thousands of young men facing the prospect of being drafted into a war which many cannot approve of, and with America divided against itself on the morality of the whole enterprise, actual and serious rioting breaks out. Flower Power confronts military force, and pretty girls smoking joints put flowers into the barrels of guns. America has never seemed less governable.

There is also a predictably high toll among the drug-takers. Heroin users in the United States approach an estimated half million – probably a real figure this time – and some percentage of this half million must succumb to addiction. Thousands of people experience bad trips on LSD and, whatever the technicalities of addiction, over-use of the amphetamines interferes with thousands of lives.

During the Sixties, although laws are changed so as to prohibit first this and then that new drug as it appears on the scene, there is very little demand for steep increases in penalties. Seen in the context of this Hundred Years War, the Sixties are a time of remarkable tolerance. But that is about to change. The VietNam conflict on America's campuses, fully reported by the media, is disturbing 'Middle America' so profoundly that people are yearning for a return to more stable times, and when the American public wants something, there will always be a politician ready to capitalize on that want.

And here is Richard M. Nixon himself, campaigning on a 'law and order' ticket. 'No president,' says Professor Musto, 'has equalled Nixon's antagonism to drug abuse,' and for his first four years as president, Nixon wages a bitter campaign. Expenditure on the Drug War skyrockets, overseas sources of opiates are 'encouraged' to reduce production, and, in America, the Constitution itself comes under direct attack. The Fourth Amendment, which guarantees Americans that their homes will not be unjustifiably invaded, that their possessions will not be taken from them unless by due process of law, and that they themselves will be free from arrest except in limited circumstances, is side-stepped by a 1970 law which permits 'No Knock' searches of premises, no matter what the hour.

In 1972 Nixon sets up a Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, composed of establishment-figures and chaired by a former Governor of Pennsylvania. This high-powered team studies everything they can find on the subject of marijuana and, like every fully-informed body of investigators before them, they come to the conclusion that the stuff is more or less harmless. Their preliminary report firmly recommends the decriminalization of marijuana, and when the Commission put in their final report the members stick to this recommendation. Nixon goes ballistic on the subject. Adopting an over-my-dead-body attitude, he even goes so far as to refuse to participate in the public handing over of the report. His last contribution to the War against Drugs, before he resigns the presidency, is to create the Drug Enforcement Administration – the DEA.

With Nixon gone, an element of reasonableness returns. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter take a very much more relaxed attitude towards drugs. Despite Nixon's determined hostility, cannabis smoking continued to increase throughout America during his presidency, but at the same time there was an apparent decrease in the use of heroin. According to figures given to Congress, the number of deaths that can be related to heroin falls from about 2,000 a year during the last years of the Ford Administration to about 800 a year at President Carter's mid-term in 1978. That year of 1978, indeed, marks the high point in the toleration of drug use in modern America.

But the presidency is in trouble. In office, Jimmy Carter doesn't radiate the charisma he developed later, he is beset with economic difficulties and terrifying interest rates, and the United States is feeling confused and leaderless. Furthermore, Carter's drug Czar – as the head of the DEA is now called – has to resign under a cloud. This, ironically, is said to be because of some arguably improper prescribing of drugs – to a member of the White House staff. Indeed, Carter simply cannot afford to fight for his re-election, tarred with the brush that he is soft on drugs, particularly when one sees who his opponent is – the right-wing conservative, Ronald Reagan. Any chance of a sensible rationalization of America's relationship with drugs runs into the sand.

Ronald Reagan will go down in history as one of the stranger presidents. He accomplished some great things, and sometimes he had access to a sixth sense which served him incredibly well. He had the reputation of being deeply un-intellectual and it was often said he was incoherent when he didn't have a script in front of him. He was immensely likeable, he often sounded irresistibly believable and he gave America back its self-respect.

In the view of many internationalists, America never had cause to lose its self-respect. Those outsiders who know it well regard it as the kindest of nations, notwithstanding some of the terrible things it has done – like holding on to slavery for so long, or like permitting the Native Americans to be treated as they were: all nations have done terrible things, and in many ways America has been, and still is, an example to the rest of the world. No people, anywhere, feel as free as Americans do, not even the British. In spite of the violence of some of the inner cities and in spite of the shootings – both of which, understandably, give America the reputation of being a violent place – the day to day reality of America is a much more friendly reality than the rest of the world realizes.

And, to repeat and perhaps to re-emphasize what was said at the outset, the American people have all been brought up knowing that they are free to challenge the constitutionality of new laws, knowing that if they want a referendum to change the law, and can find enough people who agree with them, they can have a referendum. All this gives the individual US citizen a kind of civic muscle-power most other nations can hardly imagine, and this, in turn breeds a unique kind of self-assurance. While the strange and complicated machinery of American democracy and American law seems to be operating properly, there's a sort of contentment in the land. If, on the other hand, the system seems to be failing, there's anxiety and disquiet, and this affects the mood and energy of the entire American people.

Between the years 1963 and 1979 America's contentment was shattered. National self-confidence took a hammering as the American people as a whole began to entertain serious doubts about whether they were doing the right thing in VietNam. When eventually it had to be conceded that America was fighting a war that couldn't be won, and the US pulled out, the wound to the national psyche was a deep one. America had never called off a war before. People were particularly aggrieved by the anti-American demonstrations that broke out in Europe, castigating US policy. The United States had, after all, intervened not once, but twice, in Europe, saving and restoring democracy both times. American willingness to spend both money and blood had saved South Korea and had given Western Europe decades of peace and prosperity. People really believed that, without America, the dictatorship of Communism would indeed have taken over the world, and who can say they were wrong in believing this? The declared aim of the Communists, after all, was world revolution leading to a universal communist takeover. Americans felt that, in VietNam, the rest of the free world had let them down, and that, when it came to the crunch, the 'collective security' America had given to the free nations wasn't 'collective' at all. The United States is a well-meaning nation, and the entire VietNam episode left the American people hurt, divided and confused.

Then came Watergate. The world watched with sniggering fascination and an increasing sense of disgust and disbelief as Nixon fought his embarrassing rear-guard action. Along with most of America, the whole world jeered at the gap in the tapes and giggled at all the 'expletives deleted' from the transcripts. It was a gruesome fiasco and people felt deeply ashamed. So much had happened since the exciting days of Kennedy's Camelot – Kennedy assassinated, his brother assassinated, Martin Luther King assassinated, VietNam and all that represented – then Watergate. The nation desperately needed reassurance and restoration, but the strong leadership that might have provided these comforts wasn't there. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, for all their other virtues – which were many – weren't able to ease America's psychic discomforts.

And then came Ronald Reagan.

Reagan made America 'walk tall' once more. This was the phrase we heard again and again. He promised, and accomplished, an enormous build-up in military strength. He was uncompromising in his mind-set towards the Soviet Union, describing the other super-power as 'the evil empire'. He set up a programme of research and development, costing unimaginable sums, that became known as 'Star Wars'. His attitude towards the labour unions was hostile, he cut taxes across the board, and he borrowed on the international bond market as if there were no tomorrow. By the end of the Reagan administration, America had been transformed from the world's richest creditor-nation into the world's biggest debtor. The consequences of this, as yet hardly apparent, are troubling.

But the effect Reagan had on the morale of the American people was to lift it out of the slough of the previous twenty years. People felt they were on the move again and they walked with a sprightlier step. Despite early difficulties caused by an economic recession, Reagan, with his old-fashioned right-wing approach, galvanised the United States into a new frame of mind, where energy and acquisitiveness and 'yuppiedom' were the watchwords of society. And for all the hatred he stirred up among extreme liberals, Reagan got massive public support.

He was, predictably, a 'get tough on crime' president, much in favour of harsher sentences, mandatory minimums, more and more prisons. When it came to the War against Drugs, Reagan's attitude was simple and fundamentalist. He 'declared war' on drugs – as if there had been a state of peace before he arrived. He called on America to 'mobilize for a national crusade against drugs ... to help us create an outspoken intolerance for drug abuse.' First Lady Nancy Reagan embarked on her campaign against drugs as early as 1980, with her catch-phrase 'Just Say No.'

In 1984 the Omnibus Drug Bill led to stiffer penalties and, in disregard of the protections of the Fourth Amendment, federal prosecutors were authorised to sieze the assets of drug dealers – without due process of law. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this provision. Mandatory urine analysis of certain federal employees was introduced. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 virtually doubled the Drug War budget, and permitted America to offer military aid to 'friendly' drug-producing countries so as to clamp down on production and trafficking.

Federal judges found they were deprived of almost all discretion in sentencing drug offenders, as a wide-ranging 'tariff' of sentences was imposed. At least one distinguished federal judge, J. Lawrence Irving, resigned in disgust, describing the situation as one of 'insanity.' He went on record:

It may seem strange to bring together a quote from a federal judge and from a rock music magazine, but they are both apposite. Rolling Stone, in its May, 1994, edition, said it clearly and simply:

When George Bush succeeded to the presidency in 1988, his attitude to the Drug War was well-nigh indistinguishable from Reagan's. Bush too 'declared war on drugs.' Non-federal employees were drawn into the drug-testing programme, causing the liberal Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to proclaim:

By 1991, random drug testing of transport workers was declared constitutional. In June of 1994 a Justice Department report declared that between 1980 and 1993 the prison population of the United States had trebled. America now has, apparently, a higher percentage of its population behind bars that any other nation, and in the mid-Nineties the prison population was increasing at the rate of 1,000 a week – at least half of them as a result of offences directly related to drugs.

Because of the enormous power the United States has enjoyed during the greater part of the Twentieth Century – economic as well as military – America has been able to call the tune that the world marches to when it comes to drugs. Although the league of Nations and, after that, the United Nations, have played their part, there is no escaping the fact that the Drug War has been an American-inspired enterprise. The British did what they were required to do in accordance with their international treaty obligations, and, like the rest of the world, joined in a whole series of international conferences and conventions. Parliament kept bringing the British anti-drug laws up to date, following America's lead.

But if a 'state of war' exists, even a war a particular combatant didn't want in the first place, it is difficult not to get caught up in the momentum. Even though this century-long preoccupation with perception-modifying drugs has been principally an American affair, there is no denying the energy with which the British prosecuting authorities took up the challenge. Professor Musto entitled his comprehensive survey of the Drug War 'The American Disease,' and there is no doubt whatever that the British were eventually infected with this American malady. The attitude of many British politicians has been and still is as blindly unimaginative and unperceptive as that of the Reagan-Bush administrations.

In Hansard, the official report of parliamentary debates in Britain's House of Commons, for Monday, 28th March, 1994 an English lawmaker is airing his views on this intractable problem. And what does he say?

'I agree with the Honourable Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington – probably for the first time – when she says that we need a war against drugs.'

That, it is worth repeating, was in 1994. 'We need a war against drugs'. Where do we begin? Where do we begin if we are to bring a little common sense, a little sanity, to this hideously expensive, hideously cruel, hideously corrupting, hideously destructive battlefield? We've had a war against drugs for the whole of the Twentieth Century. It has intensified, then eased, then intensified again in discernable 'cycles'. But it's been going on since 1875. Countless millions of taxpayers' money have been poured out to fight this dragon, and whenever sensible people have sat down to search for the truth, for the realities about this dragon, they have without exception discovered that the thing has been blown up out of all proportion. The Indian Hemp Commission, the Canal Zone report, the Marijuana report that Richard Nixon refused to accept – all of them reports from sober, responsible, government-appointed people, and spaced through this last century so that the thinking, as it developed through the century, can be seen – they all say that to criminalize cannabis is insanity.

But we never get any further than that. We don't go on and publicise these reports. We don't set up more and still more government commissions to inquire into the real truth about opium-smoking, or the real statistics about bad trips on LSD. We don't go on a search for the underlying truths about why people feel such a need for perception-modifying drugs. We certainly don't invest in trying to find out what society would be like if we were all given back the liberty to decide for ourselves what drugs to take. We just don't know what would happen if we decriminalized drug use and told the public the truth. It doesn't seem that we know enough even to make an educated guess.

This state of not knowing is unforgiveable in the circumstances. It is as unforgiveable as all the lies that have been told to the public, as unforgiveable as using the War against Drugs as a vote-catching political football. We, the People, of the western world as well as of America, have been conned by successive governments and led by the nose into greater and greater ignorance of the truth.

In the Puritan Ethic of childhood, many of us were brought up to believe that telling lies was evil. In the long run, no good could come of it, and all kinds of evil consequences might be the result. The result of the lies and distortions of the War against Drugs is what we see around us today. More prisons than hospitals, overburdened courts, federal judges resigning in protest, tools for protecting individual freedom being destroyed, producing countries riddled with corruption and turmoil. And our respect for the integrity of our police forces and for the wisdom of our judges has been shaken to its foundations.

All to protect us from ourselves. All to prevent us from taking the risk that we may become addicted to something. All to prevent us from taking a trip to a perception-modifying experience. All to prevent us from taking responsibility for our own decisions and exercising choice. Billions and billions of taxpayer money to tell us what we may and may not eat, drink or smoke – and to try to make sure we do as we are told. That's the story of the Drug War – in a nutshell.

In researching this story the writer talked to law professors, physicians, judges, prosecutors and politicians. Not one of them had heard of Bishop Brent. Not one of them had heard of Hamilton Wright or Richmond P. Hobson. They had all heard of Harry J. Anslinger, but apart from being vaguely aware that he was very hostile to drug-use, they had no idea of what he had done. Not one had heard of the Canal Zone Report. Not one knew about the conclusions of the Indian Hemp Commission.

So it seems that the young people of the Sixties were right after all when they listened to the judges sounding off about 'this filthy stuff', and concluded that the judges didn't know what they were talking about. None of the leadership of the world seems to know what it is talking about on the subject of drugs.