At last. Some people who might have some influence are finally getting the message: prohibition doesn’t work. And that by decriminalising and licensing things you can not only control them but you can tax them.
No, for once I’m not talking about sex work. This is about cannabis.
The headline in yesterday’s Guardian read:
Sell cannabis to over-18s in licensed shops, says Lib Dem panel
It isn’t quite the Dutch model, but the recommendations have been put forward by a panel of experts including a couple of top cops.
The article is worth a read.

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian from Neena Modi in which she attacks the myth that the NHS is unaffordable.
The NHS is not unaffordable, as anyone with half an ounce of common sense can see.
The NHS has shed-loads of money to do everything you and I would want it to. It just uses that money inappropriately and wastefully — often as a result of political intervention.
Neena Modi gives some good examples (I am assuming the figures in her article are accurate):
PFI repayments (that’s money the politicians made the NHS “borrow” from the private sector) cost around £10bn a year.
Virgin Care, who have some large NHS clinical contracts, admit to an 8% profit target. That’s another £1.6bn a year — and that’s just on the estimated £20bn of contracts awarded to the private sector in 2013-14.
The NHS is complex. We understand that; in many ways it has to be. But that doesn’t excuse another £640m being spent on management consultants.
Then the politicians introduced this thing called the “internal market” (everyone bidding against each other for a set amount of work). That is reckoned to cost somewhere between £4.5bn and £10bn a year to administer.
And how much is the NHS being told it has to save over the next few years? Did I hear £30bn? Well OK, let’s call it £22bn after the government has pledged (not yet paid!) an additional £8bn.
BINGO! Add up the savings above (let’s take the minimum figures from above) and we get … Yes, a whopping £16.7bn the NHS is spending *each year* that it should not be.
And that’s without allowing for all the wastage of medicines, dressings, supplies etc. Without any account for the multi-layers of unnecessary management. Without thousands of administrators who, whenever I visit a hospital or clinic appear to be ambling around carrying a single piece of paper. Without the countless project managers and IT specialists who can’t; so major improvement programmes fail. Without continual reorganisation and re-branding creating unnecessary jobs and work.
If we could get rid of all that — and we could, if the will was there — we could not only save the required £30bn but also pay the junior doctors a decent salary to work responsible hours.
Or even better … plough back those savings to improve the quality of the care delivered from fit for purpose buildings.
It needs a really tough businessman at the top. One who will tell the politicians to “f*** off” and let him run the show. And then restructure and rebalance the whole organisation to run on the people who genuinely have the right vision. It wouldn’t be pretty, or comfortable and it couldn’t be done overnight; but it would work. If Mussolini could get the trains to run on time…
Why is this so hard? Oh sorry, it doesn’t line anyone’s pockets with gold. That’s why!
We’re doomed. FFS!

We all know the Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, is on the warpath against alcohol. And she is on record as saying to Parliamentary Committee this week:

I would like people to make their choice knowing the issues and do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine and think, “Do I want my glass of wine or do I want to raise my risk of breast cancer?” And I take a decision each time I have a glass.

Christopher Snowdon calls it well in the Spectator on Wednesday:

She insists that she weighs up this trade-off every time she takes a drink. Just think about that. This is how she lives her life …
There is a distinction between understanding risk and being so preoccupied with death that you can’t pour a glass of wine without thinking about tumours. Cross that line and you enter a dark realm inhabited by neuroticism, unhappiness and the Chief Medical Officer …
… whatever she throws at us in the years ahead, always remember that if you are able to crack open a bottle of booze without dwelling on thoughts of cancer, you have already beaten her at the game of life.

If she was as intellectually acute as she would like to have us believe she would know that the change in risk of breast cancer before age 75 is around 9.5%, rising to perhaps 10.6% with the consumption of alcohol. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that this is about a 10% risk regardless. And while technically it may be statistically significant (though it doesn’t look it from here) it’s unlikely to be emotionally significant to the vast majority. After all there is something called “quality of life” — something the CMO seems not to have.

[He] ridiculed her latest ‘drink tea instead of wine’ edict, saying: ‘The Chief Medical Officer regards a quiet glass of sherry as too risky to contemplate. Poor creature. She must shudder in her shoes at the risks taken every Sunday morning by celebrants at Holy Communion sipping at the Communion wine. As I look forward to my 85th birthday in the spring, and my brother’s 89th in the autumn, she is unlikely to persuade me to desist from my nightly half-bottle, or he from his.’

Quite so. This very well connected and wealthy female appears to think we’re as stupid as she is a miserable control freak.
Besides, remember: Research causes cancer in rats.