This question cannot be answered because, in truth, we have never fought such a battle. If only we had. Instead, we have been sold a myth – a lie if you will – about a supposedly dogged pursuit of drugs, their users and suppliers by the various arms of the state. The reality is sadly rather different.

In response to my above assertion of there never having been a war on drugs, Joshua Lachovic wrote on his blog:

And you haven’t noticed the war on drugs? You haven’t noticed that the global prohibition kills thousands each year? You haven’t heard practically every politician of the past thirty years refer in some way to the ‘war on the drugs’? You haven’t heard any policeman who refers to the war on drugs? You haven’t noticed the £1.5bn that the UK spends yearly on the war? Nor have you noticed the time spent by every police force in the country trying to fight this war on drugs?

All the while, there are still drug users (as there will forever be), people still die because of drugs and people’s lives are still ruined because of drugs. Relaxing the enforcement and governing of banned substances? I suppose you hadn’t noticed mephedrone be criminalised because of media hysteria last year. I suppose you hadn’t noticed magic mushrooms be criminalised earlier this decade. Nor had you noticed that with a police force such as the one in Sussex, over the past decade crime has fallen, while drug crime has increased. To imply that we aren’t fighting a war on drugs is frankly naive, to say the very least.

Unfortunately for poor Joshua, he makes a number of glaring errors in his argument. To begin with, what he calls the ‘global prohibition’ of drugs (which doesn’t exist, because it is not prohibition) does not kill thousands each year. Drugs kill people; ‘prohibition’ does not.

Even if certain politicians, sections within the media and parts of the police ‘service’ refer to a ‘war on drugs’, this does not mean we are actually fighting one. Repeating a lie or a mistruth enough times still does not make it the truth.

If we were really fighting a ‘war on drugs’ then we would be locking up drugs users for long periods of time, or fining them heavily, or raiding University campuses. But we are not. Instead, most drugs users, if they are even bothered by an unlikely visit from the police, are given a caution (which essentially means being let off) or at most a suspended sentence (again, being let off). So very rare is it that a person is sent to prison for using drugs, even with multiple previous convictions. Does that sound like a ‘war on drugs’?

As for the magic mushrooms and mephedrone Joshua mentions, what of them? Adding extra drugs to a list of banned substances means very little when the ban remains largely unenforced. As it is, we’ve seen a less than half-hearted attempt to pay even lip service to the existing laws, and a law is only as good as its enforcement.

The pro-legalisation rabble within the media and political class find it incredibly convenient to pretend we are having a real ‘war on drugs’. This allows them, coupled with the continual undermining and weakening of the law and its enforcement, to claim said ‘war’ to be lost, with the consequence as the pursuit of legalisation.

However, where Joshua is correct is when he says there will always be drug users. Most laws are not one hundred percent effective, but the purpose of enforcing a real ban on certain substances is to discourage as many people as possible from their use. Let us not forget, these are extremely harmful substances, whose effects on brain chemistry, behaviour and the human body are still not fully understood. They cannot be taken safely or indeed more safely as the harm reduction lobby would have us believe.

We were also graced with an article, currently behind the pay-wall of yesterday’s Times newspaper, by Anushka Asthana (who she?) claiming:

The bankruptcy of prohibition is becoming ever more apparent as it fails to keep up with the plethora of ‘legal highs’. As one is banned, ten more emerge. There will be no need to go to dark alleys in Brixton soon: the internet will offer people everything they want. Some form of legalisation – in which users are no longer criminalised but the market is regulated – is inevitable for some substances. So we might as well start thinking about how to do it now.

It doesn’t really seem to matter how many times you point out to the likes of Ms Asthana and fellow travellers that Britain has no such manner of prohibition, they just won’t listen. This is because they are attempting to draw comparison between the perfectly winnable battle (if we were to actually fight it) against drugs in Britain with actual prohibition of alcohol in the United States of the 1920s, which was doomed to failure before it even began.

The divide lies between those of us who wish to see the current laws strengthened and enforced, and those who believe users are somehow able to take these drugs more safely. They call it ‘harm reduction’, though it is anything but. Furthermore, Ms Asthana casually repeats that old lie which claims drug users are criminalised by the law, where in fact it is users who criminalise themselves by taking their poison in the first place.

Louise Mensch is one of those rather airily vacant MPs who would be as comfortable in the New Labour party as she is in Cameron’s modern, liberal Conservatives. In fact, in 1996 she was a member of the Labour party, with Peter Hitchens remarking:

No surprise there. Miss Bagshawe has the political grasp of a Teletubby and was – like so many other Cameron fans – a supporter of the Labour Party in 1996.

Having had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting Mrs Mensch in Bournemouth in 2006 (when she was but a mere Bagshawe), I think the description of her by Peter Hitchens, writing on another occasion, rings wonderfully true:

The irresistibly charming thing about Miss Bagshawe, now prospective Conservative candidate for Corby in Northamptonshire, is that – like David Cameron himself, only with less pretence about it – she is clearly only slightly interested in politics, and has a marvellously limited understanding of what it involves. She will, I fear, go very far. A sweet vagueness swirls round all she does, the kind of vagueness that often conceals weapons-grade ambition.

Her extracted partial confession in The Daily Express on her use of banned substances comes as little of surprise. Like David Cameron and the liberal circles that both moved in, taking drugs was seen as just a little bit of harmless, giggly fun. She said:

Although I do not remember the specific incident, this sounds highly probable. Additionally, since I was in my twenties, I’m sure it was not the only incident of the kind; we all do idiotic things when young. I am not a very good dancer and must apologise to any and all journalists who were forced to watch me dance that night at Ronnie Scott’s.

Note the rather obvious lack of an actual apology for taking the drugs. Notable too was hold fellow Commons Culture Select Committee member, Tom Watson, was quick to defend her on Newsnight saying he didn’t much care about what she ‘did in nightclubs in the 1990s’.

Interestingly, when I first read the accompanying BBC article last night, I recalled the Watson creature being quoted as claiming to ‘admire her for what she has done’. According to the News Sniffer archives this comment was silently edited out. Now, I wonder why that may have been…

If we were to allow Tom Watson to have his own way then he would try and bring everything back to his precious phone hacking scandal, saying as he did:

What she has effectively done today is give a very big finger to a… journalist who is trying to dig up dirt on her from many years ago, probably because she is involved in exposing the truth about hacking and what went on on our committee.

As is so often the case with modern British politics, the political class can be seen to close ranks to protect one of their own, revealing the truth that they have more in common with one another than the voting public. That little bit of giggly, harmless fun they enjoyed when younger may have done them no harm (or so they like to believe), but in weakening our laws and undermining their enforcement, they condemn thousands of others to suffer an unpleasant, but avoidable fate.

Like so many before him, Peter predictably called for the legalisation of all banned narcotic substances by the State arguing, in classic ‘harm reduction’ style, that what British people really need, rather criminalisation, is ‘better drugs education on how to take them safely and where to get help if needs be’.

Where do I start? There are so many comments and observations by Peter in his piece that I take issue with that it is difficult to know where to begin. I suppose, firstly, it should be made clear that even if we, as a nation, wanted to legalise such substances then we could not due to the binding international treaties which Britain has signed. Before we could begin to initiate legalisation in this country, Britain would have to break from these treaties.

Anyway, putting aside the fascinating issue of international law for the moment, it should also be said that North Jnr doesn’t get off to a fantastic start in his article when he says of drugs that:

The evidence that prohibition is a failed policy mounts up year after year but we remain in a constant state of political paralysis.

I would have thought that it really goes without saying that the banning of drugs such as cannabis and heroin in Britain are not in the slightest like prohibition. However, much like the pressure group, Transform, whose spokesman was given a rather soft interview by Evan Davis on the BBC’s Today programme recently, Peter North seems convinced that the British state somehow acts in a ‘punitive, prohibitionist’ way towards illegal drugs.

Rather than explain this point myself I will directly quote Peter Hitchens from his most recent Mail on Sunday column because he rather handily sums up this false analogy far better than I could:

If only our policies were actually punitive. But drug use and possession are almost entirely unpunished, which is why they carry on growing.

As for ‘prohibition’, the drug lobby uses this expression to mislead the gullible into comparing the winnable struggle against narcotics with the doomed war against booze fought by the ‘Untouchables’ and others in Twenties Chicago.

Alcohol had been legal for centuries, part of the culture of Christian civilisation. You might as well try to make breathing illegal. But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.

Actually, US Prohibition recognised that the cause was lost before it began. Congress never made it illegal to drink or keep alcohol, only to sell, transport or make it. Our most important drug laws are utterly unlike Prohibition because they rightly ban possession.

And if our cowardly courts and bureaucratic police would only enforce the existing law, we would see a swift decline in the use of illegal drugs.

They don’t, because our establishment – including the BBC – was itself introduced to drugs in the Sixties and still cannot see why they are wrong.

Despite increasingly frequently assertions from the likes of North Jnr and so many others that Britain has lost the so-called ‘war on drugs’, the fact of the matter is that in reality we’ve never fought one. Instead successive Governments have simply undermined their own laws, demoralised the police and made quite sure that the rules were not enforced, with the intended consequence being the practical legalisation of narcotics by stealth.

Peter North’s assertion that these drugs should be made legal is therefore practically irrelevant. They might as well be considered legal at the moment since prosecution for use is rare, especially among the rich and famous. Even if you are stupid enough to be caught and sentenced by a court of law then the punishment often amounts to nothing more than a smack on wrist.

North Jnr also continues to make the assertion throughout his article that people are going to take drugs anyway, so why bother to stop them? Returning to the aforementioned theme of ‘harm reduction’, again Peter Hitchens was spot on when he said:

Virtually everyone else in the official drug policy establishment is a member of the same faction – the one that believes the best approach to drugs is ‘harm reduction’, that rejects any moral objection to self-stupefaction, or the idea that by disapproval and punishment we could reduce the amount of drug-taking and the number of drug takers.

On the contrary, they work on the basis that drug abuse is more or less inevitable and so must be managed by advice (much as the ‘sex education’ zealots work on the assumption that the young will have sex below the age of consent and without any thought for the consequences, whatever we do or say, and so the only thing we can do is pelt them with condoms and morning-after pills). Doesn’t it occur to them that the adoption of this attitude by Professors and Police officers might actually make drug taking more likely?

Quite so – and I really don’t have much more to add to that particular line of argument except to say that taking the attitude of ‘harm reduction’ is not in the least bit conservative.

It has been duly noted, in the past, that North Jnr likes to lecture people on what is ‘real conservativism’. I suppose I am not really one to talk here since I do a similar sort of thing all the time too. Everyone has an opinion on what conservativism is and means, but it is fair to say that certain stances are more conservative than others – and some not even conservative at all.

Furthermore, very early on in his article we get an indication of why Peter North takes this attitude and just what he thinks of drugs, by way of his observation that ‘people take drugs because, for starters, they’re great’. Later on in the article he readily admits to having taking them in the past, describing them as ‘fun’ and, rather bizarrely, as ‘educational’.

This I think feeds into another important point about the debate on drugs policy – one which I have made before – which is that the majority of the time it is self-serving drug users (or supposedly former users – one never quite knows whether they are being honest about having given up or not) who are calling for their activities to be legalised to suit their own selfish pleasures and needs, even if it means that thousands of other people may in future be condemned to harm and misery.

I have yet to actually meet someone who has not once taken these drugs and yet still wants to legalise them. Perhaps this is because I have not spoken to enough people yet, but it certainly seems to be the case that the vast majority of those advocating legalisation are doing so with wholly selfish intentions.

This is perhaps a little strange because North Jnr accurately describes the way in which such drugs can lead to enormous problems for society as well as the families and friends of users. Yet, he then goes on to make ridiculous statements such as this:

If you had to obtain recreational narcotics from a chemist and there’s a special queue for them with all the other junkies, kids will see that what they’re doing is seriously uncool.

Is he serious? Apparently so. Anyway, and finally, a question that never seems to be have been answered by the pro-legalisation advocates is what exactly would we lose by driving the use of these substances from our society completely?

Moving on from the legality of certain drugs, North Jnr does make a number of good observations about the increasing retreat of the British political system from policies to personalities. However, in one paragraph he writes of politicians that:

They’re afraid of public debate, they’re afraid of real politics and that’s why we get things like ‘constitutional reform’.

While it is certainly true that, in general, many politicians are increasingly scared of public debate and formulating policies, I think it is a mistake by Peter to underestimate the Left and the power and significance they place on ‘constitutional reform’.

Firstly, how exactly can ‘constitutional reform’ not be considered to be ‘real politics’? Okay, so at face value ‘constitutional reform’ may not seem to be important in directly tackling issues such as immigration or economic problems, but its undertaking certainly doesn’t mean that those politicians and parties that pursue it are not interested in politics, real or otherwise.

The many radical and important constitutional changes that have been enacted by New Labour since 1997, under Blair and Brown, have been seen by them as vitally important in achieving their long term goals, whilst undermining traditions and institutions such as the Monarchy for their social and political ends.

Having said that, I think North Jnr is generally right in his analysis that the Government, whether it be Conservative or Labour, is on a countdown to extinction, and that British people are simply waiting for parties and politics of substance to return at Westminster. Let us all hope that such a day, if it ever arrives, comes sooner rather than later.

However, regardless of whether Cannabis is classified as Class B or C is largely irrelevant. More often than not, drugs laws are not enforced at a low or personal level. Individual users are rarely prosecuted, if ever, and it is only large scale importers and distributors or dealers that are sporadically targeted.

Celebrity addicts such as Kate Moss and Pete Doherty regularly flout the law without any consequence, other than the minor inconvenience of a court appearance which invariably leads to nothing. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that Pete Doherty is now better known for his drug abuse than his music. Such behaviour and lack of any retribution sends out completely the wrong signals about drug use to ordinary people who read about it in the media.

The use of illegal drugs needs to actually be enforced by the police – though unfortunately this seems unlikely in the foreseeable future since most of our political classes and the liberal media probably have used or continue to use these substances themselves, and so have little or no interest in discouraging their misuse.

Labour’s announcement is nothing more than another meaningless gesture that will do nothing to actually solve the growing drugs problem in Britain.