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...I have the courage of my convictions (no, not that sort of conviction!) and the balls of Rosie Boycott and resile from her former paper's reactionary u-turn on cannabis.

I also enjoy a good malt. And I know that, at up to twenty times the strength of the small beer on sale at my local hostelry, I can't drink it by the gallon as I can pale ale if I want to last very long.

It's not that I don't care how many youngsters have their brains mashed by the stuff, if that is indeed what's happening. But even the Independent, back in October 2006, was making the point that it was misdiagnosis of pre-existing tendency to mental illness that was the problem, and that people with such drug dependencies were just as likely to be self-medicating to cope with their emerging illnesses rather than the substances actually causing the problem.

But the difference between my best malt and my best skunk is that I know precisely how much of the psychoactive ingredient is in my malt, because the maker has to tell me. And I know, from experience, advertising and public health campaigns how much of it I can take and still remain on my feet.

I also know that, if I looked fourteen, I would not be sold even the small beer by any reputable dealer (known as a publican)**, whereas because skunk is itself illegal, and, by extension an unregulated market, the dealer (known as a pusher) couldn't care how old I look.

No, the real problem here is that the government, following the Independent's 1997 campaign, did not go far enough. It was itself schizophrenic to say that possession of cannabis would no longer be so harshly treated but to leave the supply mechanism thoroughly criminalized. To signal a more open market, but a more restricted supply. There is nothing more guaranteed to lead to an increase in the potency so that dealers can maximise their profits while minimising their chances of getting nicked. It's happened with opium-heroin and with cocaine-crack, and it happened to alcohol during prohibition in the US.

In their defense, the Independent cites a study to be published in the Lancet this week that "will show how cannabis is more dangerous than LSD and ecstasy" as if that's big news. The Independent suggests that this "new" research is in the same vein as several other reports recently, amongst them one from the government's own standing committee, the "Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs", and the even more august "RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy":

"Experts analysed 20 substances for addictiveness, social harm and physical damage. The results, which will show many illegal drugs being less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, will increase the pressure on the Home Office to reform the existing ABC system of classification."

But both the ACMD and the RSA came out suggesting that of their twenty or so substances, LSD and ecstasy were way down, ten places and more, below alcohol. So if cannabis is somewhere in between alcohol and LSD, why is this new news?*

Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk and philosohper mused that many everyday things have good and bad sides - if you use the natural gift of alcohol as a means of increasing the pleasure of a social interaction it is wholly different from if you abuse it to blot out your other problems in life. So with drugs, what is needed is not more policing, more criminalising, which is just as likely to ruin the rest of someone's life as indulging in the odd spliff will physically, but a better understanding of why young people in particular seek to turn to psychoactive substances of any kind in what should be the happiest days of their lives.

Mental health services have long been and, if Oxford is anything to go by, remain the Cinderella service within the NHS. Yet research into why people seem to feel, in the modern world, ever more stressed out and less at ease with themselves could yield huge social benefits. Having a go at what people turn to when their cries for help and change have gone unnoticed and possibly unvoiced is not the answer.

Legalise, regulate, and balls to the Independent I say! They are not worthy of their name.

*Incidentally, there are several other dubious claims in the articles today in the Independent:

They tell us the average price of cannabis (implying skunk) is down to £43 per ounce. If so, show me where to get it at that price, PLEASE! At Christmas I thought I was getting a very good deal at £75 for a half ounce. One might get so called "diesel" - a block of the dregs of the remains of a plant once you've taken off the "bud" that's been mixed with all sorts of solvents to extract the very last of the THC and all the more dangerous for the solvents - for around £50 on the ounce. And, crucially, something that would not even find a buyer in a legalised, regulated market.

They keep going on about street skunk being 25 times more potent than what Rosie smoked yet the sample they had tested was just nine times more powerful.

** In an ironic parallel, I do however recall being allowed by my parents to attempt to make that same small beer with a Boots kit in my mid-teens, presumably because allowing me to "grow my own" would sate my curiosity and keep me out of the pubs.

In all the talk about cannabis and the oft repeated but rarely quantified assertions that today's drug is a different thing to that which our national leaders will have encountered in their heady youthful days when they clearly had a disregard for the law ill-befitting people who now want to tell us how to live our lives Matthew Norman in the Independent today relates his experience of having hallucinations on modern "skunk". Well don't believe it, or at least don't take it as definitive proof of the aforementioned unquantified assertion.

In the general spirit of confession that seems to be pervading this issue at the moment, I just want to say that the one and only time I have experienced any kind of hallucinogenic effect off cannabis was 22 years ago when I first tried the drug. After my first joint a friend came to take us to the pub. He was of a pale complexion and very white-blond hair. And in the car, in the dark, with street lights flashing overhead and listening to mid-eighties electro-dance music I became convinced that I was being kidnapped by a silvery skinned robotic alien! I didn't particularly enjoy that night, even once we got to the pub, but like any eighteen year old getting blind drunk I worked my way through it and tried again!

I've only really got back into the occasional spliff over the past couple of years - sometimes, for periods taking it quite a lot (though not, thanks to Thames Valley Police's zealous enforcement actions against local suppliers, at all this year). Yes, some of it feels stronger than others, but what it amounts to is similar to the difference between small beer and spirits in alcohol terms. You "feel" the "buzz" sooner. But I also find that the body has a self-regulating mechanism with cannabis. When the THC receptors are sated, or some such scientific explanation, you literally cannot smoke any more and I have had occasions when I have put out a half smoked reefer when that happens.

It seems to me a false differentiation to make, as Matthew Norman suggests, to attempt to categorize different strains as virtually different drugs. It would be far safer, and far better, to know the strength of what you are buying or taking before you do so, for sure. But just as with alcohol, there are times when you would like to have a quick snifter to take the edge off the stresses of the day, and other times when you would like to share a few lighter spliffs in company as with a few pints in the pub.

But in my experience, the most psycho-active cannabis I ever tried was twenty two years ago. Yes, as David Cameron related his experiences the other day, today's stuff sometimes smells stronger. But I have also noticed that that appears to be when the weed is fresh and slightly damp and as it dries properly that seems to diminish. Of far greater importance in terms of the harm it can do to you is the fact that more recently unscrupulous growers and dealers have been treating their cannabis with other substances, including, most dangerously, some kind of silicon spray to make it heavier and make more money out of a smaller quantity. This is an inevitable function of prohibition, and reclassification can only make this worse, and the effects on everyone involved more unpredictable and dangerous.

Transform has shown that despite reclassification to class C, use of the drug has continued a long term pattern of decline, not the unfettered growth the moral panic brigade would have you believe. Do not fall for it all. This is a politically motivated panic and one that does great discredit to the supposed intelligence of our "leaders".

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