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Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me.

So, once again Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan police commissioner, is targeting the Hampstead dinner party set and its use of cocaine. Apparently he's going to have "smartly dressed" officers posing as dealers in the sort of bars and clubs where posh people get their coke. He wants to stop it replacing wine at smart middle class dinner parties.

Now, fair's fair, his officers have long made life hell for poor users of cocaine and its sister freebase-cocaine, or "crack", so it's probably about time this law officer enforced the law more equally for all. But the lines he's using (sorry! I couldn't resist that) are that middle class coke use is not a victimless crime, that people in north London estates die to perpetuate the supply of coke and that the cocaine plantations of Columbia are now the land mine capital of the world.

So, do we finally have the appalling admission that the law itself, rather than cocaine use, is causing this killing? Why doesn't he do something about that, speak out on that? After all, he has shown himself and his organisation very capable and willing in the past not merely of enforcing existing laws, but in lobbying for changes in the law relating to terrorist activities that threaten all our civil liberties.

Cocaine has been used in a variety of forms, safely for the most part, for thousands of years. The peoples of its native growing area, the Andean mountains of South America, have chewed leaves as a pick me up since they arrived there. It helps them to cope with high altitude living by increasing circulation and therefore take-up of oxygen. It was used in tonic wines, toothpastes and popular drinks were named after it.

It was only scheduled as a proscribed drug a little under a hundred years ago, and the history of that is tainted with the sort of legal institutional racism Blair keeps saying he is against in all its forms - that it made "negroes" frenzied sex fiends.

The history of heavy addiction, and the dangers to health of tainted and constrained supplies all stem from its prohibition as a useful stimulant, not so much from any inherent danger in the drug itself. It is time a liberal world addressed these issues. If we're not going to prohibit absolutely everything that could possibly ever have any kind of effect on peoples' bodies or minds why should we choose these few substances? Cocaine use has been around for far longer than chocolate or coffee.

So, he's back in the news again. I was amused a few weeks ago to see a regular sketch in a comedy show (was it the new Harry Enfield one, I can't remember?) where every time there is a Metropolitan Police press conference they give figures on the amount of officer time they've spent arresting Pete Doherty.

And it is a bit of a joke. I wonder if any of our MPs (or perhaps our putative mayoral candidate) might take up the idea and see if the Metropolitan Police could produce figures for just how much the police and courts service have spent hounding this pathetic specimen?

Was this sort of thing what Sir Iain Blair meant when he said he wanted to go after the "dinner party cocaine set"? I have to say I always assumed that was aimed at former Bullingdon Club members in glittering Notting Hill and similar socialite snorters.

Last week, reminds The DrugSpot: Anniversary of the Opium Exclusion Act, was an anniversary (though not quite centenary yet) of the start of one of the most destructive and baseless wars the world has seen - the "War on Drugs".

I recommend anyone with a vague interest in it to go read the blog article. It highlights how prohibition was, by turns, a muddled policy led by a few evangelical campaigners (think the Temperance Movement in the UK) on moral rather than medical grounds, a racist policy aimed at people of far eastern origin where missioinaries were trying to do that imperial thing "civilise them", and a measure sponsored by the vested interests of the pharmaceutical companies (recall for example that Merck acquired a patent on MDMA - Ecstasy to you and me - as early as 1912).

It highlights that the principal effect of prohibition was a flight to using as yet uncontrolled substances like morphine and heroin and the birth of the junkies' love affair with far more dangerous forms of what had been relatively benign narcotics.

And the cost of that continuing "war" in money and lives is a tragedy of enormous scale. Do we have time to call a truce before it reaches that centenary?

Again, (much) closer to home, the Oxford Mail/Times reports that:

Residents near Plater College in Headington, Oxford, have expressed concern about a

new influx of students after the college was sold



for £5.6m to an international language school.

Though I know and respect all those mentioned in the story, I am a little perplexed by this "fear". Plater College was, as the name suggests, a place of learning with students in residence and an ambition to expand, already taking in weekend residential courses and the like before they collapsed.

The site was protected for residential educational use, and indeed when Plater themselves sought to build some flats on a piece of spare land last year planning was turned down because housing use would intensify the pressures on traffic in a narrow private lane. They did however get permission a few years back, not yet acted upon, to increase the number of student rooms from, I think, about 75 to just over 100.

Plater accommodated students. EF will accommodate students. EF's main business throughout most of the year, like many international language schools, is not the hordes of Euro-teens that descend on the city each summer but young adults from overseas mainly spending several months getting their English language skills up to a standard at which they can study at degree levels in English speaking universities.

They are the least likely to bring additional traffic to the area for example. Yet they also tend to save to come here and have disposable money while they are here.

They will hopefully feed much needed overseas student fees into Brookes at the end of their courses with, perhaps, less effort on Brookes's part because they can be recruited locally.

I'm not sure I see the problem. Though it would have been nice (I have to say this bit I suppose) if Brookes themselves had managed to buy the place. Mind you, that outcome would also have involved students staying there.

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