So, Patricia Hewitt says that tax on alcohol should rise to reduce binge drinking among teenagers.

Jeez - my Puilly Fume is already approaching ten quid a bottle. Why should I have to pay for matron Hewitt's inability to enforce the law? Or to educate people properly about drink and drugs?

It is illegal already for the kids she's talking about to buy booze. But at least it is licensed and there are people who care about their livelihood and liberty enough to help enforce that law when Vicky Pollard comes in to the shop wanting to buy some.

It is also illegal for those kids, and the rest of us, to buy heroin, cannabis or ecstasy. But for the price of two coconut and coal-tar flavoured rum slushes one could, if one wanted, buy a wrap of heroin that will leave you blotto for hours, or several days' worth of cannabis, or several weekends worth of ecstasy.

Face it Pat, you're losing this battle, and imposing penalties on everyone else who does indulge sensibly in oder to try to put off the most determined teenagers is just a nasty, mean minded approach that is doomed to failure.

Prohibition doesn't work. Tax was the weapon of prohibition. The reason Al Capone was famously done on tax evasion rather than anything else he could have been done for is that that is the way prohibition was enforced - you didn't actually ban alcohol, you put a tax regime on it that meant nobody could actually pay the taxes and were therefore breaking the law. It's the same with nacrcotics prohibition in the US too. Because so many drugs do have proper uses under medical direction you don't actually want to ban them completely, but make it so that nobody other than the few people the government licenses to produce and sell them can actually trade legally.

It doesn't work. It's illiberal. It's protectionist. It's patronising.