The new ban on ‘legal highs’ is unworkable. The government doesn’t even know what it’s banning

The man in the pub’s solution to the ongoing panic about legal highs is to ban them. ‘Ban ‘em all! S’obvious, innit? I can’t believe politicians haven’t thought of it already. Yeah, go on, I’ll have another…’

Here’s the thing. It is obvious and politicians have thought of it already. The reason that it never went from the idea stage to the planning stage is that it isn’t as simple as that. Previous home secretaries such as David Blunkett and Charles Clarke didn’t baulk at the idea because they were lily-livered pussy cats with libertarian tendencies. They rejected it because it’s a bad idea, not just illiberal but also unworkable.

The current government thinks it knows better. It intends to automatically ban legal highs before they can hit the market. This is exactly what the US government tried to do with the Federal Analogue Act of 1986, which was rushed through after similar panics about ‘designer drugs’ in the yuppie era.