Within ten years, you’ll be buying cannabis at your off-licence

The first time I came across skunk cannabis was in an underground out-of-hours bar in Nottingham in 1997. I think I’ll leave that as ‘came across’, if it’s all the same to you. I might want to be prime minister one day, and it’s important to have my tenuous denials lined up in advance. More expensive than your regular cannabis, I remember, uh, people saying, with a stronger smell and a far -stronger effect. Which I noticed, obviously, from the behaviour of other people. As I studied them with clear, unreddened eyes, like an anthropologist. Yes.

From then on, until I stopped moving in such circles, skunk was all there was. In my Scottish teens, the druggy kids — no, -officer, I didn’t get their names — smoked hashish, presumably brought in with the heroin through the docks at Leith. At university it was mainly marijuana. In my twenties, though, dope meant skunk. And throughout that time, whenever ageing commentators remarked, reasonably, that the stuff kids were now smoking was much stronger, nastier and generally worse for you than the stuff they’d been smoking 30 years earlier, it always bothered me that none of them ever seemed to wonder why. Or, indeed, whether the kids would rather have been smoking something else.

This is one of the points that I gather Professor David Nutt makes (or, depending upon when you read this, has made) in an interview this week on BBC Radio 5 Live, with Jacqui Smith. When drugs are illegal, he says, the incentive is for them to become stronger. Consider American bootleggers in the 1920s, and their disdain for beer. Risk and economics all point in one direction. Folk want more bang for their illegal buck.

Nutt, you might remember, was a government adviser on drugs, famed for getting sacked for suggesting that taking ecstasy was no more dangerous than riding a horse.