Highs of a world where drugs are legal

The recent row over the Government's decision to change the classification of cannabis reopened, for a moment, the weary debate over legalisation of drugs. But what would such legalisation really mean?

What if, a decade from now, the United Nations met to plan their latest drugs strategy, as they will in 2018, and, gazing on events such as the recent drugs-related slaughter in Mexico, the chaos in Afghanistan, the civil war in Colombia, the explosion of crime in Russia, the gulag of 400,000 drug offenders in US jails, decided to legalise the lot - cannabis, cocaine, whatever - across the globe?

At the moment, drug trafficking is an estimated $18bn annual business worldwide. It offers a 2,000 to 3,000 per cent profit margin. Such margins are worth protecting, whether by gun or bribe. What if those

margins disappear for the criminal?

In Colombia, in 2018, we might have a negotiated peace with drug money no longer funding either the paramilitaries or Farc and a government no longer embroiled in scandal.

In Afghanistan, we could also have a settlement as poppy farmers, no longer alienated by foreign attempts to deprive them of their living by destroying their crops, might agree to cooperate with the Kabul government. The poppies could be bought for medicinal purposes by the WHO, and pomegranate and almond replacement crops slowly introduced.

In California, the US state with the largest number of drug offenders, there were 21 new prisons and one new university built during a period in the Eighties and Nineties. In 2018, that process could be reversed, with young people being educated in college rather than jail.

If the same happened across the US, it could empower many young black men, who disproportionately make up the prison population, to follow in the footsteps of a