By a curious paradox, no politician dares propose legalisation as the solution to the drug problem and no intellectual or celebrity will propose anything else. Both groups have to look to their constituencies: the first fears to lose votes, the second caste. Since only those who belong to one group or the other ever discuss the problem, there results a dialogue of the deaf. I think this will continue for the foreseeable future. 

In Legalize Max Rendall – a doctor who, since he mentions having worked in a casualty department at the end of the 1950s, must by now be in his late seventies – argues the case for legalisation vigorously. He does not adopt the standard libertarian view that everyone should be