Clare Foges tells us several things about the idea of legal cannabis. For example, that smoking the modern stuff causes psychosis. This is not quite how it works, no. In any society there are those whose mental balance crumbles under the strain. Who and why might vary given the society but there’s been no society ever without the incidence. One of the known things about people who feel their mental control slipping away being that they self-medicate.

What they use to do so depends on what drugs are generally available in that society. But it’s the worry about becoming a nutter that leads to the drugs, not the other way around. Or at least, that’s the general experience, even if not that for each and every individual.

But there’s a much deeper mistake in Ms. Foges analysis:

Unlike its hardcore cousins heroin and cocaine, cannabis is widely perceived as gentle and soft, the Horlicks of drugs. This may have been true of weed smoked in the Seventies and Eighties, when the drug contained very low doses of THC (the psychoactive compound that delivers the high) but the cannabis (or skunk) of today is anything but gentle. To associate the oregano smoked decades ago with this hugely potent stuff is like bracketing a naughty seaside postcard with online pornography.

Assume that this is true for a moment. Do consenting adults have the right to produce, star in, watch, otherwise consume, online pornography? Yes, yes they do, as the viewing figures of the sites that provide it show.

Therefore consenting adults not just should have but justly have the right to consume even modern cannabis. On the grounds that any damage is to their own morals, their own life, things which are not our business to interfere with nor impose our own ideas upon those of others.

OK, so pot is porn. As with the bawdiness so with the blunt. Obviously, for we are all liberals around here, aren’t we?