The Scottish Government has just decided that their drugs policy will henceforth be based on “promoting abstinence”. Good plan guys!

This from the same politicians of course who themselves mostly take hard drugs almost every day. No, I’m not accusing Uncle Alex of being a junkie. Just pointing out that alcohol is by far our most serious drug problem. Violence. Accidents. Public nuisance. NHS costs. Bereavements. The ill-effects of heroin, ecstacy, and cannabis combined aren’t even in the same ballpark.

This presumably takes its inspiration from the storming success of the US-led War on Drugs, which as we all know is close to achieving a formal surrender by the Great Leader of the Drugs Army. Well, there has to be a drugs army doesn’t there if there’s to be a war on them… I mean, you can’t wage war on a category of products. Or is this perhaps a sign of hyperbolic muddled thinking?

Let’s take this further… Let’s take insipiration from the remarkable success of campaigns to persuade teenagers that celibacy is really far more fulfilling than doing what normal teenagers have done since time immemorial. (Pity about tiny details such as soaring rates of teenage pregnancies and STDs in regions where such paternalistic campaigns replace factual education, relationship advice, and open access to contraception… and pity that the sanctimonious preachers so often turn out to be, ho-hum, ‘fallible’.) Back to the point, let’s copy their ‘silver ring thing’…

I propose we launch the White Ring Thing. Everyone who wears one swears they will never use cocaine, heroin, codeine, paracetamol, Night Nurse, tobacco, coffee, lettuce, nutmeg, sugar, alcohol (of course), chocolate… or any other psychoactive drugs - whether legal or not, whether on prescription or not. Just say nae chance!

There is no rational alternative to such an uncompromising campaign, because there’s no justification for saying it’s okay to take painkillers during cancer treatment, whilst doctors are not allowed to prescribe cannabis for chronic arthritis, or indeed uppers or downers for situational depression due to being one of life’s losers. Why let bored housewives self-medicate with Prozac, but deny spliff through licensed outlets to bored students?

Or maybe, just maybe, that with a little political courage and imagination the Scottish government could have taken a step or two further towards (breathe deeply…) a rational debate about ‘drugs’. Maybe we could take advantage of our small nation status to put the tabloid hysteria to one side and actually examine ALL drugs on a spreadsheet with columns for ‘harmful effects’ and ‘benefits’ and direct our resources accordingly. Maybe we could have a presumption that people should be treated as adults able to take their own decisions (the only conditions in which people tend to behave like responsible adults) rather than give rebellious teenagers such an obvious means of rebellion. Maybe we could use education to give users and potential users the real facts -positive as well as negative - about each product, which evidence shows to be the single most effective route to harm reduction. Maybe we could use licensing to remove the inconsistency and impurity of supplies that in reality is the cause of most deaths, whilst simultaneously destroying the huge incentives for greedy or desperate people to push people into using drugs in harmful ways.

Or then again, maybe we could take the easy political cop-out, and instead opt for hypocritical moralistic preaching about abstinence…