The question is not who is taking drugs, but who isn't  

It must be 35 years since I flung an old friend out of my tiny North London flat for bringing cannabis into my home.

I was still pretty modishly Left-wing about most things in those days. But I felt (as I feel now) a special disgust against drugs.

How could it not be wrong to deliberately dim and dull your senses? If you don't like the world as it is, then change it. Don't numb yourself into apathy.

I have to say that when I told him to get out, I thought I was expressing a pretty conventional opinion. It only dawned on me later just how out of tune I was with the times.

Not that it's a bad thing to be unfashionable. In fact it's more or less a duty, if your mind is alive.

People have told me since - and they were only half-joking - that Harriet Harman and I were probably the only two people at the University of York in the early 1970s who didn't smoke dope.

I know directly of several outwardly respectable figures who take drugs and let their children do the same.

And, while I feel a wave of hatred beating against me whenever I walk into a BBC studio, it is never so strong as when I have come there to argue against the weakening of the drug laws.

In fact they have pretty much stopped asking me to discuss this at all, since I dared to give a hard time to their favourite advocate of drug law relaxation, Professor David Nutt (how long before he gets his own show?).

Drug abuse, you see, isn't just a minor fringe activity. It is the secret vice of the whole British Establishment.

I wonder how many government and media buildings would get through a thorough search for traces of cocaine, for instance.

That is what has mainly worried me about the allegations now being made against the Rev Paul Flowers, and against Nigella Lawson. I have no idea if the charges are true.

But is anyone really surprised to hear such claims? And how much further does it go? Let me share with you two other revelations from recent days.

The first is that, in Brixton Prison in London, the jail's Government-sponsored Independent Monitoring Board reported that inmates are smoking so much cannabis that the clothes of prison officers and of volunteer staff stink of the drug.

Remember, this is a prison, a place supposedly for the absolute enforcement of law. Yet the drug law has broken down totally, in a building under the direct control of the State. If this is so in a prison, what about the streets?

And then there was this interesting comment, by the insiders' favourite insider, the political columnist Matthew d'Ancona.

He wrote that an ‘unspoken agreement' had been reached between the main parties about drugs, saying: ‘It was clear that a campaign of inquisition, digging into every senior politician's university past, would leave the front benches more or less deserted.'

University past, Matthew? I think we are talking about much more recent events than that.

As he added, a Tory researcher had claimed to him, before the last Election, that ‘some of the teams within the party were notoriously better at acquiring drugs than others'.

He says this sounded ‘outlandish' to him. It sounds like the sober truth to me.

This widespread secret illegality is a form of corruption. Fearing personal exposure if they act or speak against drugs, our political class let this man-made plague rage through our society, fuelling all kinds of crime, driving young people mad and debasing our whole society.

I suggest we offer our ruling elite an amnesty. All crimes confessed to within a set time to be forgiven - on condition they now enforce the laws they were elected to preserve, protect and defend.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk 30/11/2013