Mrrzy, don’t try to tell me how it works, I have 20 years’ experience, both with my son and 12 years working with young people, a significant number of whom were users, during a 12-year spell as a Youth Worker with our local Education Authority.

Please read my posts again - properly this time. I said that consumption should be decriminalised, and that legal (and therefore presumably licensed) suppliers only should be permitted to sell it.

The way dealers work - and this is from my actual experience of what happened with my son, and with several other ‘hard’ drug-users whom I worked with during my time as a Youth-Worker, not something I read somewhere - is that they employ a ‘carrot and stick’ technique to hook their victims. They give cannabis ‘free’ to young, gullible people for a while but then they ‘call in the debt’ by giving them cannabis and other substances to sell, on pain of getting a beating-up, or informing on them to the parents, or both. If the victim doesn’t sell the stuff, or fails to hand the requisite amount of money over to the dealer, they get the beating. The dealer then has the victim under control.

The next step is to suggest to the victim to ‘try a bit of this’, the ‘this’ being something a little ‘stronger’, and again for ‘free’. Various techniques of ‘persuasion’, physical and psychological, are employed by the dealer to get the victim to comply once again. Sooner or later, the new ‘debt’ is called in, once again on pain of a beating or being informed on. Refusal to comply usually results in the aforementioned beating - as my son found out the hard way in the car park of the place where he worked when he tried to refuse to do what his supplier(s) wanted. His explanation for his injuries to his mother and me was that he “Fell off the top of a stack of pallets in the warehouse at work”.

And so it goes on, step by step, deeper and deeper, until the user becomes a part of the dealing network - whether willing or not. Once the victim becomes addicted to whichever drug - heroin in my son’s case - the dealer has a ready-made ‘employee’ whom he uses to move drugs around, sell drugs, engage in criminal activities, whatever.

So, whilst I agree that the idea that cannabis ‘automatically leads to hard-drug habit’ is nonsense and is not a valid reason for its use to be a criminal offence, there is no doubt that, for those who become hard-drug users, and definitely for the many users who find themselves part of a dealer’s network of mules, many, perhaps most, begin with cannabis.

As my son often says, “Nobody who’s a Smack-Head started with Heroin, he/she started, almost inevitably, with cannabis”, and I believe that the decriminalisation of all ‘illegal’ drugs, and the setting up of legal routes of supply, would go a long way to dis-arming the dealers of the psychological and physical weapons they use to control their dealing-network and their customers.