A six-year study of Britain's drug laws by leading scientists, police officers, academics and experts has concluded it is time to introduce decriminalisation.

The report by the UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC), an independent advisory body, says possession of small amounts of controlled drugs should no longer be a criminal offence and concludes the move will not lead to a significant increase in use.

A prospective candidate for the position of Bristol mayor has been fined for possession of cannabis.

Independent candidate Craig Clarke was told to pay the £100 fine and an extra £100 at Bristol Crown Court after being caught with the drug on 5 May.

A magistrate says she has been removed from the bench after telling her bosses people she knew smoked cannabis.

Sarah McDonagh, who sat on the West Sussex bench covering Worthing and Chichester, last week learnt that she was permanently sacked as a magistrate.

Nowadays there is willingness for mainstream media to engage the debate about what should be done with international drug policy. Even the BBC is keen to present a balanced debate, inviting reformed celebrity drug ‘addicts’, self-confessed ‘medical’ users of cannabis and self-professed experts to discuss how prohibition created a paradox of consequences of harms across the globe. From Glasgow estate junkies using heroin contaminated with anthrax, to the killing fields of Mexico’s turf wars over the cocaine trade, it’s now acceptable to argue to de-criminalise, regulate or legalise so-called illicit drugs. I say ‘so-called’ because all these expressions such as ‘War on Drugs’, ‘illegal drugs’ and de-criminalising/regulating drugs are examples of transferred epithets obviously applying to the trade and possession of drugs, that is human action, not drug action. I will say more later on why the de-personalising language of this discourse is problematic; it is significant to point out that the law controls persons with respect to drugs, not drugs with respect to persons. When we think of a war on people, it seems unconscionable to talk about winning it, its unjust and unconscionable; the various punitive policies are arbitrary.

Talk of decriminalising or legalising drugs as mooted by Transform and Release is rooted in a fictitious construct about how the law operates. They are seeing the whole thing in reverse, ascribing legal status to objects; this is impossible. One result is that the entire system of addressing negative outcomes connected with human actions associated with drug misuse is lost. The envisaged regulatory system of controlling human actions has been replaced with an indivisible illegality imposed on some persons concerned with some drugs, this via the misnomer that (some) potentially harmful drugs are illegal and some are legal. Tom Lloyd was right in his oral evidence to point out that this is nonsense, but he did not touch upon the profound significance of the replacement of the legal subject (person) with an object (drug). Simply put, we are avoiding the elephant in the room, we completely misconstrue the Misuse of Drugs Act with catastrophic consequences for all.