Mephedrone illegal within weeks

Home Secretary Alan Johnson has confirmed HMG plan to make the currently-legal high mephedrone illegal within weeks. The drug, known on da streets as meow-meow according to several newspapers (though I've not heard anyone call it that, and neither has H*, the 17-year-old drugs-fancying raver son of a friend of ours), will be classified as a Class B controlled substance alongside cannabis and speed and as such anyone caught with it could face up to five years in the nick. Dealers could face fourteen years.

Argh! Drugs! Evil! Panic!

Mephedrone has been linked to the deaths of four people in the UK since it first emerged at a festival on the Isle of Wight in 2009 - less than half the total number of people killed by food allergies every year.

Well, thank feck for that, eh? I'm sure that, just as has been the case with all other drugs, banning mephedrone will rid our nation of this rather un-scourgely scourge. Smackheads don't even exist since heroin was banned, do they?

Meanwhile, over in Portugal, the number of teenagers using drugs fell during the first five years since the country decided to decriminalise possession and consumption of drugs - as did the number of new HIV cases. People seeking treatment to combat drug addiction, on the other hand, more than doubled.

Hmm. Might we be doing something wrong?

*Name omitted for obvious reasons.