Take dope smokers for example (and dope is still illegal, despite its recent reclassification in the UK), what exactly are they doing that is such a threat to society? They sit around basement rooms, listening to music, giggling and eating too many Mars Bars. Of course, I’m being facetious here, but have you ever seen a crowd of stoners squaring off to each other in the High Street with broken bottles and knives in their hands?

And what about Ecstasy users? What exactly is their crime? If you’ve ever been out with a crowd of Ecstasy users - and I have many a time - you would know what a loving, peaceable crew they are. They’re too busy hugging each other and dancing to be much of a ‘danger to society’.

Okay, it’s time to nail my colours to the mast. I use illegal drugs. I don’t use them very often, now that I’m a parent, but I still like to take the odd E and occasionally, when the opportunity presents itself, I might take a line of coke or a toke of a joint. I’m 43 years old and I’ve been consuming illegal drugs now for 26 years.

I’m not in a minority of one here. A lot of my thirty-something, forty-something and fifty-something friends still take illegal drugs. Amongst this crew there are doctors, lawyers, journalists, film directors, musicians, artists, poets, plumbers, electricians and all sorts. Chances are your divorce was settled by a solicitor who liked a wee sniff or your washing machine was fixed by a stoner. Drugs are all around us. Just about everyone is doing them. And most drug-users manage to enjoy their drug or drugs of choice without it interfering with their everyday responsibilities. This is a fact, but it is not a fact you will see reported in the tabloid newspapers. ‘Illegal drug-users get on with their lives’ is hardly an interesting headline.

The tabloids report sensationalist stories about drugs, like the one about that poor actress lassie, Daniella Westbrook, who rotted her septum through excessive cocaine use. I don’t blame the newspapers for peddling their sensationalist stories and giving a completely unbalanced picture of reality: they know sensationalism sells. But for every Daniella Westbrook, there are hundreds of actors who use cocaine without any obvious ill-effect. Cocaine use is rife in the media. It’s the drug of choice, not just for the cast, but the crew also. I know this for a fact as I worked in film and television for three years... and I was not averse to a sniff myself when it came my way. It was unusual to come across people who did not partake of the old Columbian marching powder occasionally. The fact of the matter is the film industry is awash with cocaine, as is television, journalism, the advertising industry and the music industry. If cocaine were as bad, mad and dangerous as the politicians would have you believe surely these industries would collapse? But they don’t! And why? Because most people who use cocaine use it responsibly.

I’m not pretending there are no casualties amongst cocaine users, there are! Cocaine is addictive, and some people get addicted to it; just as alcohol is addictive and some people get addicted to that. But the fact of the matter is most people manage to use addictive drugs like cocaine and alcohol without getting addicted. They manage their daily lives and enjoy getting high occasionally. It’s as simple as that.

So why is cocaine illegal and alcohol legal? This is something I fail to understand. They are both addictive and they both have potential to damage your physical and mental health if used in excess. They both lower the inhibitions and cause people to feel exhilarated, and if used immoderately can cause people to be opinionated, arrogant and bolshy. Coke can turn some people into arseholes, as can alcohol, but it kinda stops there with coke. Alcohol users are much more antisocial, especially en masse. If they aren’t actually squaring up to each other, often tooled up with weapons, then they are staggering down our High Streets, singing and shouting at the tops of their voices, abusing passers-by, vomiting on the pavement, pissing in doorways or passing out. So, why exactly is alcohol legal and cocaine isn’t? Please, feel free to explain this to me, because I just don’t get it.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of cocaine, just as I’m not a huge fan of alcohol. I don’t use either very often, and never to excess; and I don’t like being in the company of those who do. That said, I don’t think either of those drugs should be illegal. It should be entirely up to the individual what they choose to put into their body: it is, after all their body, not the government’s. The nanny-state interference of politicians is unwelcome. We do not need to be protected from ourselves; and we especially do not need to be protected by a government whose policies are inconsistent. If I need to be protected from cocaine and ecstasy I also need to be protected from whisky and cigarettes (and I’m lighting up as I write this).

If ever there was a drug that should be outlawed surely its tobacco? Hell, you don’t even get high from it; and yet it’s the most addictive and dangerous drug on the market. It kills more people than all the other drugs put together (including alcohol), and it doesn’t even kill them gracefully, but with long, drawn out, highly unpleasant illnesses like lung cancer and bronchitis. It’s way more addictive than cocaine or heroin and there are hundreds of millions of addicts worldwide, most of whom will be addicted for life and will probably die of some disease caused by this addiction... and yet there isn’t a single country on the globe where this highly dangerous drug is illegal. Why? Could it be anything to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars that the tobacco industry spends lobbying governments? Could it be anything to do with the billions of dollars raised on tobacco taxes?

If the governments across the world outlawed tobacco and alcohol I might concede that they have my health and well-being in mind whilst banning me from using cannabis, ecstasy and all other illicit drugs. But, as they continue to let me smoke and drink to my heart’s content I must assume that my health and well-being are not uppermost in their minds; and that they have another agenda altogether.

I would suggest that governments are more interested in social control than the physical and mental health of their citizens. Many of the drugs that are illicit also happen to be mind or consciousness expanding. LSD is a case in point. It had a transformative effect on American youth in the sixties, which frightened the hell out of the authorities. Much as hippies are maligned amongst hip young things today, it has to be acknowledged that the hippie revolution changed the face of our world. Prior to the hippy revolution, fuelled as it was by LSD, the world was grey, grim and repressive. The powers-that-be liked it that way... and believe you me, they would like it that way again.

Way too many of us are now enjoying the sorts of freedoms that our 1950’s counterparts couldn’t even have dreamed of. Hell, you couldn’t even read D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” back then: that’s how repressed things were! It’s easy to forget what freedoms we now enjoy, but we should try our damnedest to be aware of these freedoms, because there are a bunch of bastards on the highest rungs of the ladder who would like to deprive us of these freedoms. They’d like us all to be blind, unquestioning sheep - little cogs in the big machine that they control.

Personally, I try my best not to be part of that machine. In my mind’s eye the machine is the epitome of all evil and I don’t want to be either a little or a big cog in it. I don’t want to participate in the running of this machine and would, if I knew how, happily sabotage it. I don’t approve of war. I don’t approve of the economic exploitation of the third world. I don’t approve of social inequalities. I don’t approve of the environmental devastation of the planet. And I don’t believe the lies that are told to justify these actions.

I honestly believe that using consciousness-expanding drugs such as cannabis, LSD and ecstasy have been intrinsic in the development of my point of view. They’ve opened me up to thoughts and ideas that I might not otherwise have had. Without exposure to mind-altering drugs I might have ended up a ‘good and useful member of society’. Before I smoked my first spliff I was, under my father’s guidance, considering doing science at university. I always had a natural flair for maths and science and it is not inconceivable that, had I not discovered drugs, I might right now be performing vivisection on a white rat rather than spewing my subversive thought out via the internet. I could have had a glittering career as a nuclear physicist or genetic engineer. I might even have been involved in the development of GM foods. Who knows?

How many other people have been subverted from their guided career paths as useful cogs in the machine by drugs? A lot, I would suggest. At festivals such as Traquair I am constantly bumping into people who were straight A students at school, but who now happily scrape a meagre living on the fringes of society. They’re mostly poor, but happy; and they are as far removed from the clutches of the machine as they can be. These people are a significant minority and their philosophy can be quite infectious. I’ve met engineers, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers and all sorts who have chosen to drop out of the machine’s rat-race. Some of them first got the idea to do so at festivals like Traquair.