I think you truly have no comprehension of the extent of the evil you are dealing with here.

The proper comparison to be made here – and it is one to be taken seriously – is with the downfall of Imperial China through widespread opium addiction. Yes, widespread opium addiction was largely responsible for the destruction of Imperial Chinese society and the fall of the empire.

In that case, opium actually was pushed into the market, deliberately and regularly, in exchange for other goods that the European market required, like tea and silk, creating massive demand among the higher castes of the Chinese population and bringing the whole edifice down.

Never in European history have dangerous and addictive drugs been both widely available and legal.

“But ultimately it boils down to how to justify the State’s right to control your private actions”

The state (obo the taxpaying public) has every right to control your private actions when the consequences of those actions are not privately borne.

That is exactly why you are made to wear a helmet on a motorbike and a seat-belt in a car, why there are strict regulations on diving with aqualungs, why you need a licence and insurance to drive a car, and why cigarettes are heavily taxed. Those are just some examples.

People who take far too many drugs become unfit to work – and therefore cannot pull their weight financially in society, becoming a burden on others through their own choices – and when they become really ill and require treatment, that has to be paid by non-consenting adults through the fruit of their own productive work.

The greater part of the health services budget goes on treating or otherwise contending with the problems created by poor individual choices in diet, lifestyle, cigarettes and alcohol. It is not the people who make those bad choices who pay for the consequences financially, but others – you, for instance, are paying right now for somebody’s free and independent choice to smoke two packets of cigarettes a day for 30 years.

When alcohol was banned in the United States, it was banned only in the United States. It was legal everywhere else, and made and sold legally everywhere else. So there was no worldwide tangled web of deeply evil criminal networks solely dedicated to making and distributing alcohol illicitly across the globe.

The United States was one country in which alcohol was illegal. You cannot compare the situation in one country to the situation in the entire world, which is what we have now.

Also, alcohol was perfectly legal in the United States before it became illegal – while being concurrently legal in the rest of the world – so your comparison is fallacious there too. We don’t have a similar situation with cocaine, heroin and marijuana. For a roughly similar comparison, you would have to ask yourself what would happen today if the European Union were to ban cigarettes overnight.

“When something is legal you open up the market to honest players” – I think you need to read that back again to yourself. Honest players? In heroin and cocaine? Please ask yourself exactly what sort of people you expect to go into business selling cocaine and heroin even when they are legal.

Secondly, legalisation will not end the illegal market and nobody in his right mind is going to enter a market where the competition is made up of murderers and some very evil criminals.

Back to your Prohibition comparison: the criminal gangs that thrived when alcohol was banned saw their raison d’etre end when the ban ended not because suddenly everything was legal BUT BECAUSE THERE HAD BEEN A VAST, WORLDWIDE INDUSTRY IN THE PRODUCTION OF LEGAL ALCOHOL ALL ALONG, AND ALL THROUGHOUT THE PROHIBITION. When the ban ended, the Scottish distillers entered the market and that was the end of it.

YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY BE SERIOUS.

Remove control from the European crime syndicates? How, exactly?

They control the chain of supply all the way back to the source of production. Please don’t tell me you envisage a situation in which, the day after cocaine becomes legal, the members of Malta’s Chamber of Commerce will open up negotiations with, say, Pablo Escobar’s people and cut out the inconvenient ‘Ndrangheta middle-man with no fear of what might happen to them as a result and every guarantee that Pablo Escobar’s people will want to p@ss off the ‘Ndrangheta by allowing others in.

This is crime. CRIME. The worst criminals IN THE WORLD.

“OK, chaps, it’s legal. So now we have to let other boys into the market.” That’s not going to happen. You are talking here about completely ruthless criminals who routinely flay people alive, immerse them in acid alive, place them in pits of fuel and set them on fire, torture and murder the entire families of soldiers and police officers, and you expect that this won’t continue? It will intensify with legalisation as they seek to protect their turf.

The comparison with alcohol is completely fallacious as grapes for wine grow in most parts of the world and spirit alcohol can be distilled from a wide variety of plant materials anywhere in the world.

You speak as though drug crime will end because illegal drugs are legalised in Europe, when those drugs are not produced in Europe but in other parts of the world, and when the worst of the crimes are committed in connection with their production and not with their sale on the streets of Europe.

Legalisation in Europe will increase demand in Europe which will, in turn and quite obviously, increase production in crime-ridden parts of the world, with more tracts of land given over to drug-crop production, more gangs of serfs controlled by the cartels working day and night, and more impoverished people dragged into mess and death so that European t@ssers who can’t deal with life can smoke or snort something to help them cope.

And then the same European t@ssers go on about the environment, social awareness and We Are One (and are probably vegetarians who go to the gym, too).

I imagine you’re not in marketing.

The minute something is legal, it becomes legal to push it openly. The market is wide open and the number of consumers increases because THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT.

Look at the situation with cigarettes. I grew up looking at cigarette advertisements literally everwhere: newspapers, magazines, television, the cinema, bars, shops, hoardings. They were always in your face. The Marlboro man even became an icon. Cigarette manufacturers even sponsored sports events. The result? Almost everybody smoked.

Then the links to health problems became impossible to ignore and cigarette advertising was banned. Before long, cigarettes even disappeared from films and television shows. You could depict people having sex and murdering each other, but you couldn’t show them smoking.

But still cigarettes continued to sell like crazy, and still the manufacturers found increasingly creative ways to push them, and still people smoke and smoke and smoke. And why? BECAUSE IT’S LEGAL, AND ANYTHING LEGAL IS CONSIDERED FINE.

Do you have children? Probably not. Because if you did, you would know that by the time they’re 11, parents are fighting off the cigarettes, and by the time they’re 12, parents are fighting off the illegal drugs.

AND THAT’S IN A SITUATION WHERE THEY’RE ILLEGAL. Now, imagine the situation if marijuana, cocaine and heroin are legal. Overnight, they become the equivalent of cigarettes.

The essential problem of criminality remains.

Europe’s criminal networks depend on, for example, the South American cartels. Those are going to stay criminal.