Half a dozen police thumped on the door of the home of my eminently respectable father in law. Two boiler suited bobbies pushed past him when he opened up. Others explained that if he had not come to the door, they were about to use their battering ram.

A chapel going 68 year old angina sufferer does not expect to have his home raided by the drugs squad. The police in Baneswell, Newport, Gwent in my constituency were acting on a tip off that he had cannabis in his loft.

If anything had been found, my father in law could have suffered a 2,500 fine or a barbaric prison sentence similar to those now being dished out in Scotland.

The tip-off was false. My father in law is as likely to grow illegal drugs and he is to become a serial murderer.

While heroin, cocaine and a hundred other more dangerous substances can be supplied on the NHS but cannabis is still banned.

Privately the Government confess that the ban is ludicrous and is causing avoidable suffering. No court would convict the three women who braved the press in London.

I believe the majority of MPs agree. More than 60 of them signed my commons motion asking for prescribed cannabis. Yet The Government know that that any relaxation in their 'tough on drugs' posture might lessen the harvest of votes it brings.

The leaders of Labour and the Lib Dems are paralysed with fear of tabloid rage if they appear soft on drugs. So the farce plays on with all the parties united in cowardly self-serving hypocrisy.

Only the hopelessly ignorant or prejudiced believe that the 3 million plus British recreational users of cannabis should be hounded as criminals. Yet the informed chattering class are supine and publicly silent.

The problem is not illegal drugs. The problem is prohibition. It was prohibition of alcohol in America in the twenties that spawned a crime empire, a flood of adulterated poisonous booze and criminalised the majoritv of the adult population.

Soon there will be a majority of young people using cannabis and other soft drugs. The stark choice is to abandon them to the mercies of irresponsible criminals or to regulate the trade. Now the source of cannabis is often the supplier of hard addictive drugs. Having crossed the line of legality the cannabis user is easy prey to pushers seeking new lucrative hard drug customers.

Dutch de-criminalisations has reduced all drugs use among Dutch young people. Soft drugs are no longer glamorous or sexy in a boring street cafe. Fewer people are now in contact with hard drug pushers and the average age of Dutch addicts has increased as fewer young people are ensnared.

Inexorably we are repeating the mistakes of the American war against drugs. They have spent up to $8 billion a year and deployed their police, armed services and customs in the battles.

The result has been ballooning levels of illegal drug use and drug related crime. Yet the real lethal drug pushers are unhindered and encouraged.

If deaths are a measure of drug harm, its legal drug use that should be challenged. Britain's death rate last year was, tobacco 110,000, Alcohol 25,000, Medicinal drugs 2,000. Paracetamol killed 200 people, more that twice the 94 killed by heroin.

Ten times as many people are addicted to medicinal drugs as illegal ones. If a perverse individual wanted to create a new crime wage and enrich a new army of criminals there is a guaranteed method - make tobacco or alcohol illegal.

There is universal understanding of the absurdity of such a step but only a slowly dawning understanding that the same results are tragically apparent from prohibition of other drugs.

The stepping stone argument that soft drugs leads to hard drugs is greatly exaggerated. Millions of people are social drinkers. Their four or five regular pints on a Saturday had led only a tiny mino rity of them to become winos or alcoholics.

Almost exactly the same proportion move from soft to hard drugs. The great majority are contemptuous of hard drug use. Addicts to all substances are psychologically vulnerable.

Government Minister David Maclean said this week end that legalisation would mean that children could buy cannabis at street corners. Where has he been?

Almost every child in Wales has access to illegal drugs now. No power on earth has ever or will ever stop the trade. Our only hope is to bring it under rigidly licensed control.

Those then selling to children or to vulnerable people would lose their licences. The illegality of drugs is an attraction that must be removed.

Prohibition increase the likelihood of exposure to addiction. The dozen recent deaths in south Wales were largely caused by young people being tricked into hard use - often offered as an unnamed antidote to the effects of ecstasy or other recreational drugs.

Once hooked, they are at the mercy of criminals who have scant regard for the purity or strength of their wares. Only ending prohibition will destroy the black market in drugs by replacing it with a market that treats addicts as patients and controls the sale and quality of all soft drugs.

Until that happens more lives will be wrecked and drug related crime will rise waiting for the moment when our craven political parties open their minds to new solutions.