You have to feel for Polly Taylor and Eric Carlin, who resigned from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs last week. It's kind of a lose-lose situation for the council at the moment: they can carry on providing the government with research they know it will ignore; or they can resign on principle and forfeit any chance they had of making a difference to the UK's bizarre drugs policies. Whatever they choose to do, the government will apparently continue to base its approach to drugs on tabloid headlines and conjecture - Alan Johnson made it known he planned to ban mephedrone before even receiving the council's report on it.

Only one death in the UK has been officially attributed to mephedrone use so far. Of the others who died "after taking" mephedrone (in the same way that, say, Peter Sutcliffe committed all his crimes after eating a sandwich, which just goes to show bread should be illegal), one was a 14-year-old girl who it subsequently transpired had in fact died of bronchial pneumonia; while two more were young men who had taken the drug with alcohol and methadone. (On the father of one of the teenagers' assertion that his son was "not a druggie" I will refrain from comment. I've met 17-year-olds who I can readily believe have easy access to high-grade heroin substitutes.) One thing is common to pretty much all these "meow meow killed my baby" stories: mephedrone was not the only drug they took. Mostly it was mixed with alcohol or ketamine, though, like I said, high-grade heroin substitutes will do at a pinch.

What we need here is not scare stories, or kneejerk bans, or Alan Johnson. There is never a need for Alan Johnson. What we need is reasoned, informed discourse about drugs; and given the priorities of the press and the public and the politicians, this is not likely to happen for a very long time.