by PETER HITCHENS, Mail on Sunday

Imagine the national frenzy - the bonfires of uneaten cattle, the bankruptcies, the public inquiries - if it turned out that eating beef could cause schizophrenia.

The misery this terrible disease brings is so appalling that sales of beef would virtually cease.

In fact, British governments have already panicked - in my view on scanty evidence - about beef. But they have also actively legalised cannabis, a powerful mind-bending drug which may well cause schizophrenia and can certainly trigger it where it is latent.

A growing number of doctors suspect that a sharp increase in schizophrenia among the young may be linked to cannabis use. No proper research has yet been done, probably because it would be deeply unfashionable.

Can you imagine any commercial drug, packaged food or electronic device being allowed on sale if there were any such suspicion about it?

Just as we battle to suppress tobacco smoking because of its grave threat to our health, why on earth are we going softer, year after year, on cannabis?

There is no real confusion in the Government's position. Its absurd advertising campaign claiming that this dangerous poison is still illegal will not be believed by anyone, because it is obviously untrue.

You might as well run a campaign saying that train travel was reliable and enjoyable.

Dope-smokers know that the police and the courts gave up taking cannabis use and possession seriously in 1968, after that pestilent liberal, Lady Wootton, produced a report saying the penalties were too severe.

What interests me is the double standard applied to it. It is not just that cannabis gets let off where beef doesn't. Governments can and do use the law to stop people doing certain things and to make them do others.

Campaigns against drink-driving and for seat belts have been effective precisely because they were backed by a fiercely enforced law.

People are always asking the Tories if they smoked cannabis in the long-gone days when they were young. This is fun, but pointless. Who cares what they did, or what they do?

What we really need to know is how many Labour Ministers and MPs, senior civil servants, lawyers, newspaper editors, TV and radio programme makers and influential journalists smoked it then and are still smoking it. And we also need to know how many of these people have teenage children whom they permit to smoke it in their bedrooms.

It is these selfish, complacent fools, who want cannabis legalised so they can live free from fear that their careers, or their children's careers, may be damaged, who are at the back of the sneaky campaign to turn this country into a Third World dump where sloth drags us down into squalor and the misled young find out, too late, that a supposedly soft drug is hard enough to wreck their brains forever.