The highly successful symposium – Peace in our time – held in London recently promises a new direction in the debate this nation must have about the place of drugs in our society, and of the laws controlling their manufacture, distribution and use.

For the past 90 years this debate has been dominated by the professional purveyors of moral panic in our society – a toxic combination of politicians, pressmen, prelates and policemen, aided and abetted by ill-informed parents, who have sought to pre-empt any serious discussion of "psychoactive" substances.

The tone for this debate was set in 1920-21, when parliament was first persuaded to legislate against the production and possession of certain narcotic substances – cocaine, morphine, opium and diamorphine.

At that time the British public was being fed lurid stories of "the yellow peril" – the dangers allegedly posed to British values by mysterious men from the East peddling "dope" and enslaving helpless maidens. These stories had been given spurious credence by the frankly racist pulp fiction of the novelist Arthur Ward (AKA Sax Rohmer), whose master criminal Dr Fu Manchu mesmerised the reading public.

In 1920, the Lloyd George coalition government decided to exploit this hysteria (heightened by the death of a minor actress known to be a dope addict) by passing the Dangerous Drugs Act – the first general statutory restriction on the possession and use of psychoactive substances in this country.

The debate then was more or less monopolised by the purveyors of moral panic. They have more or less monopolised the debate ever since – most recently in the totally manufactured hysteria over mephedrone, banned in the dying days of the Labour government on the so-called advice of an Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) that we know permitted itself to be bullied into conveying a rushed and ill-informed decision to a home secretary determined to ban mephedrone irrespective of the facts.

Indeed, well before the ACMD had even begun to consider the matter, police officers were stopping and even arresting citizens for possession of mephedrone and were thus meddling in matters that were then of no legitimate police concern.

This complete negation of evidence-based policy making (for instance, no death has been attributed to mephedrone) must never be allowed to happen again. But my overriding concern is with the dangers to our civil liberties posed by the armoury of anti-drugs laws and regulations now at the disposal of the authorities, and with further restrictions threatened/promised by the moral panickers.

Every day of the week citizens are being criminalised because they imbibe, inject, inhale or ingest substances that they believe give them pleasure, or help cope with difficult times. Granted, these people may need help. But what is the point of criminalising their behaviour?

It is now being seriously suggested that students – and their teachers – should be compelled to give urine or blood samples to detect the presence of cognition-enhancing drugs. Am I to be required to penalise a student whose academic performance might have been enhanced through the use of modafinil? What about the student user of another stimulant, caffeine?

As participants in the symposium were told, the "war on drugs" has been lost. The decades-old policy of stamping out the supply and use of banned substances is palpably bankrupt. More than that, it has cost and is costing billions of pounds (to say nothing of countless lives) to prolong a conflict that society was never, ever capable of winning. The alternative is obvious: decriminalise, regulate and tax.

At the symposium, the thinktank Transform presented its "blueprint for regulation". In the "new politics" that we are promised, this blueprint must be taken seriously.