Ann Widdecombe, the former Home Office minister, is one of the more robust advocates for a zero-tolerance approach to drugs. “There are huge arguments against decriminalisation,” she tells me. “There are only two ways of doing it, either you decriminalise all drugs or only the soft drugs. If you decriminalise just the soft drugs, all the efforts of the drug barons will then be poured into the hard drugs. Secondly, for a percentage of people, soft drugs take you through the gateway to hard drugs.” Widdecombe believes the reason we don’t win the war against drugs is that we don’t actually fight it. “We do take a strong line against the importation of strong drugs, but we do not have any stamp down at the lower end. What I propose is zero tolerance, from hard drugs down to the possession of soft drugs, obviously with hugely different penalties.”