I’ve been waiting for the government to legalise cannabis since I was a student.

By this, I don’t mean that I’m a mid 40s caner who has been smoking solidly for 25 years. Rather, I mean that it’s the right thing to do even though I haven’t smoked dope for 15 years. That we haven’t freed the weed is a testament to stupidity, wilful ignorance of science and political subservience to tabloid sensibilities.

Back when I was a student, I smoked quite a bit of dope. This was because I was at the deeply unhip University of York, where, in those long-ago, pre-internet days, trends happened two years late. So, no raves and ecstasy for student Alex, just the odd lump of Moroccan Black hash and, if we were very lucky, some grass.

Three years of repeated experimentation with these substances revealed that they made me giggle, sleep and eat lots of Mars Bars. I soon realised that dope was less dangerous than the ice cream it made me scoff (and so horrendously addictive that the second I moved down to London and discovered the E and coke I’d been missing, I forgot all about it).