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Gary Lineker prompted a new drug debate this week after tweeting his support for Britain decriminalising drugs.

All recreational drugs have been legal in Portugal since 2001, and now Norway could be about to follow its lead.

The Match of the Day presenter, reacting to another tweet, said he wanted Britain to "get on with" taking the same step.

He posted on the social networking website: "Controversial, no doubt, but never understood the drug laws. Just get on with decriminalistion."

The Leicester Mercury asked two prominent local people on either side of the debate to set out their opinions about the UK's drug laws, and whether they should be changed.

Express your view by voting in the poll on this page.

For decriminalisation: Rob Canton, Professor in Community and Criminal Justice at De Montfort University

"It is often thought that taking drugs is just a dangerous recreational indulgence that may then develop into a destructive addiction, but the reasons why people come to take drugs are many and complex.

"The idea that we can and should wage a "war on drugs" has driven most countries into a strategy of detection and prosecution, usually backed by stern punishment. When this fails, as fail it always will, it is supposed that we must redouble the effort to do more of the same.

"The criminalisation of drugs has caused enormous damage. Cannabis, for example, has been described as a "gateway drug", but it is not the substance but its criminalisation that takes people towards and through a gate that brings them to associate with dealers and others who take advantage of them and sometimes introduce them to more harmful substances.

"Again, it is criminalisation – not the addictive properties of drugs – that leads to so many more crimes, including stealing to fund a habit, smuggling, gang warfare and corruption.

"Meanwhile, effects on levels of consumption are negligible.

"In the USA – and, many would argue, in the UK as well – enforcement has been deployed unfairly.

"Enforcement unfairly applied breeds contempt, distrust and disrespect for the law.

"It is perfectly consistent to hold that using a drug is undesirable but that the criminal law is an inept means to reduce consumption, any gains achieved overwhelmingly outweighed by the unjust and discriminatory consequences of criminal enforcement.

"The decriminalisation of cannabis within a properly regulated market would be a good first step, but the same reasoning can be applied to other substances."

Against decriminalisation: Andrew Bridgen, Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire

"There are all sorts of considerations to be made, and we can have the debate, but I'd be against decriminalising recreational drugs.

"You wouldn't even know what substances you were legalising - it would be everything there is now, however dangerous and addictive - and then anything people might come up with in the future, too.

"And the criminals currently in the drug trade aren't just going to get a job at Tesco after drugs are made legal. They'll turn their hand to other kinds of crime instead.

"Drugs can be highly addictive and deadly.

"I knew one person who was killed by his use of skunk cannabis. He lived in Moira, and was about eight years younger than me.

"He had fallen out with his parents and was living in a caravan in their back garden, and I gave him a job to get him back on the straight and narrow, working as an HGV driver and earning good money.

"But then he stopped coming to work, and so he left the business.

"And years later, after I became a politician, I saw him walking his dog along the road and I barely recognised him. He looked 70 and he was shaking.

"I asked what happened, and he said he was smoking too much cannabis and his wife left him with his children.

"Then later I heard he had killed himself. He had gone to a reservoir, poured petrol over himself and set himself on fire."