A quarter of Scottish adults admit having tried drugs

Shock horror! Surely they're all going to turn to a life of crime and then expire in a heap of burnt spoons and other 'drug paraphernalia'. Or perhaps not, since looking around there never seem to be that many drooling crack fiends rampaging across the Meadows of an evening.....

It's a point that's been made before (although I can't remember by who), but you can't help thinking that the massive disconnect between many people's experiences of drug use (i.e. might make you feel a bit funny but won't put you straight on the conveyor belt to hell) and the blood curdling stories told about drugs by government and media must be a contributing factor to processes undermining the legitimacy of the law. Certainly drugs laws, but perhaps others as well.

If people are continually told something is illegal because it's extremely dangerous, but their own experience tells them that at the very least it's a bit more complicated than that, then they will surely start to think something is wrong with the law and those behind it. In the final analysis laws are about the regulation of moral behaviour - they encode prevalent moral standards. If the connection between law and public morality is broken, for a significant minority at least, then the whole system starts to creak.

Mind you, perhaps the disconnect is not as large as us lefty/liberal types might like to think. According to the latest British Social Attitudes Survey, attitudes to cannabis, at least, are hardening:

In 2001 nearly half of those surveyed thought the drug was not "as damaging as you think". Now that is 24%.