Drugs laws are the UK's version of US gun laws: idiotic and dangerous

Drugs are as easy to get hold of as take-away pizza; someone makes a call and they are delivered straight to your door. Thousands of people take drugs every day in the UK; they do it smartly, safely and without any repercussions aside from a dent in their wallet.

In 2015, nearly one in 12 people aged between 16 and 50 took an 'illicit substance'. When this study was carried out 'illicit substances' didn't even include the artists formerly known as 'legal highs'. So those numbers are likely to rise sharply.

We've heard from the Royal Society for Public Health that decriminalisation should be an obvious policy. They, and many others before them, say the Government's approach has failed and that treating drugs differently to the equally or more harmful drugs of alcohol and tobacco is ludicrous. Just as we teach people to enjoy drinking safely, we need to encourage safe and pleasurable drug taking.

One story sticks in my own mind: I attended a music festival in Australia where one girl died after taking ecstasy. She'd bought three tablets and smuggled them through security. An hour later a police officer with a sniffer dog approached her, she panicked, and took all three at once. Of course, she flipped out. So much so her naive, inexperienced friends also panicked. The ensuing chaos led to a communal loss of sanity. Rather than asking for help, for fear of being arrested, in a moment of madness they put their friend on a roller coaster. She had a heart attack and died.

The young girl was petrified in to swallowing a dangerous level of drugs by a patrolling police officer while her friends couldn't ask for help through fear of those same officers and their rules. However scared she may have been, that girl would not have swallowed those drugs had she known the reality of what taking such a huge ecstasy dose would do to her, and she and her friends were able to ask for help.

There has recently been a spate of deaths linked to ecstasy use. At any one time there’s hundreds of varieties of the drug available. But the deaths haven't been down to contaminated batches, no. They're down to kids taking too much at once. The levels of MDMA, the active substance in ecstasy pills, are increasing but the tablets don't come with a percentage on the side like vodka does. They would, if the Government regulated them. So, kids die from taking too many pills at once. As more people die, so the cycle of fear and criminalisation will continue.

Kids need to know that while you may have needed an entire gram of mephedrone to get high, an entire gram of coke will make your heart explode. Sure, a Spice blunt does the trick, but continually smoking blunts of high-THC skunk will cause long lasting mental health problems

Dr. Adam Winstock is both an addictions counsellor and author of the Global Drugs Survey. On a recent interview with LBC Radio he highlighted how the recent psychoactive substance ban will lead to an increase in use of the more classic drugs like ecstasy. He’s already started a campaign called 'just take half' (a pill), in the wake of these deaths – a first step to preaching sensible drug use to a new generation of users.

If we really want to stop drug-related deaths and to prevent people becoming reliant on them, we have to begin a programme of teaching sensible drug use, because there really is such a thing.