The failure of the current system of drug prohibition was evident right from the start. Quong Tart, tea importer, socialite, lacrosse champion, and indefatigable anti-opium campaigner, insisted that banning its import would ‘stamp out the evil within twelve months’. That was in 1894.

The manifest improbability of the proposition has done nothing to cure succeeding generations of their naïveté. Drug laws come in cycles, just far enough apart to prevent us from remembering the conspicuous failure of previous attempts.

Drug books likewise come in cycles. Every couple of years, we see a new book dedicated to urging changes in the current approach, begging for rationality and balance. Drugs and Democracy: In Search of New Directions is the latest in a long line. It is an edited collection, and its eleven chapters, involving a wide range of contributors from many disciplines, tell us little that we did not know five years ago, or ten or twenty. Jacques Lacan describes psychoanalysis as ‘the talking cure’. The theory appears to be that if we talk about our problems long enough, they will lose their hold over our subconscious and allow us to behave more rationally. Perhaps this is the theory behind such a book as this. By demonstrating – yet again – the failure of the regime of prohibition and its catastrophic effects on our society, the authors provide us with no revelations, but they are at least part of a process that may eventually bore us into submission.