Can someone tell me what on earth is going on? Are we all going mad?

Even the usually sensible Home Secretary David Blunkett, of whom I have lately grown rather fond, appears to have lost his marbles.

What is this frenzied dash to legalise cannabis all about?

While recategorising it as a Class C rather than a Class B drug is not, strictly speaking, making possession legal, it surely follows as night follows day that decriminalisation will eventually happen.

This is the first step along the way - the first legal move to soften us up for a radical change in the law that will create in Britain the sort of drug infested society they have in Holland.

The former Tory social services supremo Peter Lilley claims the Dutch experiment has been a huge success.

He is wrong and twisting the facts. Young people in Holland are the biggest users of cocaine and ecstasy in Europe.

The use of heroin and cannabis is rising and there has been a huge surge of drug- related crime. His claim that the alleged health risks of cannabis are 'either bogus or exaggerated' is equally wrong and unsustainable according to the vast majority of serious medical research.

Home Office figures show that 81,000 people were arrested for cannabis possession in Britain in 1999.

Apparently, with all the paper work and red tape the police have to cope with, it takes between three and four hours to deal with each case.

So David Blunkett argues that by making possession a non-arrestable offence, he is freeing up more than quarter of a million hours of police time.

The real answer, surely, is to cut the paper work and red tape, the bane of every policeman's working day, not to change the law.

But there is more flawed thinking.

While on the one hand the Home Secretary is making life easy for cannabis smokers, he also maintains the Government's message is still: "Don't take drugs of any kind. They are dangerous and they will damage you."

Then he says it is necessary to have credibility, consistency and clarity. It is the soggy thinking of a hapless minister, driven into a U-turn by powerful pressure groups.

The so-called drug misuse professionals are hard at work. Reclassifying cannabis may be the first serious change in the drug laws for decades but these people will not let up.

Next will be ecstasy and LSD. They want them recategorised from Class A (like heroin and cocaine) to Class B (like amphetamines).

This at a time when London's drug trade is reckoned to be the city's third biggest business after finance and tourism.

Half a million young people take ecstasy every weekend and some ten of them die each year.

So what do the professional lobbyists argue? "Government policies will not be credible in the eyes of the young while ecstasy remains in the highest category of illegal substances."

Astonishingly, the Government is listening.