A lot of them dabble anyway: 16 per cent of young adults in Britain admit to having tried amphetamines and 8 per cent

A lot of them dabble anyway: 16 per cent of young adults in Britain admit to having tried amphetamines, and 8 per cent to having taken ecstasy. Illegality also puts a premium on strength: it makes more sense to sell drugs in concentrated form. In the same way, during Prohibition, consumption of beer fell, but spirits drinking increased.How, if drugs were legal, would they be distributed? For the answer, look at the different channels through which legal drugs are distributed today. Caffeine is for sale on any street corner; to buy alcohol, you need proof of age; for Valium, you need a doctor’s prescription Different countries would seek different solutions Indeed, that is already starting to happen. While Canada starts farming pot in unused mines, the Swiss are debating a proposal to allow farmers to grow cannabis, provided it is sold only to Swiss buyers. A commodity market for opium poppies may be far off into the future, but a common agricultural policy for cannabis? Soon, perhaps, no longer merely a druggy’s dream.Frances Cairncross is Management Editor of ‘The Economist’.

‘The Case for Legalising Drugs’ is in the magazine’s current issue. The recent report that stated that British managers were the highest paid in Europe by quite a margin went some way to answering a question for me. The recent report that stated that British managers were the highest paid in Europe by quite a margin went some way to answering a question for me. See, I’ve known for some time, as we all have, that more or less everything costs more in Britain than almost everywhere else.

But what was bothering me was, where was all that extra money going?
Now we know it’s going to some fat arse (of either sex) in a suit. When you pay £1.75 for a watery cup of coffee at Heston Motorway services, compared to perhaps 75p for a caffe con leche on the ring road outside Madrid, the extra money that is taken off you in the UK certainly has not been spent on finding the finest Kenyan coffee beans, for which a fair price has been paid and which are picked by happy and contented small farmers. The extra cash has not been used to recruit highly trained waiting staff poached from the caf?of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Via Veneto. The additional money has not gone on the finest architects and designers creating a building which elevates the spirits and brings soaring joy to all those that use it. No; the extra cash went to overpay some executive who chose the worst beans at the lowest price they could screw out of the poor, powerless producer, served by the illest-trained, most-exploited staff in the vilest buildings.But that can’t be right. A British manager gets an average of £560,000 pounds a year, whereas their German counterpart gets an average of £240,000, so really in Britain things should be £320,000 better than in Germany But they’re not, they’re not even £1 better. And I should know, because on your behalf I reckon I’ve tried out everything in the British Isles at least once, and sometimes twice if it’s covered in chocolate and chopped nuts, and it is my calculation that things are, on average, when compared with the continent of Europe, not any better but approximately £169,000 worse! With that figure rising to around £212,600 when it’s raining or there’s a cookery show featuring Antony Worrall Thompson on the telly.So, then, why are British managers paid such huge amounts? The mouthpieces of the highly paid talk cant about their rare skills, their contribution to the economy, the stresses and strains of their high-powered jobs.

But the truth is that the highly paid pay themselves highly for the same simple reason that dogs lick their own bollocks – because they can! Middle and upper managers decide the pay of other middle and upper managers without reference to morality, performance, honesty or modesty and the only decision they make is not whether or not they should jack their pay up by outrageous amounts, but who is allowed inside or outside the charmed circle of the overpaid.See, there have to be adjustments from time to time because there are a couple of problems with the unfair payment system we have in this country. Firstly, while those who have their rates of pay imposed upon them, such as manual workers, nurses, teachers and so on, get percentage pay increases of 2 or 3 percent, the ones who decide their pay for themselves – MP’s, upper managers, City lawyers – give themselves pay increases of 40, 50 or 100 per cent so that the gap gets wider and wider between those inside the circle and those outside, i.e. between the overpaid and the underpaid.Nobody inside the circle gives a stuff about this, but there is another problem; from time to time it is necessary to admit new professions to the overpaid and to eject others from payment paradise. After all, there would be no point in having a charmed circle if everybody was inside it – that would be communism!For example, in the 1950s those whose job was in the business of advertising were grubby little scriveners who laboured in grimy offices up seedy stairways off Oxford Street, and who were remunerated on the same level as maggot sellers.