AUTHORITARIAN right-wingers from George Dubbya Bush to Rev Ian Paisley have repeatedly hijacked the term "evil" in order to promote their own private moral agenda.

Mrs B Stuart (Bolton Evening News, May 25) is only the latest to do so. In truth, I suspect that what she objects to about drugs is not their use, but their democratisation.

"Ecstasy" had not been invented then, but we know that the use of cannabis, heroin and cocaine were common in the higher echelons of Victorian society. And no reputable historian would characterise Victorian England as either a hotbed of anarchy or a cesspit of moral degradation. And as long as the peasant and artisan classes were reliably around to cook the food, mop the floors, drive the trains and work the mills, it seems that nobody bothered overmuch about what their elders and betters got up to discretely and in private.

Those who seek to regulate human behaviour by enforcing laws have a problem to solve. Policing, the operation of courts, the prison system, and the whole apparatus of law enforcement is an expensive process, and, unless the law commands the consent of the governed, it will fail. This is no new notion. The 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that, "unless the law conforms to the requirements of the General Will, it will lapse into desuetude". This is happening, not only with the law on drug abuse, but with, for example, the speed limit on motorways.

Those of us who may in the past have had some experience of illegal drugs doubt whether all drugs, to use your correspondent's own terminology, are equally "evil" -- or equally dangerous. Whenever any relaxation of law is contemplated, the control-freak tendency will shriek "anarchy". But it surely makes some kind of common sense when enforcement resources are finite to concentrate them on those drugs which are most obviously dangerous, and this would exclude both cannabis and Ecstasy.

Peter Johnston

Kendal Road

Bolton