Drugs. Aren’t they great, eh? On any given day, you can probably find me in the corner of my room, rocking back and forth in the dark, having a grand old time with my cocaine reserves.

There’s nothing illegal about saying this, or printing it in a newspaper (at least, if you’re reading this), but there is a slight legality consideration when it comes to actually taking them. Drugs are sort of not allowed.

Well, not for long, if government think tank Transform has anything to do with it. This week, they put forward their ‘blueprint’ for drug law reform. Basically, they want drugs to be entirely legal.

Why stop there? Let’s take a few leaves from America’s shining example, and legalise guns too. That way, we’ll always be safe. Would you rob a bank if the lady had an automatic shotgun beside her panic button? They should trial AK-47-toting checkout girls at Sainsbury’s.

Britain could become more independent, too. No longer would we have to see our hard-earned pounds being siphoned off into Nigeria or Afghanistan, but we could grow opiates in our back gardens. Sheffield Smack and Weed of Watford would be proud new additions to our rich heritage of industry. If Transform are to be believed, there are endless benefits.

This is, of course, a ridiculous idea. Legalising drugs is possibly the most brazenly idiotic idea since burning irreplaceable, toxic fossil fuels to power transportation, or electing Tony Blair.

Their reasoning? It would “reduce crime”. Brilliant. That’s some fantastic, outside-the-box, 21st Century thinking. In fact, while we’re at it, let’s legalise prostitution. We could buy a hooker with our milk and bread on our next shop – just don’t go for the Tesco value range.

Of course it would reduce crime. If smoking marijuana, or injecting heroin, was legal, the crime rates would clearly fall dramatically. Drug-use crime would drop by a staggering 100 per cent.

It would lead to other crime numbers dropping too. Drug dealers could have designated crack-points in local supermarkets, safely monitored by police to protect innocent users from harm or extortion. And prices would go down. Selling Es on ebay would make the market more competitive, leaving users with more cash for guns and prostitutes. It would help the economy.

Legalising murder would reduce crime, but that doesn’t mean it’s a brilliant idea. Drugs are illegal for a reason. They are dangerous, addictive and destructive. There’s a world of difference, certainly, between the occasional spliff and a heroin junkie, but drugs are drugs and they destroy people’s lives.

Outlawing drugs was one of the better ideas from the modern era. I’m sure that if heroin, crack and the likes had been widely available (or indeed, in the case of many chemical-compound drugs, invented) hundreds of years ago, they’d probably be legal now.

After all, that body-endangering, mind-warping toxin we know as alcohol has been widely available since civilisation began.

Similarly, the absurdly damaging death-sticks that are cigarettes would never pass the kind of health and safety checks that new products need to pass to make it to our shelves if they were invented today, yet they are easily obtainable. The fact that the governments of the western world actually put a stop to the dangerous drugs vice before it became acceptable is one of the few high points of modern thinking.

Legalising drugs might help save a few people from falling into dangerous drug gangs, and it might make our prisons a little less congested, but it won’t tackle the cause of the problem. If anything, making drugs more acceptable and more freely available will simply lead more people into harming themselves. People can openly buy cigarettes, but this doesn’t ease the problems of addiction or disease they cause.

Similarly, it might save a few quid to stop raiding drug factories or blocking pill traffickers, but this has always been throwing money down a black hole. The key is to spend on persuading people to stop, setting up help schemes and rehabilitation clinics. It may sound clichéd, but this is the only way the war on drugs can be fought; spreading awareness of the dangers and creating help for those who can’t escape them. Transform’s wishes for Amsterdam-style, coffee shop drug-swaps simply won’t achieve this.

So let’s put a stop to the crazy ideas and keep on pushing a sensible ‘No to drugs’ culture. After all, we still have smoking and drinking.