SOMETHING calling itself the Royal Society of Arts has decided that illegal drugs can be "harmless" and shouldn't be "demonised". There should be no classification but, rather, an "Index of harm".

This report, which is being touted as "really important", is, in fact, another platinum example of the monumental and on-going selfishness of the drug-loving community.

So drugs don't do any harm, do they? Tell that to Francisco Santos, the vice-president of Columbia who, after seeing photos in which it appeared she was taking cocaine, has invited the model Kate Moss and her drug-addled beau, Pete Doherty, to visit his country to discover the real cost of this "harmless" drug.

El Vice-Presidente says the pair would be ashamed if they could see the devastation that illegal cocaine production has wrought.

He says Columbia is losing its rainforests to the cocaine barons who slash and burn to get the land they need for their crop. He says terrorist groups in Columbia use the profits from British cocaine to buy arms and lay landmines that maim and kill children.

Cocaine, he says, is "painted in blood".

We all know why he has picked on Kate Moss as poster girl for this crusade but his words could and do apply equally to every rock star, media type and pathetic businessman who's ever decided to powder their hooter with Columbia's finest.

Tragically, it is STILL considered cool to take drugs, often by the very same kind of people that spend a lot of their time campaigning against valid issues like world poverty, or who are prominent in politics.

They are sincere but they can't hide their own culpability. Campaigning to feed starving African kids is not noble if your private drug habits ensure that little Colombian ones are getting shot and maimed and having their futures stolen.

The reason so very little is said and done about cocaine in particular is because it's the drug of choice of some of the people whose job it is to decide what we watch on TV and read about in the national media.

Frequently the same types, out of interest, who have now realised that their beloved cannabis is quietly frying the brains of their kids and the kids of people they know and are busy publishing a tsunami of why-oh-why articles about these "new" dangers.

I know I'm always banging on about the evils of drugs but I don't care. They ARE evil, they make people do evil things when they've taken them and thanks to the vice-president of Columbia we can now be in no doubt that their evil influence is blighting his country.

We're always being told to reduce our carbon footprint, ditch our 4x4s, stop going on holiday and miserable-ise our lives in order to save the planet. And I wouldn't mind, I really wouldn't.

Except that I'm convinced that half of the people urging us to do this are people who, when cocaine and all the rest of it was offered on a plate, snorted it up their nose without a thought for anyone else or the effect it had on them.

  • PLENTY of hip and scornful young gay chaps have stepped up to the plate on various internet message boards to speak ill of dead actor John Inman - better known as Wilberforce Clayborne Humphries of Are You Being Served? fame.

Yes, Mr Humphries was a stereotype, mincing gay of the sort that went out with the Ark.

However, at the time Inman was playing him, a bigoted proportion of the British population sincerely believed that homosexuals, as gays were known, would pounce on anything in long trousers.

Innocent Mr Humphries helped 22 million people each week to see that gays weren't people to be frightened of but, were more likely to be the nice man up the road.