It seemed so daring when 'The Independent on Sunday' began its campaign to decriminalise cannabis. Simon O'Hagan reflects on how public and political opposition went up in smoke

We have come a long way since police raided Ringo Starr's London flat in the late 1960s and emerged triumphant with one and a half ounces of cannabis. As the Beatles generation has grown up to be the leaders of today, the use of cannabis has become so normalised, its effects long now revealed to be so much less damaging than the establishment's scaremongers would have had us believe, that decriminalisation has become almost inevitable.

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