No industry exists in which the laws of the free market operate so freely and so purely according to the conditions that Adam Smith described in his Wealth of Nations, than the trade in illegal drugs - "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production; and the sole interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer."

Yet seeking to control the market at the producer end - which is to say, banging up the dealers - has nevertheless been the consensus among policy-makers in recent years. The Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes summed up the view of many when he spoke of "catching more big-time drug dealers and middlemen", as if no one had thought of this before.

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