A difficult decision this weekend -- whether to roll up with the dope smokers for the Independent on Sunday decriminalise cannabis demo (taking place on Saturday, presumably, so that they can write about it in the paper on Sunday); or to turn up to The Land Is Ours mass trespass on a plot of forbidden countryside somewhere in southern England. Dope fumes or no fumes? A hard choice -- and there won't be anyone from New Labour at either event to help me make it.

In their different ways, both protests are about civil liberties -- and the attitude of the government to each of them tells us much about its approach to personal freedom in general. When it comes to cannabis, Jolly Jack Straw has revealed himself as the sort of party-pooper who'd shop his own son to the police rather than countenance the possibility that the personal consumption of a relatively harmless herb should be no business of the modern state. And as far as rights of access to the countryside are concerned, Tony Blair has demonstrated that in any conflict of interests between the freedom of landowners to do what they want with their land and the freedom of the rest of us to share in its quiet enjoyment, it is the rights of property that get precedence every time.

New Labour's approach to both of these issues has taken a lot of us by surprise. We'd thought that the freedom to roam in uncultivated countryside was about as uncontroversial in socialist circles as the right to sit on the beach or swim in the sea. And until Jack Straw made it clear that he wasn't even prepared to talk about cannabis decriminalisation, we'd thought that the reason for the absence of rational debate on the subject was simply that the Labour Party was scared of being caricatured as "soft" on drugs by its political opponents. We never dreamt that our leaders actually believed all that guff about the evil weed; dammit, some of them have even smoked the odd spliff themselves.

Suddenly, though, it's a Tory backbencher who's broken the Westminster silence and admitted to smoking dope. ("It's done me no harm," said David Prior, MP for Norfolk North. "You can wear a suit and still roll a joint.") And it's Labour MPs who are coming out with the old sanctimonious claptrap about the perils of cannabis use as they knock back another glass of their own drug of choice.

Jack Straw rejected one obvious mechanism for injecting some hard evidence and rational discourse into the drugs debate with his assertion last week that: "Governments set up royal commissions when they are uncertain what to do about something. We are not uncertain about this." For a government that has set up no fewer than 127 different reviews of public policy since coming to power, this is a surprising degree of certainty to hold in a policy area that most MPs agree would benefit more than most from a little dispassionate analysis.

In the absence of debate, the government will get defiance. Whichever way you look at the figures (and the British Crime Survey suggests that 70 per cent of males have tried some illegal drug by the time they are 24), it is clear that the criminal laws against the use of soft drugs use are being widely ignored.

Contrary to the popular misconception put about in some quarters, this is not due to a lack of enforcement. The price of prohibition includes the cautioning, prosecution -- yes, and imprisonment in many cases -- of around 65,000 people a year in England and Wales for cannabis possession alone. Getting on for 10,000 people have been jailed over the past decade (930 in the last year for which figures are available) for this victimless crime. And despite the increased use of police cautions in many areas (up tenfold from 4,048 in 1986), the number of prosecutions -- now running at around 24,000 a year -- is higher than ever. Whatever damage might be done to people's health by the use of cannabis pales into insignificance in comparison to the damage done to people's lives by this unwarranted intervention of the criminal justice system.

It used to be one of the proud boasts of the Labour movement that, for all the Tories' rhetoric about personal freedom and liberty, it was governments of the left that did more to extend it for the benefit of ordinary people than any of the right. Well, someone should tell Jack Straw that liberty involves allowing people to do things that you choose not to do yourself. Smoking dope is one of them.

And someone should tell Tony Blair that when two sets of liberties collide, the best way to resolve the conflict is by way of the old utilitarian formula about what brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Make us happy, Tony: let those of us who want to walk on the grass do so, and let those who prefer to smoke it do that as well.