"Detectives have smashed a drugs ring responsible for the importation of almost all of Britain's heroin, it was claimed last night," the Guardian reported. "Scotland Yard said it strongly believed supply of heroin into the UK had been broken after officers moved in on a Turkish cartel operating in north London. The gang is believed to have been delivering up to 100kg of heroin, with a street value of £20 million, across the country each week -- more than £1 billion a year."

Detective Chief Inspector Jon Shatford, who headed the operation, was quoted as saying: "We believe that all the heroin coming into the country goes to this gang in north London, which acts as a clearing house. It is difficult to imagine a more significant seizure . . . We are still hunting more people from this gang," he concluded. "They are now like rats trying to jump off a sinking ship, trying to escape us."

The police figures supplied in the article gave their own clues to the highly dubious nature of the claim. The seizure -- so important that it was difficult to imagine a more significant one -- involved "10kg of heroin worth £2 million", we were told. Or, putting it another way, about one five hundredth of the reported annual supply -- less than a day's worth of what the gang was alleged to have been handling.

For some reason, the Guardian chose not to question the police claims in its report. A couple of months later, with the publication of the drugs white paper, these had changed anyway. Now, far from having "cut off" the supply of heroin, police and customs were said to be "overwhelmed" by a flood of the stuff. There were 250,000 heroin addicts in the country, we heard drugs czar Keith Hellawell say. Heroin was now the drug of "first choice" for a new generation of drug users. The country was so awash with it that the price had fallen as low as £2 a "wrap" as dealers -- masterminded by organised "mafias" from eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere, as well as from Turkey -- sought to lure more and more people into their clutches.

The truth lies somewhere between the two; but when you cannot trust even the Guardian to cast a critical eye over claims about the drug problem, you begin to understand the extent to which the media itself is a part of that problem.

I have just had one of my periodic run-ins with a section of the press over my "confession" in the last issue of Punch magazine to having once shared a spliff with someone who is now a government minister. I was trying to making a point about the reign of fear over the drugs issue that turns so many politicians into dishonest mutes on the subject. One fifth of new MPs, surveyed for LWT's Jonathan Dimbleby programme in March, admitted to having taken illegal drugs themselves; two-thirds said they knew friends and associates who had. Yet only one Member of Parliament -- David Prior, a Tory backbencher, who said he "took soft drugs for a few years in my early 20s" -- has ever admitted to doing so publicly.

I wrote in Punch of knowing at least two MPs -- one of them a current minister -- who had certainly smoked cannabis because they did so in my company. I made the point that in years to come this would probably be treated as no more remarkable than the revelation that government ministers sometimes like to share a bottle of wine with friends over a meal at the end of the day. Predictably enough, the tabloid hacks who beat a track to my answering machine after the Punch piece appeared were interested solely in the name of the minister concerned rather than any of my arguments about getting an honest discussion on drugs policy going in parliament.

The Independent on Sunday campaign for the decriminalisation of cannabis notwithstanding, the press remain the single biggest barrier to an open and sensible debate on drugs. Anyone rash enough to put their head above the parapet on the subject gets it instantly blown off with accusations about being "soft" on drugs. Yet years of being "hard" on drugs has done nothing bar see the number of people using them increase.

The debate about decriminalisation should not stop with cannabis -- an argument that I feel has been largely won, although legislation will probably lag many years behind. That there is a major problem (for example) with heroin is beyond doubt, whatever one's attitude towards specific police claims. It is worth recalling, in this context, that an earlier heroin "epidemic", in the Sixties, was contained largely by a policy of "maintenance prescription" of the drug to the addicts on the NHS. Where demand was met through the medical system, there was little scope for an illicit market to develop.

The abandonment of that approach enabled the criminal drug cartels to flourish -- just as the "tough" approach towards cannabis allowed the gangs to move in where once the suppliers had been hippies and travellers. The "war on drugs" has been largely lost; will someone in parliament start talking about how we might make our peace with them instead?