Re Colombia’s US-backed fight against drugs, yes it is hugely controversial and the rhetoric is abused by the administration. What you write doesn’t surprise me.

My aim was not to moralise against drug-taking, but to raise an important issue. If I had my way, the whole industry would be legalised so we could keep an eye on it and relieve the suffering it causes by having to be clandestine. People will always want to get high, and why shouldn’t they – let’s just try and minimise the damage to others.

Thanks for your response, Deborah. Sorry if my tone was a little harsh but articles like that in the Observer really make my blood boil. They use a faux, supposedly progressive political point as a cover to moralise about drug-taking.

I don’t think relying on Western purchasing power is good enough. I think this type of consumer campaign to get Westerners to stop using cocaine is no more likely to succeed than campaigning for the decriminalisation/legal regulation of the cocaine trade.

Much better to direct our energies into exposing how supposed counter-narcotics programmes are used to excuse repression and worse on the part of governments. For example, the Colombian government’s aerial spraying programme which they assert aims to eradicate the cultivation of coca (the plant from which cocaine is derived) in fact tends to do more harm to small Colombian farmers’ other, legitimate crops. It intensifies reliance on coca cultivation, as the coca plant recovers more quickly from aerial spraying. It causes illness and may cause genetic defects. In fact, many analysts suggest the government is in fact using spraying campaigns in pro-Farc areas to punish peasants who support Farc rebels (or who simply happen to go along with Farc because they live in a Farc-held area). It’s terror.

These are the real crimes we should be shouting about, and directing our energies against. Not some Londoner taking a line of crap (probably with very little actual coke in it) at a party.

I agree farmers should be able to make a living out of a product for which there is demand.

But you know as well as I do that the legalisation of cocaine is not on the horizon, not yet at least.

I don´t think it´s naive to think that Westerners can change things by altering their consumption habits, wether it be fair trade coffee or cocaine – the principles are the same.

The reason the proceeds of cocaine are able to fund murderous right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia, and other undesirables, is governments’ continued insistence on keeping cocaine illegal. Why shouldn’t Colombian farmers be able to make a living out of a product for which there is a demand? Apart from the impact on the health of cocaine users, what exactly is wrong with that?

This leader – and I’m afraid, by implication MexicoReporter – is incredibly naive in swallowing the idea that by ending their use of cocaine Westerners can end wars and correct injustices by remote control. The Colombian government USES the excuse of the cocaine trade to prosecute its war against Farc. By buying the governments’ line, you only obscure the issue.