There is strong evidence that legal regulation will reduce crime, and not just because it would obviously remove some offences from the statute book. For example, Australia's Drug Use Monitoring Program found that 25% of recent offenders who had reported drug use committed their crime to fund their habit.

Legal regulation would also weaken organised crime by damaging their networks and taking away their clientele. If we want to be tough on crime, taking away illegal supply chains would be a great place to start. We need sensible, informed policy rather than policies that are built simply to enable ill-conceived and often opportunistic rhetoric from politicians.