Politicians are frequently derided as being unprincipled and contradictory – and that’s just when our editor-in-chief is being polite. It’s not at all unusual to hear politicians saying one thing now and something entirely different within months – with no obvious explanation to why they’ve changed their minds. If anyone has even noticed, that is.

But Ears To The House thinks it’s slightly unfair to blame the politicians singularly for their many faults. The public seem to have some equally bizarre discrepancies in their views – and this has been shown yet again by the results of a YouGov survey on the subject of drugs.

Now, whilst we’re broadly of the opinion that drugs are a personal matter, there’s no denying that things can occasionally go badly wrong. As YouGov themselves point out, “drug deaths in England and Wales are at a record high, while figures in Scotland are the worst in Europe”. This is undoubtedly a problem with the most tragic consequence.

So what does the British public think? The results are, depressingly, an absolutely contradictory mish-mash. The vast majority of the public are against making the likes of cannabis and crack cocaine legal…

Yet this same British public also believes the government doesn’t do enough to help people with drug addiction…

Are we the only ones who see the contradiction here? There’s an acceptance that current drug laws, such as treating addicts as criminals, don’t work – yet there’s almost a total refusal to contemplate doing anything else. Yes, we accept this is a complicated subject and no one has all the answers – but those surveyed here appear to have none of them.

For example, we can totally understand the opposition to legalising crack cocaine – but a majority won’t even contemplate legalising cannabis. And some of the respondents even said that all drugs should be banned – apparently not realising what goes into medication.

So this means Britain has a public which has no idea what it wants to do regarding drug laws, and a mostly right-wing press who oppose any relaxation of drug laws and who frequently espouse misinformation on the topic. Is it any wonder that no politician dare go anywhere near the subject?

And who loses out here? Those people who pay for the current situation with their lives…