The hypocrisy of UK politics is nothing new to those of us who have been involved in the cannabis debate for any period of time. Indeed some would say the situtation which the people involved with the Worthing Cannabis Cafe face is nothing new. Nothing at all new.

The government have decided, in a last stand before the Conservative party oust them from power, to wage a war against working class people who choose to consume cannabis for recreational pleasure, over the government's own tipple of choice alcohol.

decided they will represent a public minority who have decided the Worthing Cannabis Cafe should not exist, and regardless of the fact the Worthing Cafe's have shown a marked drop in crime in the locality.

Law enforcement intervention from the very highest office in the land.

Chris Baldwin has always been involved in the attempts to legalise cannabis cafe's, and has built a regime which doesn't allow any hard drugs into previous cafe's he was involved with, doesn't allow the sale of cannabis to minors, offers a 10% discount to people in uniform, but perhaps most importantly, doesn't (or didn't) choose to serve alcohol and perhaps with this last fact we are getting a little closer to the real issue.

The British Medical Association has recently slammed the government for its so called "cosy relationship with the drink industry", so it would be fair to assume anything which is likely to threaten alcohol's hold over the Great British public would feel the full thrust of British law and in this instance, that certainly seems to be the case. 

The streets of London are a no go zone every single night of the week, with gangs of drunken yobs roaming around spoiling for a fight.

Indeed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith even commented she wouldn't walk around alone in the evening.

But down in a sleepy backwater on the South Coast, the Home Office has decided, at the behest of a publicity hungry local MP called Tim Loughton, to get involved in a situation which sees a small cannabis cafe getting a bit too big for its boots.

According to Tim Loughton the cannabis cafe in Worthing attracts all kinds of low lives to the area. A clear indication of the establishments fear of a community and a culture which it simply doesn't, or perhaps chooses not to understand.

The drug war has moved on from what it used to be.

Once upon a time the fight against drugs was seen as a battle to protect our young people from harming themselves with a substance many knew little about.

But today, in 2008, with the American College of Physicians and its 124,000 practising doctors overtly supporting the use of medical marijuana, with pre-eminent psychiatrists from the illustrious Harvard Medical School debunking and disproving the claims of brain damage, with high ranking UK police officers decrying the current drug rating system as "unworkable", and with European partner states such as Holland, Belgium and Portugal, using their own system as a blue-print which shows the UK Liberal Democrats are onto a winner by offering to decriminalise self sustained, personal cannabis cultivation and social supply, the government has decided to drop its premise of acting in the best interests of the Great British public, and instead, as was commented on recently by the British Medical Association, has decided to serve and to protect the alcohol industry, by stamping down on cannabis, its use, and its users.

Make no mistake, this Labour government, the most "Conservative" Labour government in recent times, have changed the angle of attack, from trying to deal with high level drug trafficking, to targeting drug users down at the most basic level.

Working class people who live on our council estates, and in doing so, they have created the most overt and obvious "class system" in recent times.

Its no longer a drug war. Its a class war.