The Private Cannabis Club, with its palmate green leaves stencilled on the walls and the club’s name etched on to smoked windowpanes, is at the vanguard of a new movement of pro-cannabis campaigners in Spain. The members spotted a gap in Spain’s drugs laws which, they say, makes the activities of private clubs like these entirely legal.

The spacious Paracuellos de Jarama club, in a former restaurant in a town overlooking Madrid’s Barajas airport, is equipped with a bar, kitchen, billiard tables and TV screens. It is the most sophisticated of up to 40 cannabis clubs that have sprung up in garages and back rooms around Spain since campaigners worked out that laws making it illegal to consume in public did not apply to private, member-only, clubs.

Recently, David Nutt , Leslie King and Lawrence Philips published an article in The Lancet (Nutt et al, 2010) on how to rank drug harms between 20 different drugs available in the UK. They describe a procedure by which an unknown number of drug experts rank these drugs on 16 criteria on a scale of 0 to 100. According to this decision-making process, the most dangerous drug is alcohol with a score of 72 (out of 100), followed by heroin (score 55), crack cocaine (score 54) and methamphetamine (score 33). On their scale, a drug that was perceived as extremely harmful and even neurotoxic two decades ago gets a score of no more than 9 (ecstasy).

By Peter Cohen

Bob Ainsworth, who oversaw the issue at the Home Office in Tony Blair’s government, said the approach of successive administrations had failed.

The Labour MP for Coventry North East, also a former defence secretary, said the current policy left the drugs trade in the hands of criminal gangs.

The new Dutch government decision to ban foreigners from buying cannabis in Dutch cannabis coffee shops will have a negative impact on foreign tourism to the Netherlands. "And especially to Amsterdam, according to the Dutch Board of Tourism & Conventions (NBTC).

The organization is currently doing an immediate investigation into the economic impact and image of the capital.

A quarter of the tourists also visit a coffee shop, while one in ten especially come to Amsterdam to visit coffee shops. According to head of the largest Dutch tour operator TUI, the decision would clearly make an negative impact for Amsterdam.

When the report was published, he told the Guardian, "The Misuse of Drugs act is past its sell-by date and needs to be redone. We need to rethink how we deal with drugs in the light of these new findings." Yet now he seems more vague, conceding that the study is more useful in helping government to "direct its attention in terms of harm reduction" under the drug laws that currently exist, than in helping it to decide what those laws should be. On the basis of harm to the individual user alone, the study ranked alcohol fourth, after heroin, crack and crystal meth. But Nutt admits that he still can’t fully answer the question people really want to know, namely: "If you took a standard dose of alcohol, cocaine, heroin or ecstasy, which would be more harmful?" This is because there is no agreed standard unit dose, and even if there were, this wouldn’t allow for repeat use, which would vary according to each substance’s addictiveness.