My friend had not even heard of ‘miaow' or mephedrone when the head of her children's leading London day school decided to take the law into his own hands, she told me when the tragic mephedrone deaths hit the press last week. He was not prepared to wait on the government. At a PTA meeting before Christmas he had informed her and every other parent in no uncertain terms of this new and dangerous drug, one that went under several names and guises. It was legal, cheap and freely available, he warned them; they must warn their children and impress on them how dangerous it was. For his part he had already explained to the school, that its legality notwithstanding, any of them found with it on them would be expelled forthwith

Like Stephen Welch this headteacher was well aware that the drugs legality has driven an explosion of use that has turned mephedrone into the UK's fourth most popular club drug, London the world's mephadrone capital and host to 53% of world wide outlets. There is little doubt that its legality is the cause of the recent ghastly deaths.

But in the Alice in Wonderland world of our former chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs this is not the problem - the reverse in fact. On March 1st he expressed shock that police had arrested kids at a club with this drug although it was not illegal. In the same article he told us it was safe and pure, that mephedrone deaths were scare stories, that the drug had the benefit for young people of "avoiding the limitations in their careers that a prosecution for drug possession would bring." His advice was ‘to avoid rushing to make changes to the classification system'. What Mr Welch would think of this advice, as he watches his son's deterioration under the drug, from the man who sells himself as the country's lead drugs expert is not hard to imagine.

Unsurprisingly Professor Nutt holds the convenient view that, "it is virtually impossible to police the problem .... .. the crime and justice side of things would get out of control. The police would spend their whole lives just arresting teenagers with mephedrone in their pockets".

Yes indeed and so they may have to - now - because with him at the helm of the ACMD this problem was not nipped in the bud.

For Professor Nutt is both disingenuous and wrong. His liberal brand of persuasive defeatism is the real problem. Neither this drug nor any other new drug is impossible to ban or impossible to police. While he insists we wait on Europe, the simple fact is that practically every other responsible country in Europe has banned it (Ireland excepted) and is policing it; Australia has found a way of making it illegal and New Zealand has classified it formally as such.

The Swedes banned it well over a year ago - just one day, in fact, after an 18 year old girl died horribly of convulsions and hyponatremia in Karolinska University hospital. This was no knee jerk reaction. The Swedish National Institute of Public Health had already added it to their list of illicit drugs, some two months previously, following a warning put out by an EU report . It just happened to be the day after her tragic death that it came into force. Nor did the Swedes find such a time gap before legal enforceability acceptable. So, in addition to the dedicated force they already had in place of savvy internet detectives to track every new drug as it appears, the Swedish Parliament is drafting changes to the law to give police immediate powers to detain legal drugs for as long as it takes to investigate each.

Here though, Professor Nutt's influence on drug matters, together with his personal interest in the development of cognitive enhancers, recreational intoxicants and drugs decriminalisation, has led to the UK's dithering over this matter. It has left head teachers and parents alike without the support of the law. It has left kids without the disincentive of illegality to stop their cheap and lethal experimentation - though their peers might recoil at their smell and their slackening facial muscles as the drug takes effect.

Here too, Professor Nutt's view of recreational drug culture inevitability, that permeates all the government'sdrug advisory bodies, leaves taxpayers money being spent on funding government advice on how to use mephedrone safely - as if - through a government supported charity optimistically called Lifeline.

Professor Nutt blames the Home Office for not heeding a Foresight report predicting this new generation of psycho active drugs. However there was nothing in this ‘harm reduction' nuanced report that advocated the urgent need to update the drug law in face of their onslaught. Nowhere, in my reading of it, does it warn that the very process of risk assessment of new drugs, that the ACMD is bound to do by law before classifying and controlling them, would impede an effective response to these fast appearing new drugs.

The Professor's recommendation for a holding class for ‘uncertain drugs of this type', made last year by the ACMD, he claims, was not to help the police, rather to help such drusg on their way to licensing - a subtle back door approach to legalisation that the Home Office thankfully did not fall for.

This week, following the media furore over the mephedrone deaths, the Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs finally met to start the risk assessment process for mephedrone. Asked why it had taken so long to respond, Martin Barnes, a member of the Council and head of another tax payer funded advice and information charity, Drugscope, speciously suggested that Professor Nutt's sacking was to blame and had delayed it.

But the real truth is that the ACMD has let the grass grow under its feet. It has been content to let the Byzantine process of adding a new substance to its classification take up to two years or more (as was the case with GBL). It has been happy to watch while the good professor used the ACMD as a platform to promote his alternative index of drugs harms - to include that drug we are all familiar with, alcohol - and to try on his licensing of new recreational drugs ploy, when it should have been warning that the existing system of classifying such drugs by harm before banning them is too cumbersome and slow; that the system is no longer fit for purpose in today's fast moving world.

For even if the AMCD creaks into motion this week, it will be months while scientists consider on what scale of harm mephadrone and the 400 plus associated compounds fit, or what generic they can come up with; it will be months before they recommend that all, or any of them, be added to the list of controlled substances. Then it will take further time to put it before Parliament, to get it on the statute book, to become enforceable.

No wonder the public is bemused and headteachers frustrated.

If the government is to retain any credibility it must react now. Alan Johnson must come out fighting again. He must bypass the archaic and abjuring ACMD and ignore their liberal sensitivities about using the criminal justice system for effective drugs law enforcement. He must give direct powers to the police, as is happening in Sweden, to detain any substance and to treat it as illegal for as long as it takes to investigate it. For what is the option? An effective criminal justice system or children dying?

It's a no brainer.