Bear with me, if you will, while I skim through a random selection of people who in one way or another were found in possession of Class A drugs in recent months.

Scott McEvoy, 24, from Liverpool - 40 months in jail. Alistair Oliver, 23, from Edinburgh - 29 months, ditto. Craig James, 23, from Swansea - three years. Rio Ross, 14 months, from Bristol - killed by an overdose of his mother's drugs. James McGlashan, 26, of no fixed address - fined £300. Former Royal Marine Vincent McGuire, 32, of Gloucestershire - three years' jail. Matthew Edward Dean, 20, of Cardiff - fined £100 with £60 court costs and a £15 victim surcharge.

And, as of this week, Hans Kristian Rausing, 45, and his wife Eva, 44, from Holland Park - a conditional caution and all charges dropped without a court appearance. With not even a £15 victim surcharge, £60 when multiplied by four, on account of their four young children.

The distinction is, of course, that the people in the second paragraph are just names plucked from the massed ranks of the oikish or the ordinary. Whereas the Rausings are some of the richest people on the planet, heirs to the multi-billion- pound Tetra Pak fortune.

Not for nothing did Sir Ian Blair, the head of the Met, order an immediate review of his force's charging practices for Class A drugs offences. And not for nothing did he pass bitter comment on the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to take the Rausings to court for possession of up to £3,000 of cocaine, crack, heroin and cannabis.

The Rausings, who met in rehab, were let off after they confessed their drug problems to the prosecutors and promised to get further treatment. Sir Ian, like the rest of us, believes their wealth had protected them. “I do find that result extremely surprising and it reminds me of the 19th-century legal comment often attributed to Sir James Mathew, ‘In England justice is open to all - just like the Ritz',” he remarked.

Behind him, one could hear drug squad officers across Britain chewing their fillings in agreement, well aware that their hard and risky job just got ten times harder and riskier. Even worse, the Rausing decision has rather made them look like fools - lumpen public servants who toil to no effect against the thrilling indulgences of the privileged. Let them keep busy catching the nasty underclasses, and leave us alone, it says.

This has not, to put it delicately, been a good week to be a cop involved in the fight against drugs. The UK Drug Policy Commission's report, revealed in The Times on Tuesday, was quite blunt in its assessment: no matter what the police and Customs officers do, the game is a bogey. They're not winning the war. The UK is awash with illegal drugs, a £5.3 billion illegal industry, and the law enforcers, despite spending a billion and a half in their efforts, are only catching about 12 per cent of the market; to be effective, they need to stop 80 per cent. The market is resilient; prices continue to fall; and within hours of dealers being raided, replacements have moved into the territory.

These are terrifically gloomy realities that cloak a myriad ruined lives. The problem is so bad, and threatens to become so all-encompassing, that the big moral questions surrounding it must soon be addressed. I suspect every politician is hoping it doesn't happen on their watch.

At what point do we start to look at legalisation as an exit strategy in a war we cannot win? Is it possible to turn drugs into a health rather than a crime issue? Or should we blame Britain's excess of tolerance for turning it into one of the most drug-blighted countries in Europe? As one leading expert, Neil McKeganey, of Glasgow University, puts it, at what point do we stop regarding illegal drug use as human right, and start seeing drugs as a destructive social cancer?

These are uncomfortable questions for both the Left and the Right but it is time we started asking them. We have to accept that this is no longer an argument about drug availability; this is about the existence of a drug culture that has spread to every corner of society. The poor old police can plug away at reducing supply until they are exhausted, but they cannot begin to address something that undermines them at every turn.

Sir Ian was unfairly mocked for announcing that middle-class addicts who snort cocaine at dinner parties were not above the law. He was on a loser when he said it, but he was right. Every recreational drug user - wealthy, liberal, educated, naughty, dabbling for the fun of it - is feeding an industry that threatens all that is good and positive in society. It is a nihilistic act. But one is, of course, sneered at in fashionable circles for saying such a thing - by people who have no answers to the problem, nor have ever witnessed the horrors of what street drugs do to vulnerable people.

This column is not the place to heap coals of guilt upon the Rausings. It would be unfair, would it not, in this liberal paradise of ours, to deny the rich the delights of the poor. Just as the disadvantaged buy Class A drugs to numb the pain of being poor, it appears that the very wealthy seek to numb the pain of being rich. There is nothing new in such decadence - Frances Osborne in her wonderful book The Bolter, about Idina Sackville, described how the ex-pat addicts in Happy Valley would get their heroin flown on to their front lawns by biplanes, and then openly inject themselves with silver syringes in front of their frends.

The Rausings are symbolically important. By letting them off, we validate the illegal drugs industry. We must hope that until they are drug-free, they stop donating millions of pounds to anti-addiction charities; and that Mrs Rausing resigns as patron of two such charities. Redemption takes a lot more than money. The world may indeed run on double standards, but sometimes there is a limit to what the public can stomach.

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