THE Tories are currently running a fantastically joyless leadership contest.

And what a shame that is, because it should be enormous fun (although perhaps not terribly surprising) for all of us to learn that Rory Stewart took opium (opium!) in Iran, or that Michael Gove has tried cocaine, or that Jeremy ‘gap yah’ Hunt “thinks” he drank a cannabis lassi while backpacking through India.

Even Andrea Leadsom has admitted smoking cannabis at university. She was the sixth hopeful to admit drug use – albeit in the dim and distant past. In fact, most of those gunning for the top job have admitted taking something or other, although, naturally, they deeply regret their single, solitary toke or sniff or (in Hunt’s case) possible sip of whatever they happened to imbibe.

What should we do with them all? Perhaps we should turn to Conservative policy for guidance. In late 2018, Sajid Javid – apparently one of the few to have never taken “any soft or hard drugs” – said illegal drug use would “never be tolerated”.

The party’s 2017 manifesto is oddly silent on the issue of drugs, except to refer to it, vaguely, as a ‘vile trade’. Helpfully though, in the same year, Theresa May vowed to pursue the ‘no tolerance’ line and continue fighting the ‘war on drugs’.

A few years before that, Gove himself called for lifetime bans for teachers caught using class A drugs while serving as education secretary.

So has drug use dropped in the UK? Are there now fewer people suffering in poor areas of the world because city boys and girls have stopped taking cocaine in the toilets of London’s most expensive bars and restaurants? Are there fewer heroin addicts making their sad, lonely way through the criminal justice system?

These are rhetorical questions. We all know what the answer is. If indeed we were ever fighting a war on drugs, it’s safe to say we’ve lost it.

Sky yesterday reported that researchers from substance abuse charity Addaction say cocaine is being used “everywhere” in the UK, with an average of seven in 10 drug users regularly taking the class A.

Police are currently prioritising county lines dealing, where young people with no criminal records are used to sell drugs brought to small towns from major cities. The supply of drugs is also connected, of course, to human trafficking, violence and gang crime.

Neither of the big parties has come up with a coherent plan on what happens next in this ‘war’, or even to engage in a coherent, adult discussion about it. In fact, politicians across the spectrum have utterly failed to properly grasp the nettle when it comes to the issue – and now many of them have been made to look like hypocrites.

In 2014, the Home Office released a report concluding that enforcing tough penalties against those caught with illegal substances doesn’t actually cut drug abuse. Eleven countries were studied for the report, including Portugal, which has virtually decriminalised personal drug use and – seemingly counter-intuitively – seen a huge drop in the use of every type of illicit substance.

Unlike the Goves and the Stewarts of the world, those most badly affected by drug use are often society’s most vulnerable. They are, for example, more likely to be homeless or unemployed, which has led to campaigners for reform arguing that we should see addiction as a health problem, rather than a criminal matter.

And there’s no doubt that, whichever way you look at it, that problem isn’t going away. According to a report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, details of which were printed in the Guardian, the UK accounts for 28 per cent of drug deaths across the EU, despite having just 12 per cent of the bloc’s population.

Our politicians shouldn’t regret a smoke at a party. They should regret the fatal failure of their war on drugs.