I’m a little but late with this one, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless…The Netherlands, famous for its canals, daffodils and gay policemen, banned magic mushrooms last week – a further dent in the country’s reputation as a bastion of liberalism, tolerance and tripped-out students.

It had been suggested by the mayor of Amsterdam that there be a three-day waiting period for people who want to buy magic mushrooms, but instead, the government has decided to go for an outright ban.

The reason? There have been a number of incidents in the past few months in which some trips went badly wrong: a 17-year-old French girl drowned after jumping off a bridge; an Icelandic tourist who thought he was being chased jumped off a balcony and broke both legs, and a Danish tourist drove a car through a campsite. (Presumably, this tourist wasn't too messed up as he fortunately managed to miss all of the campers in the site - demonstrating, if anything, some pretty good driving skills, I would have thought.)

Over the past six years, magic mushrooms have been banned in Denmark, Britain and Ireland. In Ireland, mushrooms were banned in January last year after a 30-year-old man who had taken some mushrooms died after jumping off a balcony. (In Ireland, in 1995, a woman died following an allergic reaction to shellfish in a Chinese takeaway. As of yet, however, there have been no calls to ban the sale of shellfish, even though in terms of Irish fatalities, they are as deadly as mushrooms.)

Of course, all of these deaths and jumping off balconies are tragic…But are they reason enough to ban something which the vast majority of people can use without any problems? In the months preceding the Dutch ban, for example, during which time the French girl (who had a history of psychotic problems) died, and the Icelandic and Danish tourists either hurt themselves or almost hurt others, no doubt there were plenty of other tourists – and Dutch people, for that matter – who ate some mushrooms and…wait for it…didn’t kill themselves, or hurt anyone, or drive though campsites, or think they were chased by any demons, or accidentally sacrafice any small animals.

Many, in fact, may have actually had a fine time – their only crime talking complete nonsense for a few hours or possibly trying to have sex in public with an inanimate object.

It’s also quite noticeable that the people who did come to public attention in the Netherlands for tripping out on mushrooms were mostly tourists – according to the health authorities, between January and August of this year, of the 35 people who called the emergency services, 90 percent of these were tourists. Seems rather unfair to make law-abiding, magic mushroom-consuming Dutch people pay for the mistakes of a few tourists.

Which brings me to a quote from Doug Stanhope, one of the best comedians around: “There are only two types of people who are against drugs: there are the people who’ve never done drugs, and there are people who really sucked at doing drugs.”