His Verve label moved into more commercial music with albums by Bing Crosby and others.Granz moved to live in Geneva in 1959 and sold Verve to MGM in 1960. He promoted European tours, reviving JATP for a time and also working with Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. In the United States, he formed the Pablo label in 1973 and added Zoot Sims and Sarah Vaughan to his stalwarts Fitzgerald, Peterson, Basie and Gillespie. Again he sold his label, this time to Fantasy Records in 1987.Steve Voce. With barely a moment's pause, the debate about drugs has moved on from cannabis to ecstasy. The Association of Chief Police Officers, a body not noted for its liberal-mindedness, has called for ecstasy to lose its class A drug status and for the establishment of legal heroin injecting-rooms. It argues that ecstasy is less dangerous than other class A drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, and that injecting-rooms for heroin addicts would at least ensure that users received clean needles and informed health advice. The Independent on Sunday was campaigning for the decriminalisation of cannabis long before it became acceptable for David Blunkett to contemplate such a move.

The case for a further relaxation of the laws is a powerful one, and to some extent logical. But the Association of Chief Police Officers is right to make its approval for such a move conditional on supporting evidence from the medical and scientific communities. So far the evidence is fairly thin.We also called for a royal commission to look into the cannabis question, and there are grounds now for the establishment of such a body to consider the laws relating to harder drugs. But royal commissions can be slow and cumbersome, and the all-party committee of MPs now inquiring into drugs laws is a credible alternative that is likely to lead to more effective recommendations.Open debate is vital, and those specialists with strong views should not be admonished for expressing them. Last week one of London's most senior police officers was rebuked by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for telling the committee that he was not interested in taking action against weekend "recreational users" of small amounts of cocaine and ecstasy.

He argued that it was a waste of valuable police time, and that such drug-taking had no effect on the rest of the community or the user who returned to work on Monday morning We don't accept the assumption behind that remark. For those who have no job to go to, drug-taking can take on a very different meaning.But there are many complex and sensitive issues relating to the legalising of so-called harder drugs, and those with experience on the ground – police officers and medical experts – must be allowed to contribute to the debate.. The international crisis continues to obscure the Government's lack of direction at home, which can be dated back as far as June, and the immediate aftermath of Labour's second electoral victory. Tony Blair got off on the wrong foot with the row he created over the involvement of the private sector in public services and, ever since, the Government has acted tentatively on a range of fronts, not helped by the rift between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer. On Tuesday it has an opportunity to regain the lost momentum of recent months when Mr Brown gives his pre-Budget report. In spite of everything that has gone on in the background, the Chancellor will be speaking from a position of unusual strength. Under his stewardship the British economy has acquired the strength to avoid recession in the coming months.