“Enforcement by negotiation creates a risk that an overly co relationship will develop between people who potentially threaten public interests and those who are supposed to protect the public interest. Such relationships can give rise to at least the appearance of undue flexibility, and the suspicion that developers exercise undue influence over the land use planning process, waste disposal operators over pollution regulators, and so forth. Nevertheless, authorities can use the threat of legal action to encourage people to cooperate in developing good practice, achieving a reasonable level of compliance and public protection without expending vast resources on policing and prosecuting likely offenders, particularly as the response of magistrates may be unpredictable. I-low the balance is struck between use of formal powers and informal encouragement, assistance and negotiation will depend on the nature of the activity, the extent of an authority’s resources, the ethos of the authority and to some extent the personality of individual officers." Disagreement about the appropriate approach to policing of laws against ‘soft’ drugs effects a debate about the proper balance between negotiation and enforcement in that context; to put it another way, about the extent to which the legal rules should be regarded as laying down hard and fast standards in practice.