Magic Mushrooms

BBC Radio 4's Law in Action was broadcast on Friday, 2 July 2004 at 1600 BST.

In the past year, the open sale of so-called "magic mushrooms" in Britain's shops and markets has become commonplace. The mushrooms contain substances banned under the Misuse of Drugs Act and can have a powerful hallucinogenic effect. So is their sale legal? Law in Action discovers that suppliers have been getting conflicting advice from the government and that an important test case could mean an end to what's become a lucrative commercial operation.

Blowing the whistle at work
The Maxwell pension scandal, BCCI, the Herald of Free Enterprise and the Clapham Rail crash were all examples of preventable disasters where employees had seen something seriously unlawful or unethical, but their complaints had been ignored by managers or they had been silenced. It was this rash of cases that led the government to re-assess the role of whistleblowers as a valuable resource in regulating bad practice in the workplace. And in 1999 the Public Interest Disclosure Act (or PIDA as it's known), became law, aiming to protect workers who legitimately blow the whistle. Five years on, what difference has the Act made?

Guantanamo - Supreme Court ruling
The 45 square miles of Cuba known as Guantanamo Bay had enjoyed a relatively anonymous existence until the United States established Camp Delta there in April 2002. Inmates have been classed by the US as "enemy combatants" and as such the Bush administration have claimed that the usual protections of the criminal law and the Geneva Conventions do not apply to them. That's the way it seemed until the United States Supreme Court gave judgments in a series of cases this week. One of the most significant aspects of the Court's decision was that the detainees would now be able to apply for what is known as habeas corpus. But what exactly does that mean and what are the options now open to President Bush's team of lawyers?