Two men have appeared in court after cocaine worth £1million one of the biggest police hauls ever was seized in Barnet on Monday.

Police officers from Operation Trident, which disrupts the flow of drugs and guns in the capital, pulled over a car in Great North Road, Barnet, at 4pm.

Thirty-four packages, believed each to contain a kilo of cocaine, were found.

Two men, both described as being from north London, appeared at Hendon Magistrates Court charged with intent to supply and conspiracy to supply cocaine.

Earlier this month, Scotland Yard announced that cocaine seizures in London had risen fourfold during the past year.

But street prices have dropped in the last few years from around £70 to £40 per gram, indicating that increasing quantities of the drug are being imported.

Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, the head of the Met's specialist crime directorate, said: "All Class A drugs have a devastating impact on London's communities and I am delighted with today's seizure. We will continue to work with the communities in London to tackle this menace so that we can make London a safer city."

But Kazim Khan, a senior research fellow at Middlesex University who has been studying drug use since 1988, said that putting a stop to drug use in the UK was an impossible task.

"We've got our finger in the dyke but that's all we are doing," he said.

Mr Khan said that despite seizures such as the one in Barnet, much of the Government's anti-drugs work has the wrong focus.

He said the Government was mainly motivated by a desire to be seen to be cracking down hard on drugs, which causes disproportionate anxiety for voters.

Mr Khan called for reasoned debate in which drugs are thought of in the same way as alcohol. But he stopped short of advocating the legalisation of hard drugs.

"The situation can be handled under existing legislation.

"The budget for drug treatment is now far greater than the budget for alcohol treatment.

"Yet alcohol causes far more harm in terms of violence, aggression and mindless hooliganism.

"Bingeing on anything is wrong and causes problems.

"We need to look at what creates the bingeing milieu," he said.