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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Off on the mother of all crime waves
Simon Heffer The Telegraph
Saturday 03 Dec 2005 Despite my being an obvious old fuddy-duddy, it hasn't escaped my attention that one thing is terribly fashionable at the moment: drugs. Not just taking them, which everyone apart from you and me appears to be doing, but also turning a blind eye to the practice. After all, only a couple of days ago our increasingly bizarre Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, said that anyone caught carrying up to 500 cannabis joints would not be arrested for trafficking. Nor would you be in trouble for carrying limited amounts of other drugs, though being found with seven grams of heroin in parts of the Far East might soon cause you to find yourself at the end of a rope. I suppose there are people for whom smoking 500 joints is a usual activity for a weekend, but I can't begin to think what they are like. As my colleague Tom Utley pointed out in yesterday's Telegraph, all this permissiveness about illegal substances sits ill with the Government's routine pre-Christmas mania about drinking and driving. At a time when the youth of Britain is being positively encouraged to smoke 500 joints a day, motorists are warned not to have so much as one drink before getting into their cars. Next year, no doubt, they will be warned to think long and hard before even driving past a pub, lest the intoxicating fumes seep out into their car. There are, sadly, some rather sinister aspects to cannabis use that Mr Clarke seems to want to ignore quite wilfully. On the drink-driving front, for example, he might have noticed the study from France published this week showing that almost 40 per cent of young drivers killed on French roads had cannabis in their system. Also, much of the organised crime and gangsterism that the Government is supposed to be fighting and protecting us from has deep roots into the drugs trade. After all, you do not need to be especially shrewd to realise that anyone with 500 joints about his person is unlikely to have grown them on his mantelpiece or in his greenhouse, but rather to have kept a serious criminal in business - if we take the view, which I don't, that he is not a serious criminal himself. It does, however, get even worse than that. Recreational drug use, notably of cannabis, was one of the pastimes routinely engaged in by Paul Taylor and Michael Barton, the pair of scum who murdered Merseyside teenager Anthony Walker, in between their bouts of hitting black people with icepicks. No doubt those who would legalise cannabis would claim that Taylor's and Barton's inherent wickedness (which, I would agree, is clearly pretty profound) was enough for them to murder Anthony, but I doubt very much whether their drug-taking activities helped balance their minds. Indeed, most policemen one talks to on the subject, and most addiction specialists for that matter, testify to the capacity of even so-called "soft" drugs to unhinge those who use them, and to provoke violence in addicts. So Mr Clarke, in suggesting the police turn a blind eye to someone with 500 joints about his person, is effectively waving Britain off on the mother of all crime waves. I wrote here last week that legalising crime was an obvious way to limit the trouble it caused in society - not to its victims, of course, who must continue to suffer, but to the legal profession, the judiciary, the police, probation and prison services. Mr Clarke's approach to drugs seems to endorse this policy. It will, after all, free the police up to do various other important things, like catching people driving at 45mph in a 40mph limit, or telling Irish jokes in public. And since the Conservative Party appears to be about to elect a leader who wants to downgrade the killer drug ecstasy, and who refuses to deny having taken class A drugs himself, I fear society's victims of drug users, like Anthony Walker and his family, have a long, rough road ahead.
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