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UK: Drug misuse,The weight of evidence
The Guardian
Saturday 10 Jun 2006 Somewhere in Britain this morning there will be several hundred worried families. Their children will have been caught with cannabis last night and they will be charged with either possession or dealing. The current system is a perilous game of chance, under which, although the risks of being caught are marginal, for the few who are the consequences can be ruinous. About 3.6 million people, mostly young, use the drug at some point in a year, but only 45,000 in the last statistics (2004) were caught for possession and 2,200 for dealing. Serious though this situation is, the future looks even grimmer. As our home affairs editor reported this week, new tough proposals drawn up by the Home Office would make drug users caught with even small amounts of cannabis - sufficient for just 10 joints - liable to be classified as dealers. The current maximum for this offence is 14 years. Drug policy has swung from one extreme to another in the space of just six months. Last November the Home Office published a consultation paper under which thresholds were set, under which there would be an "evidential presumption" that a drug user was a dealer. Different amounts were set for different drugs. The paper concentrated on either frequently used drugs (cannabis, ecstasy) or seriously harmful (heroin, crack, cocaine). The paper was severely criticised by drug experts for a variety of inconsistencies. For example the threshold for cocaine was set at two grams costing £100, but for ecstasy a mere five tablets, costing £15. Some ecstasy users consume 10 over a weekend, making another group of users vulnerable to dealing charges. But what caused the biggest furore - particularly in the tabloids - was the threshold for cannabis: up to 500g of resin, sufficient according to tabloids to create 2,400 "spliffs". This, they noted, would be equivalent to six every day of the year. Now this threshold has moved from the absurdly high to the ludicrously low - just 5g or one fifth of an ounce. Equally serious was the confusion which the November document generated. It was interpreted by many - including the Metropolitan commissioner - that only people carrying above the threshold would be liable to prosecution. Those below were presumed to be safe, which was wrong. People found with dealers' paraphernalia, for example, would be subjected to prosecution. The latest Home Office proposals were sent to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which sensibly rejected the 5g for cannabis - raising it to 28g - and presumably also raised threshold for ecstasy. The council, which includes some of the world's leading drug specialists, has an admirable record of sane advice. In its 30-year history, no one can remember a home secretary ignoring a council proposal. Hopefully, then, the latest corrections will be accepted and the new home secretary can turn his eye to another dysfunctional directorate in his empire. Neutral observers may still be concerned by last year's reports, which suggested regular use of cannabis might have more serious mental health consequences than previously thought. These too were examined by the advisory council, which found that this was true in an exceptionally small group. But the council insisted that cannabis should remain a class C drug, to which it was downgraded three years ago. Category C does not decriminalise the drug, but places more emphasis on cautions and confiscation. Better still, it freed up more police time to concentrate on more harmful drugs. The new Conservative leader sensibly noted this week that "a succession of very tough-sounding measures haven't really delivered". Yet Labour, which downgraded the drug in its 2005 act, still seems to prefer tough rhetoric. It still has not learned that a war on drugs is a war on the nation's children. http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1794317,00.html
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