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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Opinion: We've got to face it, Britain's gone to pot
Times, The
Monday 02 Jul 2001 Author: WILLIAM REES-MOGG It is odd what one may be remembered for. In the 1960s and 1970s I wrote many hundreds of leading articles as Editor of The Times. They covered such subjects as the Biafra war, joining the Common Market, the astronauts' journey to the Moon, the miners' strike and a number of general elections. One of them is more often quoted than all the others put together. That is the leader "Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?" which helped to get Mick Jagger out of prison on a minor drugs charge. The quotation from Alexander Pope must have helped. "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." Pope is the journalist's best friend among the poets, unrivalled at expressing common opinions with uncommon energy. On June 30, 1967, Mick Jagger, in the early flush of the success of the Rolling Stones, was sentenced at West Sussex Quarter Sessions at Chichester to a fine of pounds100 and three months' imprisonment for being in possession of four amphetamine tablets. Keith Richards was fined pounds500 and given one year's imprisonment for smoking cannabis. A third man, with whom they had been staying, received a longer sentence for possessing heroin. Jagger had bought the pills, quite legally, in Italy, but they were prescription drugs in England. The next day, July 1, the Times leader was published, arguing that this was "about as mild a drugs case as could ever have been brought before the courts" and that the normal penalty for a first offender would have been probation. Jagger, we considered, should not be singled out for harsher treatment because he was a celebrity. He was let out on bail, and the Court of Appeal quashed the sentence. World in Action then invited me to interview Mick Jagger in the company of a leading Jesuit, the delightful Father Thomas Corbishley, an Anglican bishop and a former Home Secretary. Jagger turned out to be a libertarian, in contrast to the Beatles, who then belonged to the soft Left. He used arguments which might have come straight out of John Stuart Mill. If he prefigured anything in British politics, it was the libertarian aspect of Thatcherism, which emerged ten years later. In an interview with The Times, he expressed his view on cannabis: "I think pot's more respectable than ten years ago; much more chi-chi. I don't see what's wrong with going on trips. I don't see what's wrong with not going on trips either. It's up to me to pick the things I want to do and I will. What I do with my consciousness is my business." I suffered then, indeed I suffer now, from having belonged to one of the last student generations before pot reached our universities. My contemporaries confined their use of drugs to alcohol and tobacco. I remember in 1970 having lunch with Reggie Maudling, who was then the Conservative Home Secretary. I said to him that it was absurd that he should be administering the law on cannabis and that I should be writing Times leaders about it when neither of us had ever tried the stuff. He later sent a message to me, saying that he asked the department, and they had replied that if we made any such experiment, they would have no alternative but to arrest us and charge us with a criminal offence. "Home Secretary and Editor of Times on Drugs Charge." That would have made a good court case. I have remained wholly innocent of any personal knowledge of pot. Indeed, for a long time I thought the French must be widely addicted to cannabis, because I was unable to distinguish between the smell of pot and that of Gaulloise cigarettes. In 1967, I saw the strength of Mick Jagger's libertarian argument, but I felt that it was a mistake for people to play around with personal consciousness. I still do believe that. Alcohol is also a strong consciousness-altering drug, but human beings have had several thousand years of experience of it. Cannabis was then a new drug to the West, and in the East it had a disturbing reputation for causing long-term mental deterioration. My father's generation had spoken of hashish-addicted beggars in the streets of Cairo, "mere wrecks of humanity". I have not changed my view that cannabis is a bad drug, as is tobacco, or alcohol in excess. It plainly has a demotivating effect, which can spoil lives. It seems to be at least as dangerous as tobacco in terms of cancer and circulatory diseases. It has been associated with inducing dementia. It stays in the body for a long time. It can affect the judgment of drivers. If cannabis did not exist in our culture, no sane person would want to introduce it. Nevertheless, cannabis use has now become endemic. Cannabis has also now become very cheap. According to a report in The Independent on Sunday, the price of a joint has fallen to just over pounds1, less than that of a pint of beer. Both Customs and the police have in recent years adopted a "softly, softly" approach, which has resulted in a steep fall in seizures. From today cannabis will be partially decriminalised in Lambeth. People found in possession of the drug will be given only a formal warning. Apparently almost half of British teenagers will have smoked pot by the time they leave school. That is not a good state of affairs, but it exists under the present legal prohibition. There are many disadvantages to the present policy, which might be acceptable if it were effective, but are not acceptable now that it has completely broken down. The criminal prohibition of cannabis turns otherwise law-abiding people into criminals; it is unenforceable in Afro-Caribbean communities, and leads to avoidable racial conflict with the police; it puts money in the pockets of local and international criminal entrepreneurs; it prevents cannabis being regulated or taxed; it makes it harder, rather than easier, to protect children; it has prevented the effective dissemination of knowledge about the real risks to human health. Even though cannabis is a potentially dangerous drug, prohibition has not proved to be the answer. Keith Hellawell is described as "Britain's first drug czar", a title which might have been designed to ridicule him. He used to believe that cannabis necessarily leads on to hard drugs. Clearly that is not true. Sometimes teenagers smoke pot and end up as heroin addicts; for that matter, they sometimes smoke cigarettes and end up as heroin addicts. But they also often smoke pot and then stop. Some people have smoked pot as teenagers but can be found 20 years later drinking real ale in the back room at the Marquis of Granby. Now Keith Hellawell has discarded the gloomy doctrine that pot is the first step on the path that leads to the eternal bonfire. All one can say is that sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not. Now he says: "I do not believe it is a gateway drug." Yet the "gateway" theory was the one strong justification left for the policy of criminal prohibition. If cannabis is not a gateway drug, it is no different in principle from alcohol or tobacco, both of which are potentially dangerous recreational drugs which some adults will take the risk of consuming. It is now 34 years since the Jagger trial. Even then, the contemporaries of the Rolling Stones, who are now in their fifties - older than the Prime Minister - did not accept the strictures of the police and the courts. It shows the remarkable rigidity of our society; that authoritarian policies can be maintained so long after they have first been challenged and so long after they have completely broken down. In terms of law, cannabis should be treated more or less like tobacco, another long-term killer drug. The trade should be regulated and taxed; it should be conducted by ordinary private companies, in competition with each other; advertising should be prohibited; there should be health warnings on the packets. As with alcohol, there should be measures to stop people driving under the influence. It should remain a very serious criminal offence to sell cannabis to children below a certain age. This is now the only way to impose some degree of social control of a drug that is available everywhere in Britain. If independent adults choose to mess up their minds with pot, that is their business. It is not for the Government to prohibit to adults lifestyles which do not directly damage other people.
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