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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Drugged-up MPs follow the herd
Julian Glover Guardian Unlimited
Friday 06 Jul 2001 Tune in, drop out - and become an MP. What is happening to Britain's squarest profession? Politicians have spent years mouthing meaningless words about a non-existent "war on drugs". Suddenly, they are leaping over each other to make the stuff available on street corners. Peter Lilley is the latest and boldest convert, calling this morning in the Daily Telegraph for cannabis off-licences on the corner of every British street. Labour's Mo Mowlam - until the election the cabinet minister in charge of drugs policy - now admits that she would decriminalise. The Metropolitan police have eased of policing cannabis use in south London, presumably with Home Office backing. The drugs tsar has been sacked. And last night the five Tory leadership contenders spent much of their time on the BBC's Question Time programme debating the topic. No one mentioned anything so unhip as taxation or transport. All at once Conservatism is less about blue rinse and pearls, more wacky baccy and Rizlas. One might hope that this about turn is taking place because MPs have considered the issue, and changed their minds. This might be partly true in the case of Peter Lilley: he has spent the past two years studying drugs policy. But most of his colleagues have simply reconsidered what it is safe to say. In this, they are following a shameful British political tradition on tricky social issues: when in doubt, wait, then follow - never lead. It was the case with the abolition of slavery, votes for women, legalised homosexuality and abortion. Only when the cry for change became overwhelming did MPs speak out - and then all at once, without thinking, when there was no danger. In 1950 barely one MP could be found who might advocate allowing men to sleep with each other. Twenty years later, virtually no MP (except perhaps Norman Tebbit) would admit to wanting to reverse the law to ban what they had once claimed to oppose. But the case for reform was won outside parliament, in the courts and Royal Commissions and bedrooms of Britain. Parliament's role was to ratify what voters had already decided. If this is true, then the battle over drugs has already been lost and what MPs now say is only confirmation. According to polls - and the habits - of people across Britain, drugs are acceptable. The law no longer anything like reflects the behaviour of a vast number of people, not all of them young and some of them MPs. Politicians are now beginning to swim with this changed extra-parliamentary consensus. Soon, support for drugs reform will become ubiquitous, almost a given for any MP with claims to modernity. The debate will flip from near total opposition to total support. Then Westminster will vote to decriminalise or legalise cannabis - and the debate, already settled, will only be token. The pity is that in this lemming-like dash to keep pace with the public few politicians will pause to consider whether changing the law is really the right thing to do.
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