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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Just a whiff of mind altering substances
Matthew Parris The Times
Saturday 07 Jul 2001 So, prodded by the police, nudged by retired ambassadors, whipped forward by The Daily Telegraph, urged on by The Times, begged to proceed by succeeding generations of voters now greying at the temples, pushed by advice from unnumbered public servants and shoved by even the judiciary, our brave MPs have after 40 years decided to give proposals for the decriminalisation of cannabis a bit of thought. What heroes. The roadblock moves! But wasn't Parliament supposed to be the road? Hasn't all this happened the wrong way round? Surely the right order would have been as follows - the Seven Ages of a sensible reform: 1: A few nutters and brave-new-worlders of whom nobody has heard propose the reform. It is immediately denounced as unthinkable by every wise head in the land; but one or two sparky young MPs of a radical turn of mind think the unthinkable. The matter is raised in the House but there is no majority to take it further. The Daily Telegraph inveighs against the very idea; the Great British Public is quite uninterested. The Editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, does not even deign to notice it. 2: A small group of MPs get the bit between their teeth, and begin campaigning. Evidence is taken. A couple of leading politicians think the proposals worth study. The Times thunders its disapproval. The police call it madness. The grey heads of media commentary shake in sorrowful disapproval. The Civil Service is, to a mandarin, against. Opinion polls show little support. 3: Activists make common cause with interested politicians, and headway with the argument. A select committee reports guardedly in favour. The professions remain opposed but some free-thinkers start taking an interest. An all-party group for the reform is set up. One of the main political parties promises a royal commission. Several Privy Counsellors are known privately to believe the change must eventually come. The police, The Times and The Daily Telegraph are still resolutely opposed. 4: It becomes respectable to discuss, even support, these ideas at dinner. The other main party all but embraces the proposed reform. Informally at Westminster, opinion has swung. Polls now show public opinion following. But the police and the conservative press remain unconvinced. 5: A senior civil servant comes out in favour. There is quite a clamour at the Commons for an early Green Paper. The professions have come over, albeit late. The public seems in sympathy, though hesitantly. The police remain adamantly against. 6: Parliament having given a lead, the Civil Service and the establishment follow. The Times is cautiously in favour. The public has been won over. The Daily Telegraph pronounces itself more concerned than hostile. The police still oppose. 7: The reform is legislated for; the Association of Chief Police Officers warns that the episode has undermined morale; but public reaction is positive. The Times accepts the change; the establishment is reconciled; The Daily Telegraph succumbs to the inevitable, muttering that the time was not ripe. Lord Rees-Mogg describes how, late in his career, he has finally been persuaded. That, at any rate, would seem to be a logical progression. Democratic politics should have been in the forefront, the establishment lagging behind. We do after all now have 659 MPs and rather a shortage of useful things for them to do. A fair few among them would be - one might assume - at least as open-minded about social change as the millions they represent. It would stand to reason that they might take their democratic role seriously enough to act as a sounding-board for new ideas for government. If our constituency system has any value it should help backbenchers become a sensitive early-warning system for changes in the way voters are thinking, feeling and behaving. Parliament would be a place where ideas and evidence were kicked around freely and without fear or favour. On a question such as drugs policy, at least, that should be the case. This is hardly the stuff of party battles, flagship measures or three-line whips. On moral and social controversies where open inquiry, constituency evidence and free debate hurt nobody, our Commons should surely come into its own as a patchwork of opinions freely heard. So, though government may move at a more measured pace, you might have expected the first cuckoos of the summer of any social reform to be heard early on the back benches. The reverse has been true. Our MPs' role in the national debate about drugs policy has been a disgrace. For 40 years they have said nothing, heard nothing, noticed nothing, acknowledged nothing, understood nothing, done nothing. Those who have departed from the herd have been trampled by the herd. Something stale in the air at Westminster has stupefied not only dissent but even inquiry. One solitary Labour MP, Paul Flynn, has become the voice in Parliament for literally millions of British voters of every age and class, and for an opinion about cannabis which something like half the nation holds. For this Mr Flynn has been regarded by colleagues as an amiable madcap. I wonder if he now feels as I expect Simon Jenkins, William Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove and Mary Ann Sieghart may feel, and as I certainly feel: weary of making again, now that everybody else seems to be making it, the argument we made so much earlier and so many times before? But all we met was silence. Nothing moved. Then a tremor runs across the logjam, a log shifts, and all at once we are in danger of drowning in the splash and roar, our opinions overtaken by the enthusiasm of latecomers, sometimes in such a hurry to catch up that they overstate the case. So it was (for me) with the homosexual age of consent. Along with the now-departed but dear Martin Stevens and a couple more Tory MPs, we argued in the early Eighties to reduce that age to 18. Colleagues - Labour and Conservative - thought we were mad, or worse. Later I was persuaded, if doubtfully, of an age of consent of 16, mostly by arguments of enforceability but also by a preference for liberty over safety. I would myself say that there are boys of 16 and 17 for whom this big personal step is not safe, but with a quiet smile I reflect that no present contender for the Tory leadership would today want to sound so uninclusive. Every happening Tory now wants to go to the Equality Ball. But I remember the dispiriting attempts to drum up a single colleague to come to sad little fringe meetings of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality in basement rooms of shabby hotels at 1980s party conferences. Now I smile again, at the newcomers to liberalism on drugs, so breathless to climb aboard that caution is thrown to the winds. They had better take care with the argument about harmlessness; cannabis is not always harmless. The case for legalisation is the case for personal liberty. But who needs my views when Peter Lilley, Social Security Secretary until four years ago, is now writing the same, so persuasively and well? Yet I cannot avoid a feeling of unreality, for Peter's views have not been arrived at suddenly or late. He has been thinking such thoughts for years. In 1999 I invited him to express them on a Radio 5 Live series I was making about drugs. He said he was not ready. On how many other subjects do how many more MPs hold opinions they are not ready to express? It matters. A politician, I accept, is entitled to be slow to be persuaded of the need for change. Resistance born of caution and a need to know more can be a strength. But if the rigidity is that of a logjam, then MPs deliberating as a body are more stupid than an MP deliberating alone. That would be dangerous: dangerous when it sticks, and dangerous when it shifts. You could see a couple of the candidates for the Tory leadership sniffing the wind as drugs were discussed on Question Time on Thursday night. Was that a whiff of cannabis-tolerance they smelt - and how should they react? That is not the mobility I seek in a leader or an MP. I want someone who, when he sticks, sticks of his own volition; and, when he shifts, shifts of his own accord.
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